Friday, Nov. 17, 2017 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
Barstool Mountain by Johnny Paycheck
The Road Goes on Forever by Joe Ely
Moonshiner by Uncle Tupelo
Deep Red Bells by Neko Case
Smilin' Ed by The Imperial Rooster
That's Just What I Am by Hellbound Glory
Homesick Blues by Ed Sanders
Let's Go Burn Ole Nashville Down by Jello Biafra & Mojo Nixon
New Polly Wolly Doodle by Peter Stampfel
Amarillo Highway by Terry Allen
Pay Day by Peter Case
Fun All Night by Banditos
Jump in the River by Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs
The Streets of Bakersfield by Jon Langford & Sally Timms
I Can Talk to Crows by Chipper Thompson
Lost On the Desert by Marty Stuart
Only the Lonely by NRBQ
The Comedians by Roy Orbison
When That Helicopter Comes by The Handsome Family
Sing a Worried Song by Legendary Shack Shakers
Florida by The War and Treaty
Blood Red Velvet by Joe West
How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away by Dan Hicks & The Hot Licks
The Poor Girl's Story by Eilen Jewell
Put 'em Up Solid by David Rawlings
Learning to Lose by Margo Price with Willie Nelson
Funny How Time Slips Away by Willie Nelson
No Good for Me by Waylon Jennings
Same God by Calamity Cubes
Going Where The Lonely Go by Merle Haggard
Like the Santa Fe Opry Facebook page Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list
It's just about the third anniversary of Throwback Thursday on my music blog, my humble effort to explore the music and musicians of decades past, and, when appropriate, to show how that music reverberates in contemporary music. As always, this comes a day after the just-about third anniversary of Wacky Wednesday here. (I don't know what got into me three years ago ...)
Here are the wonderful old tunes I looked at this past year, including one from Wacky Wednesday. Enjoy them all again.
And here's something new: I've created a new page, The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook where you can find all the links to all the songs any time. I'll update as I go along. You can find that HERE.
But here are the songs I looked at in the last 12 months: The Throwback Thursday Songbook, Volume 3 Are You Lonesome Tonight
As I wrote back then, Wacky Wednesday, was created, "to introduce you, the reader to strange, funny and/or confounding music -- the type of "unclaimed melodies" that the Firesign Theatre's Don G. O'Vani was talking about when he said, `if you were to go into a record store and ask for them they would think you were crazy!' "
I've tried to live up to that mission statement, doing my best to fill your hearts with wackiness each Wednesday this past 12 months. Some weeks I spotlight music that's supposed to be funny, sometimes it's music by artists who aren't comedians but make music that can't help but make you smile.
Sometimes I just throw pies of weirdness in your face and hope nobody gets injured.
Below is a small sampling of the music that hopefully made your Wednesdays a little wackier.
Late last November we had a 1960s Battle of the Bands between Mr. Gasser & The Weirdos and The Weird-ohs in Airplane Glue Rock 'n' Roll. Here's Gasser and the boys ...
One Wednesday a few months ago I devoted a post to songs about serial killers. And a few months before I did one with songs about Jeffrey Dahmer. Both posts included this video from Dead Moon, featuring the late, great Fred Cole, and their ode to Dahmer, "Room 213."
And speaking of the Irish I caught some (probably deserved) flack for even calling attention to this culturally insensitive band of Micks who have a thing for (fake) Native American culture. (I can call them "Micks." I'm part Paddy.) Someone should have given these guys the advice in this song -- Don't go near the Indians!!!
