Friday, August 8, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Maybelle by Jackie Cray
Out All Night by The Riptones
The Holygram's Song (Back From The Shadows Again) by The Firesign Theatre
A Day at a Time by Dale Watson
Maybe Little Baby by George Jones
I'll Be There if Ever You Want Me by The Rizdales
Rated X by Loretta Lynn
Cowboy in Flames by The Waco Brothers
Thank You Lord by James Hand
Ballad of Waterhole #3 by Roger Miller
Alone And Forsaken Social Distortion
Another Great Dream Of You by Eric Hisaw
Sleep With A Stranger by Nikki Lane
Choctaw Bingo by James McMurtry & The Heartless Bastards
One Road More by Butch Hancock & Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Big Fat Nuthin by The Bottle Rockets
I Want to Be a Cowgirl's Sweetheart by Lynn Anderson
This is one of those great songs that I used to assume was part of every American's DNA. I'm talking about tunes like "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," "I'll See You in My Dreams," "Shine on Harvest Moon" or "I'm in the Mood For Love."
Notice I said "used to assume." Maybe I'm getting old and cynical, but these days I wonder if many people under the age of, say, 40 would even recognize those songs.
Kids these days ...
But I didn't come here to grumble. I came to celebrate one of those great old songs, one that pops in and out of my skull when I least expect it:
"Moonlight Bay"
The song, originally published in 1912, features lyrics written by Edward Madden and music by Percy Wenrich.
So where is Moonlight Bay? I found a Moonlight Bay Resort & Campground in Minnesotta. And there is a Moonlight Bay Resort on Spider Lake in Traverse, Mich. Somehow I think these were named for the song, not the other way around. And why didn't anyone ever write, "We were sailing along on Spider Lake ..." ??
The lyrics to "Moonlight Bay" are below. You probably won't recognize the verse. I suspect most people who know the song are familiar only with the chorus.
Voices hum, crooning over Moonlight Bay Banjos strum, tuning while the moonbeams play
All alone, unknown they find me Memories like these remind me Of the girl I left behind me Down on Moonlight Bay Chorus We were sailing along On Moonlight Bay We could hear the voices ringing They seemed to say: "You have stolen her heart" "Now don't go 'way!" As we sang love's old sweet song On Moonlight Bay Candle lights gleaming on the silent shore Lonely nights, dreaming till we meet once more Far apart, her heart, is yearning With a sigh for my returning With the light of love still burning As in of days of yore
I'm not 100 percent sure this is the earliest version on record, but the American Quartet, featuring Billy Murray, a huge star in his day, recorded it in 1913.
Skip ahead a little more than 30 years, and we find Bing Crosby singing it with a vocal quartet called
The Charioteers -- a group that started out singing gospel but later branching out in to pop and jazz.
The Charioteers was the studio chorus from on der Bingle's Kraft Music Hall between 1942 and 1946. (A few years later Crosby recorded it with his son Gary in a faux Dixieland style.)
In the 1951 Doris Day vehicle called On Moonlight Bay, leading man Gordon MacRae, following a smug tirade against baseball, gives a harsh review of the song that gave the movie its title. My favorite line is when Bow-tie Daddy tells popcorn muching Doris, "That must have been written by a man with a glass of beer in one hand and a rhyming dictionary in the other."
Speaking of beer, often, epecially in cartoons, "Moonlight Bay" is associated with sentimental drunks. In this Porky Pig clip a bunch of drunken cats serenade. (UPDATE: The original video posted featured drunken fish. That one disappeared from YouTube.)
And in this early '60s British variety show, the comedy team of Morecambe & Wise team up with the Fab Moptops to sing ... you guessed it!
For more than 10 years, WFMU's Beware of the Bloghas served as a wellspring of the weird, the wild and the quirky. It didn't have to be Wednesday for Beware of the Blog to get wacky. It's part of the New Jersey-based independent public radio station WFMU's web of craziness, and many of the station's DJs have contributed blog posts though through the years. But during its time the blog has taken a life of its own.
But here's the bad news: On July 30, station manager Ken Freedman officially posted that the party is over.
You No Longer Need to Beware of the Blog After ten fun-filled years, we're packing up shop here at WFMU's Beware of the Blog. Many thanks to the dozens of volunteer authors who put in so much time and love into their posts and articles, and thanks to the commenters and trolls who almost feel like part of our dysfunctional family.
