Unearthed by Frank Kogan—P&J comments are prob printed out and/or preserved on floppy. Some of the Scene comments were posted here in 2004, but not the ballot.
Don Allred, your votes have been recorded.
Your Pazz & Jop albums ballot was submitted as follows:
1. Johnny Cash - AMERICAN IV:THE MAN COMES AROUND - American (10 points)
2. Miles Davis - THE COMPLETE JACK JOHNSON SESSIONS - Columbia/Legacy (10
points)
3. Dysrhythmia - PRETEST - Relapse (10 points)
4. - THE SOUL OF A MAN - Columbia/Legacy (10 points)
5. Essential Logic - FANFARE IN THE GARDEN - Kill Rock Stars (10 points)
6. James Chance - IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSE - Tiger Style (10 points)
7. - NEW YORK NOISE - Soul Jazz (10 points)
8. Groovski - GROOVSKI - Groovski Records (10 points)
9. Lyrics Born - LATER THAT DAY... - Quannum Projects (10 points)
10. Nancy McCallion and the Mollys - TROUBLE - APN (10 points)
Your Pazz & Jop singles ballot has been recorded as follows:
1. Johnny Cash - " Hurt" - American
2. Klezmatics - "I Ain't Afraid/Di Gayster (Ghosts)" - Rounder
3. Rosanne Cash with Johnny Cash - "September When It Comes" - Capitol
4. Steve Earle - " The Unrepentant" - Artemis
5. Dixie Chicks - " Mississippi" - Open Wide/Monument/Columbia
6. - " "
7. James Carter - " Gloria" - Columbia
8. John Fahey - "Remember" - Revenant
9. Fountains Of Wayne - "Stacey's Mom" - S-Curve/Virgin
10. Jean Grae - "Code Red" - BabyGrande
Subject: Don Allred's Country 03 Ballot/Comments
Date: Saturday, January 03, 2004 11:17 PM
Don Allred's 2003 Country Music Ballot & Comments
Equal points to all entries.
ALBUMS:
1.Johnny Cash: AMERICAN IV:THE MAN COMES AROUND (American)
2.Dixie Chicks: TOP OF THE WORLD TOUR LIVE (Open Wide/Monument/Columbia)
3.Steve Earle: JUST AN AMERICAN BOY (Artemis)
4.Merle Haggard: HAGGARD LIKE NEVER BEFORE (Hag)
5.Lucinda Williams: WORLD WITHOUT TEARS (Lost Highway)
6.Drive-By Truckers: DECORATION DAY (New West)
7.David Allen Coe: LIVE AT BILLY BOB'S TEXAS (Smith Music Group)
8.June Carter Cash: WILDWOOD FLOWER (Dualtone)
9.Gary Stewart: LIVE AT BILLY BOB'S TEXAS (Smith Music Group)
10. Nancy McCallion and the Mollys: TROUBLE (APN)
(comments on TROUBLE and some others:
https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004/03/even-more-guest-mentalism-from-don.html (my Mollys gateway saga, with links to later McCallion/Zavala coverage at end:https://myvil.blogspot.com/2005/12/clockwork-pinata.html
SINGLES:
1.Johnny Cash: "Hurt"(American)
2.Rosanne Cash with Johnny Cash: "September When It Comes" (Capitol)
3.Merle Haggard: "That's the News" (Hag)
4.Terri Clark: "I Just Wanna Be Mad" (Mercury)
5.Terri Clark: "I Wanna Do It All" (Mercury)
6.Dwight Yoakam: "Back of my Hand" (Audium)
7.Carlene Carter: "I've Always Been Crazy" (Dualtone)
8.Dolly Parton: "I'm Gone" (Sugar Hill).
