Howdy, Ma'am

Howdy, Ma'am:
The Midnight Plowboy And Your Favorite Dessert, Reporting For Duty
By Don Allred

Two fresh new country albums, Hot Apple Pie's *Hot Apple Pie and Billy
Currington's Doin' Somethin' Right, each serve up one song in which
"hillbillies" are called for, and and one reserved for "rednecks." Fair's fair, but
actually, I like to think the hillbillies have won. Or at least are catching up.
'Bout time. To paraphrase Waylon Jennings (while using proper tongue-in-chic
dialect): "Don't yew thank this redneck thang has done got out 'o hand?" True,
the equation of "redneck" with "red white and blue" has about ridden its
sincere-to-opportunistic ('scuse me: patriotic-to-free-enterprise!) bandwagon into a
rut, along with the war and the economy. But the Ironic Appreciation of
Rednecks isn't faring that much better.
Of course, irony brings a nice tang to the New Earthiness of recent
country, which is a healthy counter-trend to the anxieties of life during wartime
(And now floodtime, and so on.). So, as current CMT video star Jason Aldean
brings the sight of "the neighbor's butt crack, as he's nailin' up the
shin-gles," to the New Earthy party in his "Hicktown," sure, I'll salute it. But the
music reminds me of driving a pickup truck over railroad ties and bad roads,
just for the heck and the habit of it, even on your day off. Which can be fun,
like the song, yet even before the price of gas went up so far, it was kinda
dumb, and obstinately so. ("Ah gotta do this for the Big Boss Man, so Ah'll do
it for me too!")
And that, whether the defensiveness involved is self-mocking or
self-righteous and/or surrogate-seeking and/or mostly commercial, is what representations
of redneckism come down to, most of the time: that 'necks are dumb and
obstinate.
Hillbillies are more likely to be crazy and sexy than dumb and obstinate.
These essential traits were "established" around the beginning of the 20th
Century, by what were later discovered to be bogus, pseudo-scientific presentations
of the bloodlines of two families, given the stage names of Jukes and
Kallikaks. Conclusion: you might look perfectly normal, but if you have a recessive
'billy gene in there somewhere, one of these days, you're just gonna jump out
the window and go whoopin' 'round the mountain with Bugs Bunny and Dolly Parton.
Which is just the appeal of Hot Apple Pie's shimmying "Hillbillies" and
Billy Currington's curly "I Wanna Be A Hillbilly." Yes, friends, in these
troubled times, what better way to send all your hopes and fears, especially about
yourself, especially if you're Southern, right on up the crick, than to jump
outta your rode-hard "Hicktown" pickup, kick off your shoes, and dance with and
to and on Billy and the Pie. Sing it, Pie! "Lay me down-n-n, in a bed of
gold, " they harmonize, full-throatedly. So they're not *too hillbilly, they don't
sing through their noses much, though they can pick the bluegrass, while
jumping into the chorus: "Hey! Hill-bill-ies!" Not unlike "Hey! Bo Didd-ley!" Fact
is, bluegrass and blues licks are catnip to Brady Seals and his merry men,
just as Bill Monroe was equally inspired by the fiddle tunes of his Uncle Pen
and the blues guitar of his neighbor Arnold Shultz, to go travelling, musically
and geographically, with his Bluegrass Boys.
The Pie is a true band, rarely adding any session players at all, and they
always leave their music plenty of room to breathe in and travel through,
stylistically and emotionally. "Easy Does It" is a guy telling a girl to control
herself. Which is quite a switch, but not wimpy: its chorus is like that of
the robustly suave Commodores' hit "Easy," with the added attraction of " I'm a
real-l-l, re-luc-tant, Romeo," a line which, though playing hard to get, is
*musically pretty close to Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On"! These resourceful
hillbillies also know how to adapt to the musical surprises of others. Willie
Nelson duets with Pie leader Brady Seals on "Slowin' Down The Fall," but
Willie seems to have a really bad cold, so Brady figures out how to match Willie's
timing, while working around the hoarseness, rather than trying for smooth
harmony, as he would with his own bandmates. Oh yeah, about their aforementioned
take on "redneck": "Redneck Revolution" isn't as yee-haw as you might think
from the title: it rocks steady (and reminds me of Bad Company's "Rock
Steady"), while its confidence grows, and gets more expansive: "We don't give a damn
what religion or race, we don't hate." So it's not really "redneck,"
stereotypically, but "Redneck Revolution" sounds like it might be the name of a pretty
good nightclub.
Billy Currington's "I Wish I Was A Hillbilly" ("prayin' fer rain!") flies
like the Pie's "Hillbillies," and he's as lanky and sexy as 'billies are
expected to be: limber enough to adapt to life's and love's craziness, with just a
touch of his own strange tushmagick. He knows, when a lady with "Hollywood" on
her license plates drives up and sees him "sellin' turnips on a flatbed
truck, crunchin' on a pork rind," she must be thinking, "This is where rednecks
come from." Don't say! But, even though he obediently gives her directions, the
lovely traveler still turns right around and comes back to him. He's grateful
for this, but doesn't sound very surprised. Nor should he be. As long as he
keeps his reassuring faith in womanly wisdom moving to a smooth, new-cut groove,
his modest crop of memorable melodies should make for a real nice diet of
midnight snacks. Going down even easier than Pie.

The complexities of name-calling

Not heard Finnissy's latest disc but i found the throwaway comment re: "new complexity" a bit interesting. When I started reading abt classical, new complexity was the first time I came across that sort scene building that is taken for granted over in the pop-world (check yer rock music weeklies). Scene names are designed to provoke exclusivity, signal a break with what has gone before, are quite exciting to the new reader (but not to the older reader nor to the artist a few years down the line), but lead to reactionary responses (in this case complexity being an incredibly loaded term) thus doing a triffic job in promoting but obv aren't that good as a descritpion as to what goes on (how can such scene names be? Wasn't it a laugh when Stanley Crouch uttered his 'free from what?' comment re: free jazz? And in this case Finnissy I don't feel has actually "moved on" from the term bcz really it doesn't exist, if you see what i mean)...and it felt right enough, catching the UK premier of Dillon's 'traumwerk III' for piano and violin that started with a slow, mournful-sounding tune, which is not what you'd expect after the violinist spends a minute laying out the glued music sheets across the support! And micro-melodies are what seemed to come in and out, throughout the however many sections the work seemed to contain. It was long, and at times quite frustrating, but in the best way possible.

Anyway, enough ramblin', more mentalism 4 Xmas!