Damn! Another good thing has done gone on. Freedman doesn't really say why the station is ending the blog, though he mentions the thing hasn't had an administrator in several years.
Also, a recent post on WFMU's Facebook page said, "Social micro posts have killed blogs, more or less, but there is great reading and strange truth to be found on the blog archives. Also lots and lots of links to great audio."
So, thanks Twitter! Perhaps WFMU should start a new feed called "Beware the Tweet."
To commemorate the passing of Beware, I'm just going to post a few links to some of my favorite music posts.
* One of coolest was a post about "Country Fuzz"-- the use of fuzz-tone guitars in the 1960s and '70s. Some of the best-known country stars of that era -- Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, (who sounds outright grungy on this one), Wanda Jackson -- all went fuzzy for a while back then. Greg G, who posted this credits Nashville cat Grady Martin for inventing fuzztone -- with the help of a malfunctioning channel on the control board -- during a Marty Robbins recording session in 1960.
Here's one of the later examples of country fuzz featuring Webb Pierce:
* Speaking of country music, Greg G. also had a post about songs about them women's libbers burning their bras. I've played "Burn Your Bra, Baby" by Benny Johnson many times on the Santa Fe Opry. But there actually are TWO songs by that title, the other being the one by a ventriloquist named Alex Houston and his dummy, Elmer. It'll be worth your while to read the post, which unveils a woman's bizarre conspiracy claim that Alex Houston hypnotized her into becoming part of a government cocaine smuggling ring. It's not clear what role Elmer played in the conspiracy.
* Beware the Blog regular Bob Purse (a musician I wrote about in my very first Wacky Wednesday last year) is fond of "vanity records" -- self-financed recordings by amateur singers. This is a recent one by a guy named Scotty Scott. Purse posted both the A-side, "Chattanooga, Nashville, Battlecreek Trek" (my favorite) and the B-side "Antique Hunter's Craze." The first song includes some real poetry: "One man gets a job, then his brother gets one, too / Then his Uncle Bob, with or without a shoe."
* Back in 2008 Beware had an entire series of posts aboutFake Beatles bands. One of my favorites was the one about The Beagles, a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon about a group of rock 'n' roll canines.
Another post in the Fake Beatles series featured a bunch of advertising jingles for Hoagiefest -- a convenience store's big sale sale on hoagie sandwiches. So the bad news is that there will be no new posts -- no fake Beatles or weird vanity records or anti-feminist rants -- on Beware of the Blog.
But the good news is that Freedman promised: We will keep every single post up here for all of eternity, and someday, WFMU may resume online publishing. And you can still find plenty of crazy sounds over at WFMU's Rock & Soul Ichiban(which has its own 24-hour online stream for rockabilly, soul, R&B, garage, surf and hillbilly music.)
There is no Terrell's Tune-Up this week. But as a consolation prize, please enjoy this new video (actually it's only audio) by Dave & Phil Alvin from their upcoming album, Lost Time, scheduled for a mid September release.
The song is "Mister Kicks," which is one of my favorite old Oscar Brown, Jr. tunes.
And here's Oscar Brown, Jr. doing another one of best songs.
I want to thank the good folks who voted in the Santa Fe Reporter Best of Santa Fe Poll for choosing this humble blog as one of the best "Arts, Music or Food" blogs in the city. The Stephen W. Terrell [Music] Web Log was tied with Victor Romero's The Santa Fe V.I.P. for first place.
Arts, music or food. I'm guessing it was those tasty Rice-a-Roni recipes I posted here a few months ago that did the trick.
The Reporter said:
We all probably know the Terrell win is no surprise—he’s a downright local institution and the kind of writer we all aspire to be and is prolific, to say the least. Kudos as well to Victor Romero and his site that basically makes it easier to go out at night. Y’all are both VIPs in the eyes of this town.
Yesterday, July 29, would have been jazz guitar pioneer Charlie Christian's 99th birthday.
That's a good excuse to re-run an old column I did about Christian, a fellow native Oklahoman.
Read on ...
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican October 26, 2002
This isn’t a record review. It’s a tirade, so get ready.
While listening to the wonderful music in Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar, a four-disc box set and reading the booklet, I got seriously angry.
