TERRELL'S TUNEUP: Here's to the Ladies

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
April 6, 2012



Before you even listen to No Regrets, the new album from Johnny Dowd, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that every song is named for a woman.

There’s “Betty,” “Billie,” “Sherry,” “Miranda,” “Susan,” “Nancy,” “Ella,” “Abigail,” “Linda,” and “Candy.” Emily and Meryl have to share a song. And while Rita gets a song of her own, she also shares a title with Juanita. (They’re sisters, it turns out.)
Here;s to the Lad
This is something of a concept album for Dowd, with each track telling a story about a woman. “The album is about girls and women I have known, imagined, or seen on TV,” Dowd explains in a press release for the record. “I love them all.”

Dowd also says the working title for the album was “Regrets, I Have a Few.” However, “by the time I finished it, I realized I had no regrets,” he writes. The record shows he took his blows and did it his way. Like Dowd’s best work, the stories he tells here are dark, funny, sometimes tragic, and mostly twisted.

For those who are unfamiliar with the strange pleasures of Dowd, the artist was raised in Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. In recent decades he has lived in Ithaca, New York, where he is part owner of a moving company. I have always liked that Dowd and his band are true working-class heroes. He has his moving business, and singer Kim Sherwood-Caso works by day as a hairdresser. But while his feet are planted in the working world, his head is free to float into strange dimensions.

Dowd is a late bloomer as far as music goes. He didn’t start recording until he was almost 50. In 1997 he released his debut album, Wrong Side of Memphis, which was packed with murder ballads, stories of obsessive love, and the confessions of characters whose lives had long slipped out of their control.

Such themes have fueled the bulk of Dowd’s work ever since. You wouldn’t want a Dowd album without that. But one thing that has evolved is the musical backdrop behind his strange tales.

Early in his musical career, Dowd was labeled “alternative country.” He didn’t sound much like Uncle Tupelo or Whiskeytown, but he had this great Okie drawl. Plus, many of the tracks on Memphis were acoustic-based tunes with country, blues, and folk overtones, while his second album, Pictures From Life’s Other Side, had a couple of wild, mutated Hank Williams tunes. But early on, the country seemed to fade from the Dowd sound, and now there’s not much left except the drawl.

In fact, the dominant sound on No Regrets seems to be a primitive type of electronica, supplied by longtime Dowd drummer Willie B and keyboardist/bassist Michael Stark. I’ll admit, guitar-centric rustic that I am, this was a little off-putting to me the first time I heard it. But after subsequent listens, the electronic throbs and drum-machine crunching seemed to fit the songs.

And Dowd’s personality is at the center of all the music, as it should be. He still speaks most of the lyrics, rather than singing them. And there’s enough obnoxious guitar by Dowd and others to keep things interesting.

Another musical departure here is that Sherwood-Caso is no longer the sole female voice on the album. She sings on only two tracks on No Regrets. Four other singers provide the female counterpart to Dowd on various other tracks. I suppose having a variety of women singers goes along with having each song be about a different woman.

No Regrets starts off with “Betty,” a simulated telephone call in which Dowd calls an old high school sweetheart. “Hello! Is this Betty? Hi Betty, guess who this is? No ... no ... It’s Johnny. Johnny Dowd.” She’s not quite sure who he is, but he has apparently been thinking of her a lot in recent years — and not in a healthy manner.

Supposedly all the narrator wants is to get his high school letter jacket back from her. But in the course of the conversation, he lets it drop that he knows where she lives and where her children go to school. (This isn’t the first time Dowd has taken on the persona of a stalker. “Hope You Don’t Mind” from Pictures From Life’s Other Side has a similar narrator.)

Another tale to astonish is “Linda,” set to a foreboding minor-key backdrop. It’s the story of a couple — “when they were together, it was fire and gasoline.” They have two children, but the second one dies a week after he’s born. From there, it’s a descent into hell.

“She dressed in black/felt a life of fantasy/She dressed two kids each morning/Only one that she could see.” The unnamed husband is “talking murder” and dreaming of suicide, while the poor daughter is doing her best to cope with the domestic tinderbox her family situation has become. The songs ends before any atrocity occurs, but a listener is pretty sure that something terrible is in store.

Not all the songs on No Regrets are dark and creepy. Some are actually upbeat. Dowd gets funky on a couple of tunes. Both “Susan” (the story of a stripper in Atlanta) and “Ella” feature funk-filled guitars and keyboards, reminding me of Midnite Vultures — the last Beck album I actually liked much. (As far as critics go, I was in the minority in my love for that underappreciated album.) Come to think of it, Kier Neuringer’s sax solo at the end of “Juanita/Rita” has a little Midnite Vultures in it too.

The prettiest song here is “Sherry.” It’s a ’50s- or ’60s-style slow dance with a cheesy organ that sounds as if it was stolen from a roller rink. You can almost imagine this being played at a high school prom — right before some poor girl gets buckets of pig blood dropped on her. “You say I’m a rat,” Dowd sings in his broken croon. “But you’re OK with that.”