Louisville Lip

Louisville Lip
By Don Allred

Part One:
Once upon a time, in the land o' Goshen, a nice, woodsy suburb of Louisville,
Kentucky, there were two teenaged girls, Janet Bean and Cathy Irwin. And back
then, at the dawn of the 80s, they were involved in an ongoing series of punk
bands, like Dick Brains, Butt In Front, Bunny Butthole, and Catbutt/Dogbutt.
But one night, they dressed and painted themselves up and went way downtown in
Louisville, to the Beat Club, between a bunch of strip joints and hooker
bars, to sing a few of the oldest, twangiest country songs they knew.
They didn't particularly mean to make a habit of this, but somehow, as
the Tammy Wynette fashion sense and the bands got lost, Irwin and Bean found
themselves still singing together, under the name of Freakwater, which supposedly
is a hillbilly synonym for moonshine. At first covering other people's songs,
and then very gradually writing more and more of their own, Freakwater
specialized in older-than-old-school country, also known as "folk" music: chronicles
of love and other disasters. Full of images, swirling around and riding on
plain ol' tunes. (Well, the tunes are often kinda pretty, but they don't wear
much makeup.)
The contrast of words and music extend into and from Freakwater's
self-taught harmonies, guitar styles, and lifestyles. Irwin's the flat-picking, smoky
alto, who lives mostly in Louisville, painting canvas, houses, and other rude
objects; Bean's the strumming, translucent soprano, who moved to Chicago,
worked in law offices, and now studies genetics. Freakwater is unison, as well
as harmony, and unison is next to what some rule "out of tune," but also
subject to co-ordination. And stress. That has to be factored in too, if you want
what you've built to last.You gotta have stress, like you gotta have friends. On
1999's End Time, and 2005's Thinking Of You, they fit many session musicians
into a remarkably intimate, homebrewed sound. Reportedly thinking of John
Cale's Paris 1919, Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers (which took some cues from Dusty
Springfield's Dusty In Memphis, according to Ron Jovanovic's Big Star band
history) and Elvis' "sessions in Memphis and Vegas" (like "Kentucky Rain,"
maybe?), they quietly shift small, distinctive combinations of instruments in and
out of the foreground. (Currently, in the fall of '05, the touring band is:
Irwin, on banjo as well as guitar and vocals; Bean, guitar and vocals; their
longtime bass player, David Gay; with Joe Adamik on drums, bass clarinet, and
keyboards.) But I notice, adjusting the EQ, how easy it is to mess up the mix, so
that the instruments suddenly crowd the voices. And sometimes the images can
crowd the themes, as in one of their many struggles-with-religion-and-guilt
songs, End Time's "Cloak Of Frogs", which is as sensationally Southern Gothic as
you might suspect from its title.
And Janet Bean's 2003 solo album, Dragging Wonder Lake, is frustrating,
despite its inclusion of many (not all) good-to-great songs. (Just for one
example: a subset, comprised of a prequel and sequels, Bean's own equals, to Neil
Young's "Soldier." Overall effect, on paper, anyway: Flannery O'Connor
featuring Emily Dickinson, slicing and dicing Pat Benatar's "Love Is A Battlefield",
via John Cale's chamber of country-jazz-rock-blues-usage afterlife, Vintage
Violence.) And fine players. ('Tis said that Levon Helm was the only drummer that
could make you cry; haven't heard that track, but even if I had, I'd say: Dan
Leali, take a bow! But don't stop drumming.) But a number of tracks (it
varies; I'm still listening) tend to lose momentum, because Janet stretches her
voice too high and thin. And bids Kelly Hogan do the same! Kelly, who for
instance succinctly belted the role of doomed Lynyrdette Cassie Gaines on Drive-By
Truckers' Southern Rock Opera! And, dammit, despite the fact that Janet's done
her own share of belting, amidst the howling winds and northern lights of her
other band, the ruggedly neo-psychedelic Eleventh Dream Day, which, in songs
like "Frozen Mile," can seem at least as at home in Jack London's Alaska as in
Jefferson Airplane's and Neil-times-Crazy Horse's Northern California, or in
EDD's own Windy City, for that. Nor need she (or Kelly) necessarily belt, to
put a song across. In Freakwater, Janet sometimes sings a part which is usually
associated with harmony, but it's over and slightly behind Cathy's alto, so in
effect, Cathy's "harmony" becomes a counter-melody. (Which is also what
Ornette Coleman's saxophone, violin and trumpet seem to do, so maybe that's what he
means by "harmolodic," although the last time I checked, he still hadn't
offered a definitive-type definition.)(When they do this, they're still doing
their old-timey-associated tunes, so, in that sense, closer to Albert Ayler than
Ornette; Janet adopts a somewhat Ayleresque use of vibrato on some of Wonder
Lake, but (especially since she's not playing off Irwin, or Hogan, really) it
tends to come out more like Neil Young [if that such comparisons aren't too
contradicted by her stoicism vs. Ayler's and Young's tendencies to pathos]. Though
Young has said he's frustrated by his warble, and she may be singing what
he's going for, his voice is a little deeper, has a little more presence than
hers does on Wonder Lake.)
But these are experiments worth taking on, and usually, Freakwater's art
and hearts can cut a deal.And I do mean "cut." They like to sing about small,
shiny instruments, useful tools. "Needle in a haystack, burn the damn thing
down. And there you'll find the needle, lyin' right there, on the ground." Of
course it may get lost again, "lost but not forgotten!" Yes, so they can write
more anthems to the noble tool, and also mebbe keep hold of it long enough to
"write love letters in your skin," although that's just a passing fancy. (But
then, so are you.)
They do have issues with money, men, and other forms and uses of power.
In "Cheap Watch," when they hear last call, there's a mention of something
that isn't on the menu, a ball and chain. Sounds like they want one, or a new
grip on the one they've got, since they've got it, and as long as you're up; and
finally it occurs to dense male me, that Janis Joplin, who doesn't sound like
Freakwater otherwise, does sounds like she wanted that too, and for the same
reasons: to swing with, or to swing from, either way like a weapon, and/or
something in orbit, going around, coming around, and really getting out there, at
times, to swing. (Still the caveman's drawing, but maybe not too far off.)
So, as far as balls and chains go, a girl can dream about being a "Queen
Bee": "She's pretty and she's lucky but it's dark in there. She got a
honeycomb but she got no hair. The boys are waxin' her legs and doin' her nails,
knittin' her sweaters, with their pointy little tails. One little bee, the only
square in the hive, tried to get smart while he was alive. She aimed her hexagon
right between his eyes, and said, 'The Queen of the Bees, beats the Lord of
the Flies.' I'm gonna be the Queen Bee! And in the beautiful world I see, way
up in the hollow tree, perfect idolatry, little bees on their knees, saying,
"Baby you're the Queen Bee." (tiny fuzztones buzz) I won't grubbin' around down
here like I was, because, I'm gonna do like the Queen Bee does!"
End Of Part One, Part Two Continues Below:

Louisville Lip Pfart 2

Louisville Lip Pft. 2

by Don Allred
Oh yeah, speaking of "Cheap Watch, " that's where Freakwater might be
thinking of your pocket: "Wound up, tighter than a cheap watch, wind it up, and
watch how the time flies. Little white teeth, wound around what sounds like
more cheap lies, li'l black clouds, suck us up to the sky." Those little black
clouds, like Woody Guthrie's "Little Black Train," which they also sing, will
show up, but on their own schedule, like needles and everything else. And not
necessarily in a good way. On Cut yourself A Switch, Irwin's 2002 solo album,
there's a song called "Cry Your Little Eyes Out," in which a grieving mother
feels the "blue sky, like a slap across my face." The Southern sun beats down,
the roses by her gate grow too tall, sporting their "crown of thorns." She
prays for "the dark clouds to roll in, but the Devil is a fairweather friend."
"Louisville Lip" is the true story of how young Cassius Clay threw
his Olympic medals off Louisville's Second Street Bridge, into the Ohio River,
after one racial insult too many. Voices point out "a big man crying from where
the bee stung" (crying from the wound itself!). So they take the line toward
compassion, via gut irony, though basically, of course, they're taking on what
they might've heard older people say. ("Loserville," a local name for
Louisville, is another anthem of sorts, a raised glass of mixed feelings, as a toast
to anyone's hometown should be.) An oblique stroke at redemption of misused
words, wasted breath, slighted youth, but ultimately, they seem to identify with
Clay's frustration, the feeling of being trapped in Southern history, of "My
History,"(an End Time song), anybody's.
As for the comforts of art history, on the new Thinking Of You, "Cathy
Ann" is about Woody Guthrie's daughter. It pictures her life on Coney Island's
Mermaid Avenue, rising and falling like painted waves, "born by the sea, born
for the fire, that was borne by the spark, that was blown by, a wire." Then
there's that chorus, knocking hard once more: "If your father didn't love you,
there's just no good in men." The verses don't describe or suggest in any way
that he didn't love her, or is at fault for her death. (Unless you count the
frames that slide forward a little, to where he's not only "shaking like a leaf,"
but also "shaking like a flame," and even then he's being "bitten by the
wind, that stole down from his brain.") There's been speculation that Cathy Ann
Irwin is willfully, cryptically projecting onto her subject. Maybe, but there's
another artist involved: Woody. (A few years ago, a whole book of songs and
pictures for and of his daughter was published.) "Your father always drew you,
in a sky of blue." She's trapped too, trapped in that same damn blue sky that
lashed the grieving mother in "Cry Your Little Eyes Out", trapped in dead old
Woody's songs, and/or their historical context, trapped in Freakwater's song.
Tough shit. You work with what you've got. Also on Cut Yourself A Switch,
Irwin sings about a Christmas Day long ago, on which she and her brother sang
with their family about baby Jesus. Then the two of them wandered off, where
"the snow would not cover the ground," it being in the South and all, and they
built a "Dirty Little Snowman." And he kept trying to fall apart, despite
their best efforts, but his "dirty mouth smiled," and also "three worlds
collided, on the day of his creation, his head and his heart set on the arc of his
foundation." Three worlds, colliding, set, and ready to fall apart, just as
everybody's basic elements are. In the path of the three wise men, who either did
or didn't or might've come looking for the baby Jesus, who the dirty little
melting snowman either is or isn't or might be a stand-in, though not a shoo-in,
for. (It sounds like a carol that's determined not to be a hymn, although it
almost could be.)(Oh,is this paragraph another spoiler? Listen, they've got
like nine albums, counting the two solos. And not counting Janet's songs
performed with Eleventh Dream Day, whose new one comes out in the spring of '06.)
Freakwater's new Thinking Of You is a little more overtly electrified
than previous albums. Cut to the part where the old gray tunewagon cuts through
the thicket of images, and the yellow flower shines down, watching tall
growths, maybe even taller than the roses that lorded over the "Cry Your Little Eyes
Out" mother's gate. They stretch their long necks up and gape, greedy for
more light, more life, ever more.
But all that greed could make you too fat, so once again, Irwin and Bean
call out their marching orders, to all thangs great and small: "Hi Ho Silver,
high on pills, use your hands, and tell me how I feel. Higher power, higher
hands up mine, tell me why your God is so divine." It's a challenge, but an
invitation too, like all their songs, so come along if you can.

Why I Went and Bought a Slipknot Album

Okay, I don't feel good about myself sometimes. But I was there with $10.54 in my pocket, and it was two discs for $9.99 at Target, and I figured this would be a good enough way to get an entire handle on their work without actually buying any studio albums...

Okay, but we have to go back farther than that. Why, exactly, did I have $10.54 in my pocket at Target? Because this is what I do when I feel low, freaked-out, sad, angry, whatever: I buy music. And my stomach has been killing me lately and I'm stressed out majorly (although my life's pretty good overall, still sometimes I get that angst thing happening), don't have my act together, etc.

And okay, I'm curious about metal. I have a pretty good working knowledge of "classic" metal, based on once being a white teenager growing up in a rural-suburban town, and also based on Chuck Eddy's book. But starting in the 1980s I saw it as poser music, pop wearing the masque of the black death, I was all about authenticity then. Boo me. So I turned poppy and worldy and rappy and all those other things I turned, and missed out on a lot of it.