Charlie Christian was the first great electric guitarist. Ever. He played with Benny Goodman circa 1939 to 1942, the year Christian died of tuberculosis. Virtually all the tracks in the box are by Goodman’s band, which, at least in Christian’s early days, included Lionel Hampton on vibes and Lester Young on sax.
In reading the booklet, I learned Charlie Christian was from Oklahoma City, my hometown. An essay by Les Paul even tells how Charlie sat in with Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys in OKC.
What angers me is the fact that I didn’t know that until now. I hadn’t even heard of Christian until my early 20s, probably the first time I read an interview with B.B. King, who worshiped him.
It is inexcusable that no teacher in all those years I went to school in Oklahoma (up to the ninth grade) ever mentioned that one of the true innovators of jazz was from Douglas High School, just across town. No teacher ever mentioned that it was possible for even a poor black kid from OKC to go to the top of his profession, as Charlie Christian did.
Maybe it’s because my worthless history teacher was too busy preaching the virtues of George Wallace and bemoaning the fact that Vietnam War protesters weren’t being tried for treason.
Maybe it’s because Charlie Christian was black. Segregation was dying hard in Oklahoma in the 1960s.
Or maybe it was nothing sinister. It’s probably just that the teachers were too unhip, too thick and culturally crippled even to know that a local kid had grown up to play in Benny Goodman’s band. Still ...
We were never taught about Woody Guthrie in Oklahoma either, which also is a stupid shame, but given the twisted anti-commie paranoia of the day, I can understand that omission far more than I can understand ignoring Charlie Christian.
So Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar isn’t just great music. To me, it’s small reparation for something I was cheated out of as a youngster.
No question about it, religion has given the world some beautiful music, from
Gregorian chants to the Hallelujah Choral to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
It's also given us stuff like you'll hear in the videos below.
These are musical expressions by members of various "alternative" faiths some
call "cults."
Warning: If you listen to them all, you might have to be deprogrammed.
Let's have a listen, starting with Jeremy Spencer, who was an original member of
Fleetwood Mac (back in the pre-Buckingham/Nicks days when they were a British
blues band.)
One day in February 1971 while Fleetwood Mac was in Los Angeles for a gig at the
Whiskey a Go Go, Spencer slipped away. He met up with members of a group called
The Children of God and rather suddenly decided he wanted to join the group. So
he did. He never went back to Fleetwood Mac.
The Children of God seemed to be everywhere in the early '70s. I was frequently
accosted by them in my early years at the University of New Mexico. The group
was known for a controversial recruiting technique called "Flirty Fishing,"
which basically involved young female members using sex to entice new male
members into joining. That never happened to me. All I got were hairy, stinky
guys who wanted to rant about their crazy apocalyptic visions of the nuclear
bombs stored deep in the Manzano Mountains.
Anyway, here's Jeremy Spencer singing one of his religious songs. I'm not sure
how old it is. These days Spencer has white hair and less of it.
One day in the late 70s or early '80s when I was working at Stag Tobacoonists,
this hairy, barefoot guy wearing a white robe came in the store and bought a
bunch of
Royal Jamaica
cigars. Jesus, he told us, likes Royal Jamaicas. All us Stag employees were big
fans of RJs, so we just agreed with him.
Lightning Amen
He told us he was a member of a church called The Christ Family.
During the next few years I would see several members of the Christ Family --
you could recognize them by their white robes and bare feet -- on the streets of
Santa Fe. When I started writing a weekly features column for the
Santa Fe Reporter in the early '80s, I decided to interview members of the group.
I found a half dozen or so members in a bus near the Santa Fe River off
Guadalupe Street. They welcomed me aboard, but as the interview wore on, it was
obvious they weren't welcoming my questions.
They told me that they lived celibate, vegetarian lives because Christ Family
was against "killing, sex and materialism." They told me their messiah was
someone named Lightning Amen (who I later learned was fond of good cigars. I
assume those included Royal Jamaicas.)
At one point the man who was doing nearly all the talking became so angry with
my questions, he was turning read in the face. I asked him why he was so upset.
His answer:
"BECAUSE YOU ARE KILLING, SEX AND MATERIALISM!"
He didn't laugh when I joked, "That's what she said last night."
Lightning Amen -- real name Charles McHugh -- died about five years ago. In 1987
he was
sentenced to five years in prison
for drug charges, including the transportation and possession for sale of
methamphetamines.