My only regret with No Regrets is that Dowd didn’t include a Bizarro World cover of “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” Maybe Julio Iglesias was busy when Dowd was recording the album.

Here's a video of one of my favorite songs here:

Heal Yourself with the Latest Big Enchilada Podcast

I'm recovering from hip replacement surgery, so here's some new hip sounds, as well as some old ones, in an episode I'm calling "Music to Heal By." This music will soothe and bring joyful, positive, healing energy. Trust me. You'll be wanting to shake your hips in no time. Let the healing begin.

DOWNLOAD | SUBSCRIBE| SUBSCRIBE TO ALL GARAGEPUNK PIRATE RADIO PODCASTS

Here's the playlist:

(Background Music: Hills of Pills by Kid Congo & The Pink Monkeybirds)
Pills by The New York Dolls
Heavy Doctor by Thee Oh Sees
Shake Your Hips by Slim Harpo
Pray For Pills by The Dirtbombs
Hospitals by Acid Baby Jesus
Hips by L.C. Ulmer

(Background Music: Surgery Montage by John Zorn)
Deserted Town by The Movements
Knock You Out by Thee Butchers Orchestra
Adeline by The Nevermores
I Got a Girl by The Vicious Cycles
I Don't Mind by The Angry Dead Pirates
Linda by Johnny Dowd

(Background Music: Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard by NRBQ)

Saustex Set


Move It by T. Tex Edwards & The Saddle Tramps
Straight into The Sun by El Pathos
Metanoia by Churchwood
Body in Plastic by Glambilly
Derby Crush by The Gay Sportscasters
Candyman Blues by The Copper Gamins


 Play it here:

R.I.P. EARL SCRUGGS

Earl Scruggs, perhaps the greatest banjo picker in the history of bluegrass, is dead.

Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs

Scruggs, 88, apparently died yesterday in a Nashville hospital.

To people my age, North Carolina native Scruggs, and longtime partner Lester Flatt, were bluegrass music in the 1960s. More so than Bill Monroe or The Stanley Brothers. They brought bluegrass to living rooms all over the country every week playing the Beverly Hillbillys' theme song. (Sometimes Earl and Lester even played themselves in epsiodes.)

And later, they brought bluegrass to the Top 40 with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" from the movie Bonnie & Clyde.

Both Flatt, who died in 1979,  and Scruggs started out with Monroe's Bluegrass Boys back in the '40s when Monroe was in the process of inventing bluegrass. Scruggs is credited for introducing his 3-finger style of picking, transferring the banjo from a rhythm instrument into a lead instrument.

He and Flatt left Monroe in 1948 establishing their Foggy Mountain Boys as a premier bluegrass act. They parted ways in 1969.

By some accounts, politics divided them. Scruggs appeared in 1969 at an anti-Vietnam war rally in Washington, D.C. Flatt, as were most most country and bluegrass artists at the time, was a supporter of the war.

U.S.A Today in its obituary noted,

"... when staunch fans of bluegrass — a genre that would not exist in a recognizable form without Scruggs' banjo — railed against stylistic experimentation, Scruggs happily jammed away with sax player King Curtis, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, piano man Elton John and anyone else whose music he fancied. 

"He was the man who melted walls, and he did it without saying three words," said his friend and acolyte Marty Stuart in 2000.

But it was in pure bluegrass where Scruggs excelled. Just last week laid up in my own hospital bed, I watched a couple of episodes on the Old Flatt & Scruggs Grand Old Opry tv show, which is offered on Netflix's streaming service. For that hour, I forgot all about what ailed me.

Rest in peace, Earl.

Here's some videos:


  

Here they are with "Little Ricly" (Skaggs!)

Free Music? Oh si!

Dueling drummers

One of my favorite new discoveries from my recent trip to Austin was Thee Oh Sees from San Francisco. (I say "new discovery" meaning that I just discovered them. They've been around for a few years.) I saw them at the new Emo's East on the same bill as The Gories and Kid Congo Powers & The Pink Monkey Birds.

As I suspected, Thee Oh Sees have a bunch of downloads over at WFMU's Free Music Archive.

So get over there and listen and/or. download to your heart's content. Or if you're too lazy for that, enjoy a rocking 2009 concert below.

eMusic March

Here's my latest batch of downloads from eMusic:

  * Bluegrass Classics by Various Artists. This is one of those eMusic bargains that keeps me paying my $19.99 every month. What we have here is 48 tracks of bluegrass -- and some proto-bluegrass -- artists, mainly from the '40s and '50s, but some even earlier

I've been on a bluegrass kick lately. But -- call me a cranky old purist if you want -- I don't like much of the modern bluegrass music. So much of it seems cold and intellectual -- virtuoso musicians who seem more highfalutin than high and lonesome, lacking in that true hillbilly spirit that fueled the original masters.

This collection features very few artists whose names might be recognized by casual fans -- do Sonny Osbourne and J.E. Mainer ring a bell? But mostly there are singers and pickers who never got as famous as Bill Monroe, The Stanley Brothers or Flatt & Scruggs.