Sunday, Nov. 12, 2017 KSFR, Santa Fe, NM Webcasting! 10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org
Here's my playlist :
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Dead Moon Night / Don't Burn the Fires by Dead Moon
Funk 49 by Pere Ubu
Funk #49 by The James Gang
Don't Be Afraid to Pogo by The Gears
Squatting in Heaven by Black Lips
She's Alright by Bo Diddley
It's Still You/Running Out Of Time by Fred & Toody Cole
A Decision is Made by The Yawpers
Then Comes Dudley by he Jesus Lizard
I'll Be Your Johnny on the Spot by Count Vaseline
Crazy to the Bone by Dead Moon
Do You Understand Me by The JuJus
She's Like Heroin to Me by The Gun Club
Lost in Music by The Fall
Pineapple Mama by King Salami & The Cumberland 3
A Message from Firmin Deslodge by Churchwood
I Hate the Blues by Dead Moon
Black Rat by Big Mama Thornton
What is Wrong With Your Mind by Mark "Porkchop" Holder
Hills on Fire by Pierced Arrows
Sin by Lollipop Shoppe
Daddy's in the Shadows by The Rats
Who'll Read the Will by The Weeds
Room 213 by Dead Moon
We Won't Break by Fred & Toody Cole
DeControl by Maiorano & The Black Tales
Here Come the Mushroom People by The Molting Vultures
Mop Mop by Barrence Whitfield & The Savages
These Tears by The Howlin' Max Messer Show
Thrift Baby by JJ & The Real Jerks
Fools Gold Rush by Datura
In Oxford Mississippi by Jon Langford & Four Lost Souls
It's OK by Dead Moon CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Friday, Nov. 10, 2017 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
I Fought the Law by The Waco Brothers
Joy by Harry Nilsson
Coulda Shoulda Woulda by Peter Case
Run Mountain by Flathead
Don't Leave Poor Me by Eilen Jewell
Keeper of the Light by Joe West
Put Your Teeth Up on the Window Sill by Southern Culture on the Skids
Banded Clovis by Tyler Childers
New Johnny Get Your Gun by Peter Stampfel
Cocktails by Robbie Fulks
Corporate Man by Honky Tonk Hustlas
Silver City by Ugly Valley Boys
Down to the River by Rosie Flores
Second Fiddle by Rodney Crowell
Nobody to Blame by Chris Stapleton
Oh You Pretty Woman by Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel
Lovesick Blues Boy by Paul Burch
The Losing Kind by The George Jonestown Massacre
Pay Gap by Margo Price
The Morning After by Ashley Monroe
I'm Over You by Tommy Miles & The Milestones
The Trouble With Angels by Bobby Bare
Mother's Chile by The War & Treaty
Yes I Have a Banana by NRBQ
Healin' Slow by Banditos
Love Me by Flat Duo Jets
Town by Dashboard Saviors
Come on Over My House by David Rawlings
Powder Blue by The Cactus Blossoms
House of the White Rose Bouquet by Ray Wylie Hubbard
Hippie Boy by Flying Burrito Brothers CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets
Like the Santa Fe Opry Facebook page Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican Nov. 10, 2017 Monkeys and clowns. They’ll bounce around. At least that’s what Pere Ubu’s David Thomas tells us on the first track of Ubu’s new album 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo. It must be an important message. In that song, “Monkey Bizness,” he repeats it over and over again, sometimes exclaiming, “Sex clowns! Bounce around!”
Nonsense? Probably.
But it’s inspired nonsense. And most important, it’s rocking nonsense. In fact, 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo, by my estimation, is the most outright rocking studio album Pere Ubu has unleashed in about a decade, maybe longer.
No, the band hasn’t forsaken its heritage of avant-garde, experimental, atmospheric sounds.
But they also haven’t forgotten how to make your feet move and head bang either. As Thomas himself explains in the official press release, “To my way of thinking, the new album is The James Gang teaming up with Tangerine Dream. Or something like that.”
For those who haven’t followed Ubu for all these decades (the 40th anniversary of the group’s first album, The Modern Dance, is coming up next year), this Cleveland band emerged during the punk and New Wave scare of the late ’70s, even though they’d been around several years before they made their first album. But they didn’t sound like your typical punk outfit. Their foundation was clearly garage and surf rock, but with their darkly bizarre lyrics, Thomas’ warbling vocals, and Plan 9 From Outer Space-esque synth noises, Ubu was a unique force.
Despite countless personnel changes, the band has remained true through all these years to its original vision. Thomas is the only original Ubu in the current line-up, though three members — bassist Michele Temple, synth man Robert Wheeler, and drummer Steve Mehlman — have been in the band since the mid-’90s.
Pere Ubu: David Thomas in his Big Sombrero
Photo by K. Boon
After that blast of joy and weirdness that is “Monkey Bizness” comes one that may explain Thomas’ reference to the James Gang.
For you youngsters who might not remember many Nixon-era bands, the James Gang was a popular power trio that was the pre-Eagles launching pad for Joe Walsh. Probably their best-known tune was one called “Funk #49,” which also is the title of one of the songs here.
But even though the opening guitar riff is kind of similar to the James Gang sound in a mutated, otherworldly way, it’s not the same song. I can’t imagine Walsh singing lyrics like “It’s a bird of prey/It hunts for blood/I let it hunt for blood. … It’s not a song you want to sing along to/You don’t want to get these thoughts inside your head.”
Nope, that’s a pure Pere Ubu sentiment.