People I respect take metal very seriously. I actually bought some Swedish band's record last year (year before?) because Scott S. was raving about it so much, dug it, but then sold it, and I still have Francis the Mute around here somewhere, and it freaks me out at times.

Okay, so the Mars Volta and Slipknot aren't REALLY metal, yeah I know, blah blah blah. Go complain somewhere else. I don't really love hearing death metal talk about how it love cookie ahm ahm ahm num num num. I should but I don't. I like the crunch of guitars and the screams of pain okay though. Nothing wrong with crunch and pain.

So I'm there at Target looking for something cheap. If I'd had a few dollars more I'd have bought something else. But two discs for ten bucks is a great deal, and it's 2005 so I figured if I love it I can review it for someone or put it on my year-end list or something. This is how my mind works sometimes. I could have also bought the orthodox reggae guy's live disc or some pop-punk stuff, but I didn't know which one was best, plus they're all Green Day anyway, which means they're all the Violent Femmes without the god/gay stuff anyway. And I have lots of Femmes already, as I live in Wisconsin.

So I grabbed up the Slipknot and played it on the way to work, and liked it just fine. There's a lot of yelling that I can't decipher; better that way, I decided after looking up their lyrics, even though they're not the worst I've ever read, it's just that if you look up lyrics on the inter nets then you should not be listening to Slipknot. They have a lot of percussion and some tasty guitar and the doom is laid on pretty thick, and I like the facts that there are nine of them and that most of their anger centers around the fact that they come from Des Moines, Iowa. Also, now that they have names and not just numbers, it's cool that there are guys "named" 133 and Clown but that the big hyperaggressive drill sergeant lead guy, who was made this way probably by lots of gym teachers acting like drill sergeants, is now called "Corey."

Also, some people complain that this album is produced badly, but they're high because it shouldn't be too clean. Also, some people want all the songs to be about getting plugged by Satan, but I don't; I'll settle for minor transgressives like slitting someone's throat and carnalizing the wound, which is on one song, and isn't good but at least his therapy didn't cost him anything. Not something to play when the kids are around, but whatevers. And, am I digging the beautiful moments, like when they turn slightly prog with high harmonies and acoustic guitars before the crunch comes back in on "The Nameless"? Sure, why not? That's awesome.

Some would say I should have completed my early Chicago collection by getting Chicago VI with that ten bucks, or getting more 1970s Joni Mitchell, or the King of Rock reissue. I would probably agree with those people, usually. But does this Slipknot album sound pretty great as I drive home from work banging my head to "People = Shit" and "The Heretic Anthem" ?

Oh hell yes.

Ten Quick Shots to the Dome: November 1.

1. On the new George Clinton Presents the P.Funk All-Stars album entitled How Late Do You Have 2BB4UR Late? (bought it for $16 bucks, we had an email coupon for Borders, jaja suckaz), there is a nine-minute version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" featuring Bobby Womack. The song ends up as a medley of 1950s songs; at one point George sings "Let's go to the motherfuckin' hop." This is the greatest moment of music for me this year, or ever.

2. My son's favorite musical artist is the Four Tops. He is seven years old.

3. I have not heard most of the records everyone's talking about on ILM as their favorite of the year. I'm a little afraid to hear the Hold Steady because I'm afraid I'd like them. Otherwise: ugh. Indie white-guy stuff that I haven't been interested in since I renounced Blur. OMG SO CORNY!

4. I will have at least two Brazilian records in my top ten this year (Curumin, Badi Assad), maybe four (Heloisa Fernandes, Cabruera). I will have at least two Mexican records in my top ten this year (Natalia LaFourcade, Kobol), maybe four (Banda el Recodo, Ezequiel Pena).

5. Trying to read Frank Kogan's new book, but keep putting down my advance copy because I WAS FRANK KOGAN, except I was born about eight years later and three time zones westerlier. But it's all there: the relationship to music, the poetry of young revolutionaryism, the funky despair that leads to brilliant insight (well, Frank really IS kinda brilliant as a kid, I was just our town's functional equivalent). It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em.

6. Sorry, spaced out there for a second, the Bucks just came back to beat the Sixers in OT in the first game of the year. AW HELLS YEAH. On the other hand, it looks like Nene has already messed up his knee. My fantasy hoops team, the Parisian Nightsuits, is already screwed. (I hope you know where that name comes from.)

7. I voted for L.L. Cool J's Radio as my #1 album of the 1980s in that ILM poll, and Prince's "When Doves Cry" as my #1 song. I'll post more of my list if anyone cares.

8. Nice capsule review of Stevie's A Time 2 Love in the Village Voice. That last track is huge, with all the different percussionists going off all over it.

9. I spent last night doing laundry and dishes while listening to the entirety of Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814. How has everyone forgotten how dope this thing was? And who was it that said that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were the world's greatest band that year? (And if anyone knows where a fellow can find that butt bongo video, hook me up.)

10. I miss cruising. When the hell else am I going to listen to Foreigner?

We'll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning

WE'LL SWEEP OUT THE ASHES IN THE MORNING
Li'l Pilgrims Progress Through The Prograss, And The Earth's Sweet Volcanic Cone

By Don Allred

Nickel Creek's self-titled Sugar Hill debut in 2000 was a keening,
blue-green-grass world of Kentucky-to-Southern-Cali, transplanted suburban Calvinist karma. Prodigies next to prodigals: "My greatest fear will be that you will crash and burn, and I won't feel your fire, I'm hung up on that wire."
Their wires include those on the mandolin, banjo and bouzouki of Chris Thile, then 19 (he's the tallest, and most excitable-sounding); the fiddle of Sara Watkins, at 18; the guitar of her brother Sean, then 23; and the little-but-wiry
vocals of all, who have performed and recorded together for donkey's years. 1993's Little Cowpoke, their first album,features the traditional(and Hollywood)
Western stylings of Chris, age 12; Sara, 11; and Sean, 15. (Be sure to
request "I'm an Old Cowhand," when they come to town.) 13-year-old Chris' first
solo album, 1994's Leading Off, stayed relatively close to tradition, but he got
more adventurous, on 1997's Stealing Second. 2000's *Nickel Creek went gold,
which is unusual for bluegrass, but so is its music. Not so much the classical
or jazz elements: those are fairly typical of progressive bluegrass. Yet
already, the Nickels had a strikingly lived-in point of view: songs like "A
Lighthouse's Tale" were early glimpses of the world's beauty and wreckage, between
the sea and the mountains, home and the freeway. They also sounded like they
were ready to hit the road, Jack.
There was one potential problem area, traveling with them.
"Look at my girlfriend, isn't she pretty?" Chris asked shakily,
clutching his mandolin and staring down into its "face" for CMT's cameras, in late
2001. "I don't WANNA boyfriend!" Sarah laughed, while stamping her foot, and
sounding like she meant this answer to a nosey reporter, in the same mini-doc.
(Shawn, the oldest, had no comment on the subject, that I recall.) Nickel Creek
were determined to focus all their energies on the music! Its nervous edge
was soothed and smoothed out, just a bit, by producer/mist-mama/burbgrass star
Allison Krauss, who brought some of her own discreetly renowned sound to the
Nickels' latent noise. The blend was distinctive, which may well be why, by '02,
*Nickel Creek ended up in Billboard's Top Twenty.
Later in 2002, on *This Side, they covered Pavement's "Spit On A
Stranger": "You're a bittah, stran-g-a-a-h, I could thpit on a stran-gah, " lisped
Chris, in a lofty, bratty way, a parody of self-righteousness. Perhaps it's a
self-parody, or some kind of allusion to his earlier,
Bible-study-to-Tolkien-shelf-to-practice-room perspective? Also striking was his own "Brand New
Sidewalk": "You might not have meant to, but it's done now, you can't take it out.
Is that what this is about? It's done now, you can't take it back. You cry
about what fortune leant you without a plan of attack." They were adapting to the
adult world, gathering and giving out some clues and cues, to certain
ch-ch-changes, but meanwhile, *This Side became hard to listen to. Its subtle
experiments needed some shine, not just polish, and certainly no more of *Nickel Creek's mood stabilizers. Speculative song-shapes' soliloquies and hairline
fractures tended to settle slow-w-w-ly into the dust of dissolving tempi. Maybe
muted drama and delayed impact are all Allison knows how to do. Maybe that's all
they wanted from her. Maybe she and the Nickels brought out each others'
insecurities, when faced with the need for change. Maybe they all should have
consulted Dr. Joyce Brothers. (Maybe contact with *This Side's underside drove
Citizen K. to "Whiskey Lullaby" ? Seriously. Also, the New Morbidity stage/trend
of country's ongoing Life During Wartime was about to waft her Applachoid,
post-dead-baby-ballad way, and maybe the Nickels had already met the New Unease.)
In 2005, their new *Why Should The Fire Die? sports more versatile (but not showy) producers, Eric Valentine and Tony Berg. Also, Nickel Creek
guitarist Sean Watkins, whose solo projects have included jazz musicians, sometimes
brings a Bill Frisell-ian, disappearing crackle to the glamorous darkness.
The Nickels are on the dime now: they sound like they're all dressed in
black, while easing back into the kind of places they once could enter and
leave only via the stage door, when underage. "When in Rome" doesn't fiddle
around. Except in the musical sense, as Sara's sweet, snake-charmer strings chime
around Chris's calls: " Hey, those books you gave us look good on the shelves at
home, and they'll burn warm in the fireplace teacher (no commas in the singing or on the lyrics page!) when in Rome. Grab a blanket,sister, we'll make smoke signals, bring in some new blood, it feels like we're alone." There's also a doctor who comes to town but stays at home, dead men (in the video, sooty WWI soldiers look at the camera, while Chris lies on his back, eyes closed, playing his mandolin and twitching like a cockroach), and a guy with a cold. But that's all in the family, when you do like the Romans do. I think this song has
to do with implied ironic references to touring musicians as cruising tourists, and to Churchly admonitions to "be in the world, not of it." Gang Of Four's "At Home He's A Tourist" also comes to mind.
But there are also plenty of seemingly more direct-to-midnight
confessions, and some boasting, about what bad li'l pilgrims they are. "I helped her
live, and made her want to die!" That's Chris, of course, but each Nickel
contributes to the songwriting, and they take turns singing lead. Sara's got a couple
about seeming the wimpy little sister to potential boyfriends, but one of 'em
goes off and gets married and then can't get Sara out of his mind! The only
consistently disappointing track (especially after her own writing) is Sara's
wispy version of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is A Long Time." (But it's a wispy song,
except when Elvis did it.) Brief instrumentals provide refreshment, while adding
momentum. And the Nickels stomp so hard, so often, that I didn't realize, 'til
reading the credits, after listening to the whole album, that only one track
features drums. And "Doubting Thomas" is a confession so mature it's
inspiring, especially since it leads to the breakthrough of the title song, in which
love and doubt aren't just risked, and lived with, but embraced. If you can grow
up to that point, then indeed, why should (and how could) the fire die?