But it's full of great songs. There's "I'll Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms" by Buster Carter & Preston Young (and fiddler Posey Rorer), cronies of Charlie Poole. This version is at least a decade older than Flatt & Scruggs' more famous version.

There's "Wild Bill Jones" by Wade Mainer & The Sons of the Mountaineers. This is the song that contains the line, " “I pulled my revolver from my side / And I destroyed that poor boy's soul," which inspired the name of  Trevor Jones' one-man band.. Wade, by the way is J.E. Mainer's brother.

But my favorite has to be "Missing in Action" by Jim Eanes &His Shenandoah Valley Boys. It's the story of a soldier who was wounded in battle, left for dead and taken prisoner by the enemy. But the narrator escapes and makes it home. Nobody was home, but when he goes in he finds a wedding photo  -- his wife had married another guy. He then finds a letter to the Mrs. from the Army saying that her first husband was missing in action and presumed dead. The sad soldier doesn't want to spoil his wife's happiness, so he decides just to move along without letting his wife know he's still alive.

Wow! What a good sport.



* Singin' in the Rain: The Best of Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards. He was the voice of Jiminy Cricket, the sweet-voiced guy who crooned "When You Wish Upon a Star" and "Give a Little Whistle"in Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

Like Mark Twain, Edwards was from Hannibal, Mo. Starting out in vaudeville and later moving to Broadway, he played the uke to accompany his singing. Some say he learned to play the instrument when he was a newsboy to draw attention to himself while hawking papers on the street.

Edwards' golden years were in the '20s and 30s. He reportedly sold some 74 million records. He specialized in the pop hits of the day, doing versions of the pop standards of the day -- "Hard Hearted Hannah," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "Dinah" "It's Only a Paper Moon," "I'll See You in My Dreams," and of course "Singin' In the Rain."

He also was known for his novelty songs like "My Dog Loves Your Dog," "Paddlin' Madelyn Home," and the risque "Who Takes Care of the Caretaker's Daughter?" Often Edwards would scat, then break into a bizarre falsetto "human trumpet" sound.

But though most of his songs had a carefree and happy aura, Edwards' life was a mess. Alcoholism, morphine addiction and financial troubles plagued his life. He tried his hand at acting, but never got any significant roles.

But he did manage in 1940 to score a gig that would win him -- or at least his voice -- immortality: providing the voice of Pinnochio's conscience in the classic cartoon feature. "When You Wish Upon a Star" won an Academy Award. And Edwards' recording of it was his last hit record.

It might be cruel irony that Edwards' musical legacy is largely forgotten while the cartoon cricket to which he gave voice is a household name 70 years later. But the truth is that Ukulele Ike's music is a delight. This collection of 25 songs, including all the ones I mentioned here is a great testament to the singer.

* Help Me Devil  Here's how I stumbled across this album on eMusic:

A few weeks ago when writing my review of Andre Williams' new album Hoods and Shades, I was trying to find an early version of the song "Mojo Hannah" by an R&B  singer I'd never heard of named Tami Lynn. Searching eMusic for Tami I came across Help Me Devil, which features her on a couple of tracks.

I liked what I heard.

 The group behind this self-titled effort is a Spanish trio heavily influenced by rockabilly.

The group is led by Juan Carlos Parlange, who has led Spanish punk bands in the '90s.

It's just cool, basic rock with titles including "Girls Today Don't Like to Sleep Alone," ,“We Sold Army Secrets For Dope," and "Rattlesnakes Don't Commit Suicide." (which you can hear on the latest Big Enchilada podcast. ) They even cover a Hasil Adkins tune, "Chicken Walk."

 Matt Verta-Ray of Heavy Trash produced the album and played on some cuts. But an even more impressive guest here is Miss Tami who kills on the old fashioned boogie "It's Great to Be Here, It's Great to Be Anywhere."

Plus


* 3 Songs from Ricochet by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Ricochet was The Dirt Band's second album back when they still were toying with the idea that they could be the West Coast version of The Jim Kweslin Jug Band. Most the songs on the album, however, were fairly uninteresting folk-rockish pop. But I still love the crazy words-crazy tunes of their jug-band stuff.

The ones I downloaded were "Coney Island Washboard," "Happy Fat Annie" and "Teddy Bear's Picnic," a demonic stomp that I shamelessly ripped off for the arrangement of my own "Potatoheads' Picnic." There's three or for other kazoo, banjo and washboard-heavy tracks here I'll probably nab in the future.

* "Old Original Kokomo Blues" by Kokomo Arnold and "Kokomo Blues" by Scapper Blackwell. When I was writing my Terrell's Tuneup column about President Obama singing "Sweet Home Chicago" at a White House blues concert a couple of weeks ago, my original idea was to write about the history of the song. (Hint, these tunes, especially Kokomo Arnold's, were huge influences, to use a kind word.)

The column took a different turn, but I'm still glad I downloaded these country blues classics.