But at least some of the Christ Family is still together in Helmut, Calif. Here
is one of their songs.
[UPDATE: 11-14-15 Some time after I posted this, this and all the
other Christ Family videos disappeared off of YouTube. I don't know why.]
Next is Scientology's answer to "We Are the World." You might have heard this on
the HBO documentary,
Going Clear.
And then there are the Hare Krishnas. They definitely had a presence in Santa Fe
and Albuquerque in the late 60s and early '70s. They had a storefront temple on
Water Street when I was at Mid High school here (in the same building that used
to house the Adobe Laundromat.) A couple of times I stopped in to yack with them
at the temple. Unlike the Christ Family, they never yelled at me when I asked
questions. No heavy proselytizing either, though they always invited me to their
Sunday feasts. (I never went.)
This song comes from the album
The Radha Krsna Temple,
which was produced by none other than George Harrison. And unlike the other
songs posted here, it doesn't suck that much ...
This next Krishna chant goes on for nearly seven hours. Give it a listen if you
have the time.
[UPDATE 4-6-23: The 7-hour Hare Krishna video has disappeared from Youtube!
But fret not. I just found an EIGHT AND A HALF (!) hour video to take its
place.]
Know any more "cult classics" from other "alternative" religions? Post
links in the comments section.
Sunday, July 26, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M. 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell Webcasting! 101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell(at)ksfr.org Here's the playlist OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Lupine Ossuary by Thee Oh Sees
Lemonade Man by The Electric Mess
Little Girl by Hollywood Sinners
Bad Girl by Detroit Cobras
Summer Boyfriend by The Manxx
Brain Dead by Sons of Hercules
It's Great by Wau y Los Arrrggghs!!!
Police on My Back by The Clash
Hot Rod Worm by The Slow Poisoner
Leaving Here by The Sonics
Willow by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
Shake Me by Motobunny
Soul Shoes by Graham Parker & The Rumour
Playing with Jack by The Plimsouls
The Crawler by Ty Segall
The Trip of Kambo by O Lendario Chucrobillman
Elephant Stomp by Left Lane Cruiser
Garbage Dump by G.G. Allin
BOLLYWOOD SET
Dum Maro Dum by Asha Bhonsle
Naane Maharaja (I Am the Emperor) by Vijaya Anand
Fists of Curry by Anandji V. Shah & Kalyan V. Shah
Nothing is Impossible by Lata Mangeshkar, Mohd. Rafi, Sushma Shreshtha
Do You Swing by The Fleshtones
Mysterious Mystery by Persian Claws
Hot Sour Salty Sweet by The Dirtbombs
Don't Stop to Dance by Rev. Beat-Man
Let's Make the Water Turn Black by The Mothers of Invention
What a Wonderful World by Joey Ramone
Federales by Joe "King" Carrasco
Nightclub by Andre Williams & The Goldstars
Junkyard in the Sun by Butch Hancock
Ring of Fire by Social Distortion
Lucky Day by Tom Waits CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Welcome to the latest summertime episode of the Big Enchilada Podcast. We're going to have a rocking time with selections from Barrence Whitfield, The Sonics, Thee Oh Sees, T-Model Ford, G.G. Allin, The Angry Samoans, The Grannies, Frontier Circus, Crankshaft & The Geargrinders, The Routes, Butch Hancock (with the song that inspired the name of this episode) and many more. As Butch says, "For every graveyard in the moonlight, there's a junkyard in the sun!"
Friday, July 24, 2015 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Hot Dang by Dale Watson
Gone to Texas by Terry Allen
Guitar Man by Junior Brown
TJ by The Hickoids
Slide Off Of Your Satin Sheets DM Bob & The Deficits
Rehab Girl by Joe West & The Sinners
Que Wow by Joe "King" Carrasco y Los Crowns
Swinging Doors by Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard
Wives and Girlfriends by Willie Nelson
Slow Death by Webb Wilder
Artifical Flowers by Cornell Hurd
Prairie Road by Reverse Cowgirls
Wild Wild Women by Lynn Anderson
Can't Get Away by Banditos
Lovin' on Back Streets by Mel Street
Knot Hole by Robbie Fulks
If You Take Drugs (You're Gonna Die) by The Beaumonts