Okay This Really Pisses Me Off to No End

To all the lazy-ass music writers who mischaracterize Stevie Wonder's career as being split between his "funk" period of the 1970s and his "pop" period of the 1980s and 1990s: STOP IT YOU ARE LYING, OR STUPID. Stevie always had sappy ballad stuff, even on the dynamic duo of Innervisions and Talking Book. Yes he did, listen to them sometime. Hell, he even had a couple on my all-time favorite Stevie record, Music of My Mind. (Okay, it's not my favorite, Songs in the Key of Life is my favorite, but MoMM is a "better" album.) And Stevie busted out with a couple of really hard heavy funk songs in the last 20 years, but no one noticed except I guess me.

Here's the thing with Stevie: he's a soft-hearted guy, and he doesn't care about hiding it, and it doesn't matter. As he says on the new record, A Time to Love, he CHOOSES to be positive because he knows the world is full of shit and he knows he can restore some happiness to it. Okay that's a paraphrase but still. He's always been a Manicheist, the light and the dark, hitting us with the chamber-synth formalism while narrating the harsh conditions of "Village Ghetto Land," setting romantic lyrics to the saddest music ever and vice versa, I could go on but I won't because I'm hoping to get paid for reviewing this new album, because it's really damned good and I want people to know about it, plus I want my $10.54 investment to actually pay off for once.

All I'm saying is, saying that STEVIE FRICKIN' WONDER was once just a funk merchant who sold out to do lite R & B is a damned lie. Sure, he fell off after (AFTER NOT BEFORE, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants is a beautiful record) Hotter Than July, but not the way it's being portrayed. Stevie's heart never changed. Y'all just stopped listening. For shame.

For Whom The Drells Toll

For Whom The Drells Toll
A Child's Introduction To A Garden of Wishes And Dishes Upon Big Star
By Don Allred
(The child of reading something in this book, then listening to these CDs
again, wandering to and on and from this computer: not a straight-up review
overall, but a lot of notes, observations, opinions)

Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection Of The
Kings Of Power Pop
by Ron Jovanovic (A Cappella Books/Chicago Review Press, 333 pages, $15.95)

In Space
Big Star (Ryko)

"The tune itself was an up-tempo rocker, which gave the album an
abrasive start, but the song soon twisted to show its melodic qualities and then took
off to somewhere else completely." That's Rob Jovanovic reporting (he's not a
critic), and however accurately he does or doesn't diagnose "Feel," he's
close to nailing "Feel" 's parents, the misfit Anglophiliac Memphians who named
themselves Big Star, after a chain-chain-chain of grocery stores. In Big Star:
The Short Life, Painful Death And Unexpected Resurrestion Of The Kings Of Pop,
R.J. indicates that they knew their name would rise again, possibly to hang
around their necks like their pointy trademark neon sculpture, which already
looks like a real quick chalk mark around a body.
So what the heck, they named their first album #1 Record. It was more
or less "released" in 1972. On Stax, like their second album, neither of
which was exactly the Stax-ish (Bell Records-labelled) soul-pop of Big Star
frontman Alex Chilton's former group, the Box Tops. (AKA the Funky Monkees, cos
live, in my hearing, they sounded like what they mostly were, a teenbleat cover
band, spazzilizing in hits of the session rat-only Box Tops. Even main
double-shifter Chilton was pro forma-ing his own gravelly,
bluejean-jacketed-soulpunk studio pipes; his preferred range was higher, for better and worse.) #1
Record mainly existed as promotional copies, but (thus?) got great reviews. As did
# 1's even better follow-ups, '74's Radio City and '75's Third/Sister Lovers,
the latter of which couldn't find a legit release until '78, and both of
which pushed Big Star's music and luck further and further. Yet even early on,
their also-funny-named "power pop" was melodic and rough, polished and sweaty,
melodic and twisted. They all continued to radiate in the ears of critsters,
fansters, and musos.
They set the bar too high for most of what gets called power pop.
(Unsurprisingly, considering that generic pee-pee usually boils down to the kind
of creeps who fixate on a [particularly drippy] transitional phase, which then
becomes arrested development at best. Accordingly, their own fansters luv to
whine about "Why isn't there more of their good stuff?" One-hit wonders are
all over the map, get over it. But that would be a contradiction in terms.)
In an afterglow that became an afterlife, they continued to fall, into
truer, bluer Big Stars, making more and more underground/grassroots sense: some
even called them "the Beatles upside down." (As Edd Hurt points out, this notion might have gotten folk-processed from Robert Christgau's 70s Consumer Guide notes on Big Star: "The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards." But later in the 70s, I heard it from a couple of people, who didn't know each each other, or at least I hope not, considering other things they said. I've always pictured Big Star sprouting from an upside down Used bin in the sky, waiting for the next breeze to take their lusty dust for a cruise.)
Upside down in an operational sense as well, because they had found fresh
possibilities in their native Memphis, and themselves, via the perspective of the
Beatles, yes, but also (as Jovanovic points out) of the Kinks, the Zombies,
even the Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin. (Way before Big Star's local studio
consultant Terry Manning engineered Led Zep III, which also has certain
beyond-folk-rock, modes 'n' nodes in common with Big Star, Zepreneurs launched
another para-Star: even though it was an important introductory single and/or
Featured Track, moving from groovy late night FM to nervy Top 40 Morning Drive,
compulsating "Whole Lotta Love" just couldn't be satisfied with any direction
homerun but that of a purposefully self-Led ((Zik Zak Wohnderah)), as equally
possessed Capt. Beefheart would put it. He and Zep had great live acts, and
he even had tour support like they had more of, but Big Star had little act,
tour, or support, in their original setup.)
Meanwhile, back in dream-(and otherwise-)infested Memphis, Big Star
tunneled through a meta-boilism of mutant-soul-stewpotheaded, Amerophile
records, the black vinyl hobo pyramids of kicks-starved, UK art school dropouts, and
found a space to see things from, not just fall into (although that could also
be cool.)
Jovanovic makes it pungently clear that Big Star were late-adolescents,
precariously balanced, but often (almost) equally determined to swing all
moods and rock all bottoms. Yet another Beatley aspect was that they had their own
mix of George Martin, in the person of Ardent Studios co-founder John Fry,
who had had his own mix of Big Star, in the persons of his own teen gang of
brainac techno-autodidacts (One of whom later founded Federal Express.) He passed
the fever along to Big Star, teaching them how to engineer sound, teaching
them from the waves up. So they in turn could become mad monks of the studio,
locked away in the anti-roots cellar, and all of 'em could take it as far as they
could go. (So Big Star's nuclear cluster wasn't just Alex Chilton Lennon and
Chris Bell McCartney lording it over the other two, it was more of a sweaty,
somewhat richochet-prone group head.)
The music can not only sway and jump like a gland funk railroad,
sometimes it flickers, even while chuffing in place, which is enough to keep it from
sounding very much, to me, like somewhat comparable (element-wise) joyrides
of, say, Buffalo Springfield, who they namecheck in R.J.'s book. (Maybe like
some solo stuff Neil Young would do, but not yet.) Even between croons and nice
beats, it can switch and twitch enough to cough up an anti-groove (groove), a
reaction against what's usually expected and required of Suthun boys, and what
we expect and require and show and peddle of ourselves, typically enough, in
and for some quarters.
Thinking here of Radio City, especially, where "Life is White" 's
post-blues blues claims the dumb post- part for toasties, offered as toothpicks of
white noise that (I guess this part is a harmonica) can seem white as bare
wood appearing in the bandsaw of the Home Improvement daddy, flashing back to his
pre-TV incarnation as bachelor cokefiend jailbird: he demonstrates how to
smoothly peel the bark, as chips, pine needles, blood and white powder fly in
every direction, their shadows crossing over his L.L. Bean plaid shirt, and
spots appear on his khaki Dockers, and his studio light life whites on out, into
the black, or at least the next track, which has its own life to do.) And
each album has its own set of curves. To "Break on thoo!" as the Doors would say,
but Freedom Rock can become more stylized than evah, which might be why Edd
Hurt refers to Radio City as "mannerist."
Not to get too (much more) owlish about it: fairly often, even on the
early tracks, they turn gawky self-consciousness into speedy self-awareness, so
the music seems to comment on itself, but dynamically. "Don't lie to me!" they
squawk, over a heavy beat, which, in this context, sounds (deliberately, I
think!) like a child-man stamping his big foot. Although they could also button
their collars, to face down the gorgeous perfidy of "September Gurls," which
became a hit only when covered by the Bangles, many years later. Many more
years later, their futility-anthem, "In The Street," covered by Cheap Trick, was
adopted as theme song for That 70s Show, and re-named "That 70s Song." (Big
Star's own original rendition of "September Gurls" ended up on That 70s'
semi-soundtrack, possibly because the producers were such fans, and also didn't want
to pay more for the Bangles' version.)
Pt. 2 is below:

Big Star Ptart II

Big Star (cont. from above)
Not that things stayed so cute. For instance, it turns out that, for "O
Dana," Big Star's upside down semi-"Lennon" figure, Alex Chilton, built up a
stash of lines actually spoken by his (apparently) unwitting girl friend, Diane
Wall. Lines like, "I'm afraid this is my last life." Reading this, I remember
#1 Record's "The India Song," which was written by Big Star bassist Andy
Hummel, not A.C., but includes, "Get to know her after our trip, her life a part of mine." The song still sounds dreamy, though now I see it lay its cards
on the navel. R.J. also shows how witting people toss stuff into the strange
brew. Eventually, Alex encouraged another girlfriend, Lesa Aldridge, to
perform on several tracks, then erased most of what she'd done, "at a certain point
in his creative process," according to Jovanovich. But she can be heard
sometimes, not quite sealed away, on Third/Sister Lovers (also the repository of "O
Dana"), which still sounds like a house of secrets, even while Jovanovic's
impassively deep focus persuades me that it's (apparently) based on the slowly
dying relationship of Alex and Lesa.
Ron J., T/SL producer Jim Dickinson, and Big Star's Jody Stephens all
hear it as happenings in scuzzy Midtown, around which the river city fluxes and
grinds, loads and unloads. Tore down and tarted up, it's a Southern thing,
everywhere and nowhere. Big tin and today's potatoes. It's the mid-70s I
remember: walking around, outside and inside; pacing, even when doing errands, and
partying again. "Til the end of the day!" Alex, now the center of a nebulous Big
Star, raises a glass, covering the Kinks, his faves, 'til habits seem more
nocturnal than ever, rocking through sleepless stillness, like the old lady in
her chair, in Samuel Beckett's play. Stillness keeps me listening, forgetting to
be depressed.
"Morning comes and sleeping's done, birds sing outside. If demons come while
you're under, I'll be a blue moon in the sky." Either way really, which is
nice (don't come any closer). Jovanovic thinks this is a real nice song, and so
it is, in its way. Voice like a mirror sometimes, brightly so: does R.J. ,
does Chilton, really buy the A.C. quote re "Thank You Friends" being so sincere.
Maybe it is, but sincerely what? Look over here, please.
A couple of gutty, blutty, sometimes almost Hendrixan live sets, with
Alex's guitar perpedicular to that lilting, tilting voice (too confident by
'alf, in some later solo, low-dimensional/-campy gigs), and now leading a new
bassist, John Lightman, and original drummer-singer-songwriter Jody Stephens: on
Ryko's Big Star Live, and the rehearsal tapes-half of Norton's Nobody Can
Dance. (When they finally get out to the stage, sound goes awobble, maybe for them
too: R.J. says earlier lineups had a knack for that.) Then, after a couple of
decades of going solo, Chilton suddenly agreed to a Big Star "reunion"
performance, again with Jody Stephens, and new recruits Jon Auer and Ken
Stringfellow, guitarist and bassist, respectively, of the Posies. On Zoo's Columbia,
Live At Missouri University 4/25/93, there no bad dogs, even on songs from
Third/Sister Lovers, but also missing is its (and previous albums') consistent
commitment to expressive detail. About (a scattered) 50-60% of the set kinda works
anyway, but the other half's just high-generic, early-70s-associated Classic
Rock, suitable for sweatin' to the oldies "The Ballad of El Goodo" was once
poignantly self-assertive, and even (gasp!) personally responsible. ("You can
just say no, " Chilton advised Nancy Reagan in '72.) On Columbia, it's more
like Mott The Hoople's wet-hanky-waving "Ballad Of Mott." Stringfellow's bass
lumbers all over the place. Big Star lite 'n' heavvy too.
And now! A mere twelve years later, Chilton's Columbia crew bring us a
studio album of all-new tracks, In Space, where lightweight-to-high-generic
qualities seem deliberate, and sometimes witty, like they're saying, "Hello,
fellow collectors! We're influenced by Big Star!" Pleasantly hooky, tap-along,
sing-along, ho-hum-along ballads currently reside in the McCartneyesque portion of
our programme. But my fave raves are more like chillin' Chilton's better solo
joints. The veddy classical "Aria Largo" gets tortured by the twang of an
electric guitar, one (faithful!) note at a time. (I checked it vs.
pre-transcribed, chamber orig.)"Love Revolution" sounds like a longhaired Carolina beach
band covering Archie Bell and the Drells' "Tighten Up," which is surely a signal
to the shade of Big Star's tightly-wired,increasingly cracked,
upside-down-semi "McCartney," Chris Bell, who did want a Love Revolution, in the name of
Jesus!. Seeking to drive (incompetent) money changers and other bugs and swine
from the temple, and the program! For, as previously mentioned, Chris and the
other original Stars were trained in engineering by Big Star studio
mentor/founder John Fry, but Chris was the one who obsessively tinkered for years on the
same set of solo tracks, as he would have on some Big Star tracks, if he
hadn't wrung himself out of the group. (And do the tighten up, ma blue-eyed boy,
like when young A.C. was but the frustrated clapper 'ttached to Bell Records'
own Box Tops.)
This alluvial- plain-as-thee-Memphis-on-yr.-phizz bell of allusion is
closely observed by the guy behind the shades and the finally-getting-creepy,
fake British accent, who's "Hung Up With Summer." When the sun goes down, "Do
You Wanna Make It" conjures a big fat drunk chick, doing the bump with/to those
elegant Kinks. Yes, baby's got bass, and there's a Big Star tattooed on it.
Once again, Big Star shine where the sun don't shine. ('Cause after all, they're
stars of the underground!)(Update: ever the gentleman, Mr. Chilton insisted
on keeping a blind date with a lady called Katrina, down in New Orleans. He
almost became a star under the underground, but ended up settling for the
Astrodome. (Poor bastard. I don't really know what I'd do.) Now recuperating in "a
place he refuses to name," behind a wall of rumors, his usual home away from
home, at least. Hopefully not too far for A.C. and his Nola to make up, without
breaking up; there's been too much of that already.)(Updownsidedate:Get back,
Rita's rival!)(Poppermostpostdate:Wherever he is, somebody tell him Big
Star's tourette has been rescheduled for December. That's '05, Alex. I think.) For
a more concentrated hit of Big Star, book and band, see Edd Hurt's trenchant
investigation:
https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/article/13012262/mod-lang

Fried Ice Cream IS a Reality

1. Listening to "Lunchmeataphobia" off One Nation Under a Groove on my iPod while doing late-night grocery shopping: why, exactly, is George Clinton so upset about the existence of fried ice cream? Think about all the nasty stuff he'd sung about before now: peeing on and being peed on; a woman so funky that her very odor makes the air complain; selling one's soul to the devil; the ritual murder of gold-laying geese...and he's worried about fried ice cream? (Actually, "the fear of being eaten by a sandwich" kind of sums up all of P.Funk past and present. Not sure how though. A koan for me today.)

2. Dammit, but Maroon 5 rocks harder than you ever thought they could on the new live album. That's just unfair.

3. This year I believe I will have exactly almost no English language albums on my album list. It will be just about all Mexico, Brazil, India, and maybe some Africa. Oh and country, which somehow doesn't count, and hip-hop maybe. And jazz. Super Furry Animals I liked too, and Jaguar Wright. Oh snap that's 58 records already.

4. Finally hearing the latest reissue of "Odessey and Oracle". Wow.

5. My son asked me a few weeks ago if I was the best music critic in the world. I said I was twelfth or thirteenth. Tonight, he says "Dad, maybe you're only like the ninety-eighth best critic." He's a nice kid, but damn. Screw that, I'm 13th by my count.