9.Martina McBride: "This One's for the Girls" (RCA)
10.Cracker "Sinaloa Cowboys" (Artist Direct/BMG)
REISSUES:
1.Willie Nelson: CRAZY: THE DEMO SESSIONS (Sugar Hill)
2.June Carter Cash: PRESS ON (Dualtone)
3.June Carter: LIVE RECORDINGS FROM THE LOUISIANA HAYRIDE (Scena)
4.OLD TIME MUSIC: THE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION (Rounder)
BEST MALE VOCALIST:
1 Willie Nelson 2.Merle Haggard 3.Toby Keith
BEST FEMALE VOCALIST
1.Dolly Parton 2.Iris DeMent 3.Emmylou Harris
BEST DUO, TRIO, OR GROUP:
1.Willie Nelson and his band 2.Merle Haggard and the Strangers 3.Dixie Chicks
BEST LIVE PERFORMER:
1.Dolly Parton 2.Willie Nelson 3.Neko Case
BEST INSTRUMENTALIST:
1.Willie Nelson 2.Doc Watson 3.Vassar Clements
BEST NEW ACT:
Mindy Smith
COMMENTS:Country is a certain place, fuller and emptier than it seems, always
counting that sought-after, expensive, hard-to-maintain, easy-to-lose,
hard-to-avoid home on the emotional range. All of my favorite performers are quite
capable of locking themselves in one room all night, but I don't have to share
their particular fixations of the moment; each can project through walls real
well. Lucinda's WOLRD WITHOUT TEARS is a world of hurt and candles, art and
medicine, surrogate soldiers and juicy tunes, which of course just make it all
too concise and too clear, that you ain't here. Yeah,YOU. Sure as a shotglass,
and a calendar. Yet there's always a sense of something in reserve, no matter
how much I actually hear: something more, and that's the way the world (oh
yeah, and home) should be, or at least seem. The old guys make a virtue of
necessity, and so experience and self-awareness come close enough to wisdom, for a
few mercifully brief (though still expensive)pre-and-post-CD-bloat minutes (as
itunes and the like usher us toward the end of the Album Age altogether).Cash
(in digitized immortality/present tense) knows he can't notes any more, if he
ever could, so finds some sounds that don't need to be held, in fact sound
better the more they decay. The Apocalypse and the "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
and that consarned "Sam Hill" 's soapbox/scaffold are just three more stops,
and no places to loiter now, if they ever were, which o' course they weren't.
But each is just as real, just as expensive, yet just as safe from/in erosion,
in the view he affords us, which is all he and we (or I, caffeinated
geezer-cadet) can afford. The layout, the sequence of rooms, views, songs (choices
which will be more pesky in the true-post-Album Age, but of course our ushers will
be guiding us), still matters greatly. "That's The News" is a sure shot, like
"Philadelphia Lawyer," but I love how we go from getting the news I already
knew but still feel the need to hear (and don't take the abilty to do so for
granted, not any more), to "Stick out yo' can, here comes the garbage man."(and
"Yellow Ribbons" is one trippy little march, on down the same road apiece).
When the Chicks go from Bruce Robison's "Travelin' Soldier" to Maria McKee's "Am
I the Only One Who's Ever Felt This Way," busting out of the little room o'
memory into the bigger one of RAT NOW, ready to head on down the highway right
between those walls, it's a paycheck Jack. Cracker's David Lowery can't help
but keep his distance, which makes his extremely belated and delighted
discovery of Outlaw chestnuts on COUNTRYSIDES a hoot (as if the Kinks had made a
covers-savvy cross between MUSWELL HILLBILLIES and EVERYBODY'S IN SHOWBIZ). A
distance close enough to wisdom on Springsteen's "Sinaloa Cowboys," which any sense
of "closure," much less justice, or whatcacallit compassion, dares not
understand too soon.
Other notes: Sometimes when you try to get back to that home, to pick up
where you left off, it's such a crazy idea, nothing to do but see and raise it,
get audacious, and settle into THAT , if you can. There's a certain
transgressive circuit-riding, sometimes should-be-circuit-breaking tradition, the orbits
of Uncle Dave Macon, of Harmonica Frank, Townes Van Zandt mebbe, John Fahey,
then there's what Cledus would call Hankenstein, and Steve Earle's the Baron of
that, sometimes shambling through the mud like his own golem. He wills not
just himself but also other dead and even moldy heroes (quotes Abbie Hoffman,"We
told an army to stop and it stopped." Does Steve really believe it went just
like that, or real close? Like, the Vietnam War didn't last 9 years, and the
Vietnamese might suggest even longer?) But at any rate, sometimes he's it even
beyond reanimation, just screw it here's the electricity: "Somebody's gotta do
it, smbdygtdt," and"The Unrepentant" goes lurching into another
guitar-squall. But the "bluegrass" is all about the bearing down and passion too, and ditto
solo-voice-and acoustic guitar going around the world with the "Ft.Worth
Blues" and other place-blues in permanent rotation on yr. headbox (reflecting the
higher isolationism of other Texans' tunnel vision, and all country karma.