Thomas has a knack for appropriating titles of old rock, soul, and country songs. Back on Ubu’s second album, Dub Housing, they did a song called “Drinking Wine Spodyody,” which definitely was not the old R&B pounder. On 1991’s Worlds in Collision, they took the great notion to do a song called “Goodnite Irene,” which wasn’t anything like Leadbelly’s tune. They’ve also recorded songs called “Memphis,” “Woolie Bullie,” and “Blue Velvet” that are nothing like the originals. And here, besides “Funk 49,” they borrow a James Brown title, “Cold Sweat.” Ironically — or perhaps not — this song, which ends Missile Silo, is one of the slowest, prettiest ones on the album. It doesn’t sound much like the Godfather of Soul, but it’s got an odd soul of its own.
There are a few slower, less frantic moments on this record.“The Healer” is one. But the better one is the creepy “Walking Again,” which has subtly ominous lyrics like “C’mon, baby, that’s what I say/C’mon, baby, you’re gonna walk this way/We’re gonna see/We’re gonna say what’s on our mind/We’re gonna see/Gonna be a good time.” And that’s followed by the eerie “I Can Still See” (“I can still see/that picture of you and me/It’s carved in my head/with a knife that’s kept in my head”).
But my favorites are the rockers, like the fast-and-furious little number called “Toe to Toe.” Here Thomas not quite sings but shouts, “20 years of a living hell/At the bottom of a missile well/20 years a forgotten son/Staring at the border of the Kingdom Come/20 years toe to toe with Uncle Joe.” This might be some nightmarish remembrance of the Cold War — “Uncle Joe” being Stalin? I dunno.
The whole song lasts less than two minutes, which is the case of a couple of the other coolest rockers on Missile Silo, “Swampland” and “Red Eye Blues (“I’m snowblind in the hollering dark/I’m chasing time and I’m coming apart”). Though these guys aren’t strangers to epic tracks that last five or six minutes, many songs here are on the shorter end of the spectrum. And that serves them well.
I guess my problem is that I’ve let Pere Ubu’s thoughts into my head. I hope they stay around spreading their strange glory and rocking like maniacs for another 40 years.
Here's some videos.
I've always been a sucker for sinister pinball, so I love this one.
Here's another one from 20 Years in a Missile Silo
And just for the heck of it, here's a clip from David Sanborn's Night Music, circa 1989. Here Ubu does "Waiting for Mary" -- with Debbie Harry on backup vocals
On this day in 1975, the final voyage of the freighter called the Edmund Fitzgerald began.
It was a tragic trip in which a terrible storm pounded the Detroit-bound ship loaded with 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets, made of processed iron ore. On Nov. 10 the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, killing its entire crew of 29 men.
Some trivia, courtesy of the Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, Mich.: The doomed ship was named for the president and chairman of the board of Northwestern Mutual, the company that owned it. It was launched June 8, 1958 at River Rouge, Michigan. At 729 feet and 13,632 gross tons the Fitzgerald for more than a decade was the largest ship on the Great Lakes.
But chances are, that's not why you remember it. If you're like most of us, you know it from the hit song by Gordon Lightfoot.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead When the skies of November turn gloomy With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed When the gales of November came early.
Lightfoot's haunting shanty was a big pop hit in 1976, only months after the actual shipwreck. It's a wonderful example of an instant folk song.
The singer spoke of his song on Reddit a few years ago
Topical songs, you know... are very difficult to come by. Every once in a while. And the Edmund Fitzgerald really seemed to go unnoticed at that time, anything I'd seen in the newspapers or magazines were very short, brief articles, and I felt I would like to expand upon the story of the sinking of the ship itself. And it was quite an undertaking to do that, I went and bought all of the old newspapers, got everything in chronological order, and went ahead and did it because I already had a melody in my mind, and it was from an old Irish dirge that I heard when I was about three and a half years old, I think it was one of the first pieces of music that registered to me as being a piece of music. That's where the melody comes from, from an old Irish folk song.
Lightfoot, while taking a few poetic liberties in the lyrics, tried to stay true to the actual story. But, as he explains in this article, he's updated it through the years as new facts about the wreck became known.
The original lyrics refer to a hatchway caving in shortly before the disaster. But in 2010, an investigation for the National Geographic Channel's TV show Dive Detectives suggested three rogue waves broke the ship in half. Lightfoot soon revised the lyric from: "At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in, he said, 'Fellas, it's been good to know ya'" To "At 7 p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said, 'Fellas it's been good to know ya."" That brought relief to the mother and daughter of crew members in charge of manning the hatches. "With the mystery resolved, I made the women very happy. The new line takes the onus off the deckhands," Lightfoot told MLive and the Saginaw News ...
Here's Lightfoot performing the song live in Reno 2000
The best cover of Lightfoot's song was by another Canadian named Gordon -- Gord Downie, who sang it with his band, The Tragically Hip. (Downie died just last month at the of 53.)
Finally, here's an irreverent, goofball cover by NRBQ in Louisiville in 1982. Too soon? Watch at your own risk.