Then There Is (Butt Moe Is Less)

Well now, Mom, Dad, some of you kiddies too, y'all know how a Stone Mountain-high billboard promoting the Allman Brothers Band's upcoming Hooterville show should read: "RETURN of the vanguard '70s Southern Rock, polyrhythmic, solar-systemic, all-tyme blues-tattooed-jazz-jam stars, eating peaches, 'shrooms and doom for breakfast and lunch too! Death-dogged dawgs, still death-defying, yet sometimes own-breath-they-frying Kings Of the Road for 35 years!" But ne'mind, Clementine: rat now, in Indian Summer '05, I yam floating through an '03 visitation of "Mountain Jam," which peacefully and peachfully loops me back through pre-Legendary days in Tuscaloosa, where I sat on a dusty-carpeted, hardwood floor with some of these guys, friends of a friend. We pointed at and jabbered about information found on the back of album covers. They were really into Mongo Santamaria, who made what was still called Afro-Cuban music. He employed (as players, and sometimes also as arrangers and composers) up-and-coming progressos like Chick Corea. (Results tended to be more fun than, say, listening past Herbie Mann's flutings, with an ear stretching toward Larry Coryell and/or Sonny Sharrock, buzzing down in the mix, but I think we did some of that too.) John Coltrane had covered Mongo's "Afro Blue," which led ABBabies from one kind of jazz to another. (Or vice versa. Really was a while back.) In late 1970 or early '71, they came back to play, in the auditorium of Morgan Hall, home of the University of Alabama's English Department. It was a setting in gray, quaint contrast to the lurid musical Godzillathon onstage. In early 1972, when, for various reasons (like Vietnam), the world seemed as gray and mottled as the pavement that had just claimed Duane, the surviving ABB returned to Tuscaloosa, unveiling the elegiac "Les Brers In A Minor," which was as bold and eloquent as any other moment spent with (all) such spirits. 1973: Once again in T-town, when the Crimson Tide was at its peak (and the war was going from mainly ground to primarily air, and backroom), the Brother hoodz seemed most appropriately viewed through the white line fever-visions of "Ramblin' Man." Of a late night appearance at Charlotte's mad '74 (Watergate Summer) Speedway mudfest, The International Carolina Jam (AKA August Jam, this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Jam) I wrote, " Their sound's the air and everything in it." And, "I look straight up. The night sky winks." (Like sorry, but it's true.) Meanwhile, back in '03, the "Jam" is still revolving/ evolving, and, while listening to the disc of it in '05, I taste traces of jazzy goodies from the crispy late 60s/early 70s cusp: Mongo's version of "Watermelon Man," Wes Montgomery's "Bumpin' On Sunset," perhaps War's "Low Rider," surely the sleight return of Jimi's "Third Stone From The Sun," near the end, but not before Gregg's Hammond B-3 almost gives it up for "Boogaloo Down Broadway," by The Fantastic Johnny C! Gregg also plays the piano part on "Layla" like he's marching punks into Reform School assembly, but it works, and the guitars re-ignite right on cue. As in recent decades, he sings like Gran'paw 'Metheus in chains, but must have been taking his Geritol, because he puts across every word, and even the tribal "Ahh-ahh, ahh-aah-aah, ahh-ahh, aah-aah" 's on "Black Hearted Woman." Nevertheless, Warren Haynes' singing is a welcome change, especially on his deep blue "Patchwork Quilt," where "tears of sorrow, tears of rage" are, I think, for the late great Allen Woody, the bassist who, along with guitarist Haynes, is given deserved credit for reviving the Allman Brothers Band. (Even if they did eventually have to make their Gov't Mule side-project a full-time job, but that worked out for the best.) Now Warren's back (replacing ditched Dickey), with the ever-budding prodigy, Derek Trucks. (Who, on this '03 set, shapes the fluidity of his main themes with a scraping punctuation.) This is a team that Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock Critics, and ABB nut from the get-go, even prefers to Duane and Dickey! I think that, in this context(in '03, anyway, when playing *together* in ABB was still new to them), obliged to perform much (though certainly not all) the same material that D.& D. defined, Warren and Derek don't project as much of their own musical personality as the Dawgfathers did. (Though the Dereks Trucks Band and Gov't Mule are something else again.) But the ABB's cliches are theirs, while Moe's three-disc live set, Warts And All, Volume 4 is a vigorously excruciating demonstration of every generic jam band cliché, evah. Hoedowns, a touch of reggae, almost-Bo-Diddley beats; nerdy, sub-Dylan-y complaints; sub-Robert Hunter philosophizin'; sub-"Dark Star" guitar detours, no-o-o! Still, I do like "Happy Hour Heros," about wryly rolling your eyes, and getting through a tiresome performance.(PS: 1) This is one of those Instant Live sets, sold Instantly at gig they've just documented, then, if there ever was any excessive crowd noise, as I've occasionally read about other sets, it's been tweaked from this nice-priced Charlotte 03 joint, at least, before it reappeared on ABB-authorized hittinthenote.com; 2)the only time on here when Allman cliches become a problem: when a reflexive slide YEEHHAAWS in midst of "Good Morning Little School Girl" 's sneaky grooves; 3) the proto-ABBabies were also into some country, as would later become more apparent when "Ramblin' Man" actually got played on 70s country radio, the first such crossover I can recall. But even early "Statesboro Blues" suggests early country. (Never heard the original, which might also, perhaps something like MS. Sheiks' delta-blues-to-honky-tonk crossover experiments?)I'm thinking of the vaudeville-ish country on some sides Jimmie Rodgers and Emmett Miller cut with accompaniment by say, Louis Armstrong, and the Dorsey Brothers, I think. Also come to think of it, Dickey did "Blue Yodel #3," wasn't it, with New Orleans horns, on Tribute To Jimmie Rodgers. (And epic glide "Kissimee Kid," with Vassar Clements, The King Of Hillbilly Jazz, it says here [RIP, again], on Dickey scuse me *Richard Betts'* great solo debut, Highway Call.) While in ABB,of course he would often raise a big dipper of blue slide-emulating-country-steel-emulating-Hawaii(hawaya)(Haveya seen that TV commercial, in which "Melissa" winds and calls all round the winding look the actress gives the actor when he finally shows--talk about your country.)

Gone With The Vroom

Gone With The Vroom: A Personal NASCAR Mixtape
by Don Allred
Dear Scarlett, this is Charlotte. Hello, Darlin'. You know you can't win. We
shall have the NASCAR Hall Of Fame, and Atlanta will, well, not burn again. How I do recall the Charlotte Pop
Festival of '74, at yon Speedway, and once again, I am moved to consider what Mr.
Chuck Berry means by "motorvation." (Join with me, girl, and soothe, nay, lose!
your sore loser wounds in the sheer adrenaline of musical celebration.)
1. Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Call Me The Breeze." Once again, the immortal DUKES OF
HAZARD movie soundtrack brings the true tale of young boys sailing through Eden,
long before pesky "environmental" rules grew the Snake!
2. Montgomery Gentry: "Gone." How their draw-wuh-uhl doth weave, even while
landing on the one! Like the "Devil's Third," or "Fifth", or whutever: banned
in the Middle Ages, for being flat and yet not. And they keep going, in
call-and-response, like a good work or gospel song should "Gaw-un, (Gaw-un), Gaww-un?
(Gaw-un)," until the straightaway: she's truly " Gaw-un lak a '59 Cadillac,"
which leads us to
3. Dwight Yoakam: "Long White Cadillac." Dwight sounds so shallow and
desolate, you know he really is that doomed 'billy star, hunkered down under his long
white hat, in the bottomless upholstery back there. In the Blasters'original,
Phil Alvin sounds a mite too soulful and healthy, compared to the glammed-out hokum of
Yoakam, keening and careening by.
4. Bruce Springsteen: "Cadillac Ranch." Isn't this like the Elephants'
Graveyard? But "even Burt Reynolds in that black Trans-Am" is coming back now, as
Boss Hog in The Dukes Of Hazzard, so Eternity
can't be too long. It might be a little short.
5. ZZ Top: "Sharp Dressed Man." Sure, there are a number of Top car songs.
This isn't specifically a car song, lyrics-wise. But what SOUNDS the coolest,
what will not be denied? You know what.
6. Brooks & Dunn: "Red Dirt Road." One of their best. No bells and whistles,
no self-congratulation. No turning back, either. "That summer I turned a
corner in my soul," and the dust hasn't settled yet.
7. Chuck Berry/Duane Allman: "No Money Down." Just in case B& D's guy starts
sounding TOO humble, here we have a fearless believer in gasoline-related
lifeforms, who refuses to unpatriotically lower his expectations. You want to
trade him a Cadillac for his Ford, you say? He'll see and raise you: "And I want
a full Murphy bed/In my back seat/I want short-wave radio/I want TV and a
phone/You know I gotta talk to my Baby/When I'm ridin' alone." Have you ever
heard of such a thing? And even in early-Sixties dollars, "A ten-dollar
deductible/Twenty-dollar notes/Thirty thousand liability" really is "all she wrote." The
song is so cranked up, as written, that Duane Allman, who never added a solo
to his version, didn't even need to. (It's on THE DUANE ALLMAN ANTHOLOGY,
VOLUME ONE.)
8.. Johnny Cash: "The General Lee"/Doug Kershaw And The Hazzard County Boys:
"Ballad of General Lee". If I knew how, I'd take these two tracks from the
re-issued soundtrack of the original DUKES series, and re-mix a "mash-up" (in
the musical, not automotive sense). Johnny moos contendedly in his trailer,
attached in more ways than one to the famous Cadillac-with-its-own name. Doug
Kershaw's Cajun fiddle is a scruffy, gleaming cowbird, forever landing/taking
off. (Oops, you missed the difference; watch it now!)
9. Cowboy Troy: "I Play Chicken With The Train": Kids, don't try this at
home. But using your imagination can be great. He thinks he's a rapper, and so, on
this track, "Big and black, clicketty clack," he chat-chat-chatters away. He
gets to be the chicken AND the train. What a lucky clucker! end#

Summer Samba

"There was this huge poster of a kid squeezing his bloody zit into a drink! We realized it was a new slushy called the 'Bloody Zit!' We had to try it! What's twisted is that you can sprinkle 'Oily Blackheads' and 'Scabs' into the drink! They're like sour candy! Mmmm but at the same time it's kind of gross!"--Skye Sweetnam, from her blog
(spotted by Frank Kogan)

July 27, 2005

the smell of cow shit
wafting over the highway
as I'm driving home

My best friend's cousin is a country singer. Before she went to Nashville and had a couple of minor hits, we used to go see her perform at the county fair, which was held in our hometown. There was country music all over that fair, but it was ultimately a rock and roll thing, because our town had more dirtbags and burnouts and hot dirty girls in baseball shirts than we did real cowboys or cowgirls.