Maybe everybody's, but let's say ZZ Top is a little too RocknRoll in literal
sound, even if current mainstream Kinda Country raids the Top feel like it used to
squeeze the Eagles (and Rosanne Cash, who once reigned over Urban Country,
now polishes her RULES OF TRAVEL into consolation prizes more perfectly
reflective than Lucinda's, and so R.C. makes really smart, woman-of-the-world
folk-rock, almost a contradiction in terms, not as inventive as young Dylan or
McGuinn, but never as geeky either, and never as country, not anymore-except when
she and Johnny lead each other through a September song's long afternoon of
clues, vanishing in footprints).
Coe LIVE AT BB's T: not as good as IF THAT AINT? Doesn't give his band as
much room here? Oh well. Warren Haynes and Johnny Neel are long gone,anyway, but
(70s-boogie-ing or banjo-and-mandolin picking in a good, trashily-electrified,
expertly-rationed way), these current guys are high generic, as is Coe, the
original John the Baptist (or John the Confederate Mormon Polygamist, he'd
correct me)/ poet laureate of the longhaired daddies(and mamas) of today's
Montgomery Gentrified, Buffed-Hat mainstream. (a letter from a forsaken,
guilt-tripping daddy[the more nuanced re audible aging of Coe, and young-sounding lungs
of his fairly well-behaved, sometimes-sing-along attendees] is slipped in under
the smoke,as moody and deft as anything I've heard him do). Some nods in the
direction of recognition, but.he still feels residual pain of neglect and
other "old scars under new tattoos"(as he tells us, around the campfire, a few too
many times, but even the boring parts keep me alert, ready for the good times
to come again). The songs co-written with Kid Richie fit well, not many mere
rehashes of hits (not many hits to be rehashed, but still) (and "You Never
Even Called Be By My Name" gets a surprise guest-shot of "The Real Slim Shady")
When he finally resumes the group vocals (which made for a strong start)), we
get a lilting, expressive "Free My Mind," (like a lawnneck Cooke/Marley-smoker)
and certainly a better "Follow Me" than Uncle Kracker's watery Steve
Millerism.
Mollys TROUBLE: the party's over (on this record, anyway). Now Nancy's hung
her name overhead, but isn't (always) quite the right lone frontperson her
pungent barstool ballads deserve (really it still takes two-so where are you
tonight, Catherine Zavala? ). But somewhere in the winter West, keyed-up,
mixed-buttoned Accordion-Americans still prowl a mining town, ghost town, college town
(all the same, if you stay long enough). Seven years after I started
listening to these erotic pilgrims, notes begin to multiply again, like (a new
generation or ten of) jackrabbits with every spin, so better hit PAUSE and send over
my own round of label-peelings (TROUBLE songs' last lines): "I've paid off
all the interest with my tears. Put the baby in the shopping cart and run. It's
all spanking new like a white dress and vow, and you're a stranger now. If
you don't stop to tell me that you want me back again, I won't stop to tell you
it's too late. First class patrons be spilling their wine, never make the
station on time. You will have him or you won't. This is my round put it here. It
has done it before it will do it again. They wish us well and what the hell,
tonight is all our own." Just don't let me get to first lines.
"Jolene" 's beauty hits Mindy Smith so hard, and keeps coming on, as if tears
could burn like they could dazzle. I get just a glimpse of how a woman might
see things, and JUST BECAUSE I'M A WOMAN:THE SONGS OF DOLLY PARTON is
effectively Mindy's (debut) album, as much as it is Shelby's, Me'Shell's, Emmylou's.
and Dolly's latest still-fresh kill(didn't quite make my Top Ten because comps
can get a bit diffuse with the roomful of voices, and still and yet
Dolly-as-writer doesn't show quite as much range as she does performing, in her own
studio, or ,Lord knows,on her OWN stage [any one she's on she owns]) Wouldn't
have hurt for Terri Clark to be on JUST. Her own PAIN TO KILL just missed my Top
Ten on account of its top half being a mite flattened by"guest" production,
but her old ally Keith Stegall almost saves the day in the homestretch, and the
words are often her own, and always delivered by the clearcut, cleancut voice
of experience. Like the lady deputy always sez on "Reno 911," "Ah believe
everyone should do what they want, long as they take a shower."