(Many of these awesome gentlemen wanted to beat me up, and some of them tried to catch me without witnesses. I would have skipped the fair, but my family was all into baseball and the fundraising concession was a dunk tank, so sometimes I would have to go work there, taking money and getting into the tank, etc. This meant that I'd often have to negotiate the minefield of getting from one end, where the dunk tank was, to the arcade, without getting my tiny ass kicked. This only changed when my big tough cousin moved up from Mississippi, and changed back when he graduated a year later.)

She had a lovely voice, and still does -- she's a big light of the western-music circuit now, and doing some very good work in that mode. But I was a Clash kid in an Aerosmith town, and so had little appreciation for lovely country voices. Shame. But that's the life, kids.

Maybe it was the fair and the FFA booths there and the hot dirty girls who played softball all summer and had boyfriends with knives and psychosis problems, or maybe it's just when you have to take long drives down rural roads to go see girlfriends...but I guess it's like this. I was at a party at this girl's place (her dad was an assistant principal at the high school, so hands off, which was the opposite of her attitude) and I accidentally cornered her in the barn and she didn't run away, and we looked at each other in the fading light, surrounded by probably literally tons of cow shit. Nothing much happened, but it's a great erotic memory for me.

Man, I need therapy. But I doubt I'm the only one who thinks cow shit is kind of sexy. And THAT, my friends, is what country music is all about.

twilight, as we kiss,
someone plays a mean fiddle
on the radio

July 25, 2005

weeding the garden
kids get bored and run around
then, soon, so do I

July 24, 2005

there's a kind of hush
all over the world and it's
called humidity

July 23, 2005

walking this morning
saw a funky little ghost
talked to her a while

Way Across 110th Street

Special Guest Mentalist---John Wojtowicz(our man in Vienna):
I recently discovered a Nigerian-owned restaurant about a half mile down the street from me, called FEED.

On my first visit there, various patrons glowered at me and the waiter treated me with caution. It's quite likely they thought I was a narc. Among Austrians, Africans have the reputation of being all drug-dealers. In a recent major drug-bust campaign, well over a hundred bars and cafes in Vienna that dealt in cannabis (and generally run by the Yugo mafia and young Turks) were closed down. This in turn meant that the Africans now do proportionally even more of the dealing here (adding cannabis to the white stuff that was already their market niche), esp. since their business is all on the street and therefore wasn't affected by the crackdown. And they don't need a crackdown, they get hassled enough by the cops as it is.

So the waiter was polite but on his guard, until I asked him what music was playing. He came back and said that it was a mix CD with things from Mali, Ivory Coast, Senegal. Since the track in question had that giddyap-giddyap rhythm guitar thing going and also sounded a bit like Youssou N'Dour, I announced to him that it must be from Senegal.

Well I was right, and that broke the ice for the rest of the meal. btw I've found that this is typical when I talk to Africans: they often withold a certain amount of information until you've shown them that you know what you're talking about, and then all is cool.

As I write this, I'm covering the phones & office for an out-of-town colleague who translates a lot of documents for African immigrants. Just about an hour ago, a Nigerian guy dropped off a document and I asked him about other African restaurants in town. He was less than forthcoming until I mentioned one specific neighborhood where I'd been recently--in the 2nd District, not more than a stone's throw from the Ferris wheel that figures in Orson Welles' "The Third Man"--where there's not only an African restaurant and a bar, but a beauty parlor and a late-hours grocery store and probably other joints that escaped my notice. And if you go there on a warm summer evening, Africans are going to & from all of the above and generally just hangin' out. If the Austrians (utter, putrid racists, cela va sans dire) didn't already consider the 2nd District to be a pit, they'd be shitting in their pants at the sight. Anyway, the Nigerian guy told me to give him a call some Saturday night, and he'd take me round to one of the restaurants there.

btw in view of the fact that the 2nd District also has a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood not so far away, when I'm there I start feeling like I'm in Crown Heights or something.

Until a half-hour ago, I was under the impression that among the Africans, the Nigerians are at the top of the heap. Well, with their country being a member of OPEC and high-profile for other reasons, yes, the Nigerians see it that way, but unfortunately, the other Africans do not. Coincidentally, a (Polish!) woman just came by with documents that her husband needs translated: he's from Burkina Faso, and she tells me that the people there and in other countries (Ivory, Mali, etc.) don't particularly like the Nigerians, who have a reputation for crooked business dealings. The joke in Burkina Faso is that if you buy a car in Nigeria, it'll break down even before you get to the border, even if you had a mechanic check it beforehand! Similarly, the Africans in Austria are bugged because they see the Nigerian drug-dealers are creating a bad reputation for the rest of them--esp, since the Austrians are incapable of making distinctions between different African countries and/or peoples.

So back to FEED: The first time I ordered beef with black-eyed peas and fried plantain. On my second visit I had fish with chopped spinach & okra and a mound of manioc and here's the revelation: substitute a heap o' rice for the manioc and change the spices a wee bit, and this is EXACTLY the kind of stuff that my GF from Oakland used to make for herself all the time. For the first time since I left the West Coast, I was nostalgic for my ex's cooking!

When I'm talking with the Africans about their food, I always point out the similarities between that and Southern and Caribbean cooking--esp. since they're almost never aware of this and they seem to appreciate hearing it.

But regardless of how relaxed things get when I talk to the guys who run FEED, I still haven't been seated in the big room, which is an all-Black domain. In fact, in each visit, until I've struck up a conversation with the people there, when I walk by I can_just_feel_Major Attitude being projected outward from the big room. In any case I won't be living in that neighborhood much longer, and will probably soon investigate the joints in the 2nd District.

greetings, bon appetit, etc.,
john
((also see John's previous Presenting "The Uncanny"(Andy's Robot Mix), in the 08/2004 archive))

"My best friend the bass player had to move away in our Senior Year, right before Christmas. His dad got transferred. In this case because of the war, indirectly. But the next fall, I already had enough of that so-called University, I took off during Homecoming. We got drunk and woke up walking around downtown Sunday. Like the song, except it was empty, which was an improvement on where I'd just come from. But mainly I kept thinking, this is where JFK bought it. Down here in Houston."
He was muttering, but I'd heard him right. What a punchline. Then
"Haaa you're serious! It was *Dallas* where he was shot! And you wanna transfer to Harvard!!"
He winced, but it seemed habitual, and whatever he'd been staring at was gone, or the stare was, anyway.

Upon Listening To Funeral Nation's After The Battle


1

Blood red hordes
congregating
on the shores of
Lake Michigan
searching
craving
for a trio
to deliver them
from piety
and dad


2

Sign Of Baphomet
and other titles
just as
dear
passing thru the hands
of shift
workers
from magical
lands
they pause
to inspect
before
boxing
brave soldiers
all
Rough Trade
Echo
New Rose
Plastic Head
Cargo
Modern Invasion
Rock City
Semaphore
Contempo
Krone Music
House Of Kicks
Bona
Fucker Rec.
Spinefarm
sending always
sending
the devil
to open hearts

The rain is too hard. The rain is too soft. The rain is too cold. The rain is too darn hot. The rain is too close. The rain is too country. The rain is ridin' the rails. The rain is pushing the envelope. The rain is signed sealed delivered to your door.The rain's candy, and it's got blue eyes, and I can't stand it no more. Not since I saw you walkin' in it. Oh. I can stand a little. A little more. It seems. I wish I couldn't stand that. I'll just stand here and wear away. And ware away (I'm a ho like you). And 'ware away (a three-alarmist you knew that). Cos it's raining in my heart. So steady it's a prop. So steady I just wish it would rain. And wash my rain away. I know we need it.

Does this thing even work anymore?

Richard Barrett and the 'modernists':

Can't believe I missed this concert but viewing that review over morning coffee, I do not understand this new work as a reconfiguration of the orchestra along a 'marxist' line - instead I see those string shapes coming from his background as an improvisor (something that the reviewer does not seen to care for - it isn't mentioned in his first para, unlike his work in electronics), and that music's insistence on non-hierarchical movement; but to even quote Stalin with respect to this work, one of the few from that corner of the musical landscape that even tries to say anything with respect to the war (doesn't sound like it goes beyond the title but still it seems to wash over the work in a way in which its politics cannot be merely brushed aside) as well as his characterization of Barrett as hard modernist living a fantasy in a postmodernist time just leaves a vile taste.

But its all here: 'amplified harps', 'microtonal', theatre in those 'bones...if its anything as good as his classic 'opening of the mouth' disc then this record will be REWARDED with a pazz and jop top 10, whatever the year a record of this happens to be released in.

classical music and the nerdy people ( jason gross handing out the awards):

i The debate as to what to do with classical er, rages on, with articles just like this, written with JUST this kind of tone and EVERY single year. Always grudging in its acceptance of pop cult seen here in an inevitable, back door dissing of it but with no talk as to why it seems to work (its complexities), and absolutely no mention of hip-hop or dance. Additionally, this guy is gonna pretend that Varese (never mind Stockhausen) ever existed or that classical indies that provide an outlet for this unacknowledged music already do the work, while at the same time criticising pop crossover without examining his proposed 'sophisticated fusion' alternative, or what that means when being critical of any attempts at same.

ii the rise of atonality in the early 1900s must've felt as if the world had turned upside down - the negative reaction leading to a period of time where readjustment had to be taken by its listeners, but it wasn't only that: the revival of improvisation (through jazz), coupled with newer instruments that could harness microtones, as well as the rise of newer technologies that could play timbral dance plus the rise of cage-ian orthodoxy - the bogeyman - from now on we could listen to anything (even 'silence') and it was music; no wonder many didn't bother, some went backwards to a time when it was all about pitch relationships and not forward, where the orchestra was being effectively dismantled - less grandiose symphonies - toward the smaller sized ensemble, with the string quartet's survival. The privileging of the acoustic over the electric and the electronic - newer ways to play - isn't good enough. The beatles as classical composers sounds ok as another angle , interesting but ultimately inaccurate, as both were hand-in-hand with each other, 'tis also why 'school of rock' can't be taken entirely seriously as a characterization of classical but it serves the need of its mainstream wing.

iii oh wait, I should talk about records here - Michael von Biel's disc on edition RZ is a case in point: compositions from the early 60s, recorded for radio and not released till last year, and no wonder: there's an electronic-only track, cpl of quartets (but with the emphasis on effect), one quintet but its the last track that I return to. Its an odd comp for small-sized tuba ensemble with electric guitar, tapes and an amplified barbecue grill: there's an odd air to the recording (made in ’68) - its forward looking: smashing the ensemble, no obv hierarchy, and the use of amplification as the bogeyman; but also backward: the tuba plays tonal through-and-through, with some quotation (?!). Its not about good or bad, and I'll change my mind from listen-to-listen, from second-to-second. Broadcast round psychedelia’s dawn it fits the time, and then doesn't. Its a last hurrah before classical’s indiefication. But yeah, buy it for that one - prob rocks harder than rock, might rock harder than school (depends whether you had a teacher or friends you'll remember) but it def rocks harder than 'school of rock' (anything with Jack Black in it can't be v gd d00d!).

Nominees For Best Single On Billboard's Hot 50 Singles Five Years Ago That I Can't Remember Ever Hearing:

Lonestar, "Amazed"
(a country band hit no. 1?!)
Joe, "I Wanna Know"
(Mario Winans doesn't)
Aaliyah, "I Don't Wanna"
(neither does Aaliyah)
Toby Keith, "How Do You Like Me Now?!"
(not much!!)
Donell Jones, "U Know What's Up"
(I don't even know who U R)

winner: Lonestar. Unless there's some fuck-up with the web-page and this didn't really hit number one, I have to assume this is one bananas ballad.


Nominees For Best Single On Billboard's Hot 50 Singles Ten Years Ago That I Can't Remember Ever Hearing:

K-Ci Hailey, "If You Think You're Lonely Now"
(ooh, sounds bitter!)
Subway feat. 702, "This Lil' Game We Play"
(yeah, no more games!)
20 Fingers feat. Gillette, "Short Dick Man"
(swear to god, never heard it)
Jon Secada, "Mental Picture"
(I bet this is some dirty hokum)
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony feat. Eazy-E "Foe the Love Of $"
(Eazy! $! Foe real!)

Winner: In a startling upset, Gillette's infamous anthem loses to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony cuz I keep meaning to buy Eazy-Duz-It but I never see it anywhere.


Nominees For Best Single On Billboard's Hot 50 Singles Fifteen Years Ago That I Can't Remember Ever Hearing:

Chicago, "What Kind Of Man I Would Be?"
(if I know my a.c. history, somebody not named Peter Cetera)
Whitesnake, "The Deeper The Love"
(the mind boggles)
Expose, "Tell Me Why"
(all the goofy older music lovers I know go ape for Expose. I only know "Point Of No Return" and I don't really get it)
Joan Jett, "Dirty Deeds"
(AC/DC cover?!?!?!)
The Brat Pack, "You're The Only Woman"
(I know this can't be Emilio et al, but I remain curious)

Winner: Joan Jett. Even if it's not AC/DC it's about dirty deeds and it's by Joan Jett. How come I know more pop hits from 1990 than 2000? I really had to stretch for five interesting unheards. Was I listening to the radio that much as a kid, or is that I've had more time to catch things after the fact? Probably both.

From my Nashville Scene Country Music Ballot:*(clarification/alibi added, even if you have read this on here before)*
The Year In Country started off great, racing chariots in Heaven with Gretchen Wilson. But somehow, my perspective only crystallized through a (nervously well-scrubbed)shotglass darkly, the everyday's-a-morning-after, Advil blues of Darryl Worley's November release, DARRYL WORLEY.
When the eponymous is their fourth release, you know it's serious. I expected the worst. No small expectation of the man who had already given us the tearjerking "I Miss My Friend" (driving videobabe/audience-ID-figure to well-mimed breakdown!). And then low-topped himself with the brainjerking "Have You Forgotten," which equated qualms about invading Iraq with forgetting about 9/11, and with "don't worry 'bout Bin Laden," AKA Saddam Hussein, o course.
But on DW, "Wake Up America" was the only really preachy number, and it busted men in uniform, cops who are "part of the infection" of drugs.(Could he even be thinking that The War On Drugs is itself part of the problem, as waged, anyway? He doesn't say he doesn't mean that. Allowing implications, associations in, and not at the push of a button, necessarily? Rather thah hitting us over the head with his latest "point"?)
Struggling with an "Awful Beautiful Life" was about as close as he came to the usual "Gosh! But on the other hand!" balancing act of most contemporary country. It's just about all unadorned as "I Love Her, She Hates Me"(ergo,"I drink": a guy's trying to talk some sense into his buddy, who shuts him up by spelling it out). "If Something Should Happen," "Work And Worry," yadda-yadda, yet the titles don't tell it all. The details of words and music keep looking around, stubborn and energetic as they are morose and lucid. Fatalistic, but antsy. You know, like maybe there's a war on or something. And the election's gonna turn out kinda weird too, no matter who wins.
So maybe I'm just projecting, or wistful-thinking ("*Now* you get it, my Red State homey!") Or maybe alienation is the craze. But I look around too, and dang if even the usually hovering mist-mother Alison Krauss isn't "Restless,"and just can't be satisfied, even with standing by Brad Paisley and watching the young widow drink herself to death, over the grave of her husband, in "Whiskey Lullaby." So: hotter than ever, that's the expected video-Allison, but also: wobbling down the sidewalk and into traffic? That's what she calls "Restless"? What George W. and Music Row mean by "off-message," I thought, but CMT's not exactly Aljazzheera All The Time, is it??
LeeAnn Womack's "I May Hate Myself In The Morning (But I'm Gonna Love You Tonight)" may seem, from a distance, like a *traditionally* fatalistic (obligatory self-torturing) cheatin' song. But really it's more of a fornicatin' twist on her inspirational "I Hope You Dance," more about what she hopes will happen, in the very near future, than about tomorrow's so-done deal.
And young Julie Roberts, despite those federally-mandated Chastity courses, well, kids still say the darndest things. She's already "picked up a stranger, found comfort in danger, and I thought about you, the whole time we were GITTINITONN." What a mouth! Speaking of which, "It tastes like yesterday." But mebbe just because she "fell asleep without brushing my teeth."
Yet however moody the brew, there's still a sense of accountability, and not just for your enemies (that's how you know we're not really in Bush Country, not quite yet). Mindy Smith's "Jesus Is Waiting" with a no-anesthetic slide guitar, and Josh Turner's way of (wayward others, especially females, not him) dealing with that "Long Black Train" is to stay on-track, and get beamed up into your own pre-Rapture. (Well, that's what happens in the video! Music videos are becoming like the Schofield Bible, in which the commentary is in the same font as the Word. Also, DVDs have been outselling CDs, dowh here in Country Country, anyway) Blaine Larsen's debut, "How Do You Get That Lonely," has us travelling in various, maybe *all* the cars, as if one wasn't bad enough, when you're going to the graveside of a teen suicide. Asked by an interviewer if he weren't scared to start out this way, he replied, "You got to step out on that ledge." So Alan Jackson does, singing "Monday Morning Church," from the scorched "I" of a guy whose wife has died. It's the deepest, riskiest (so vulnerable to tricks of the trade) track I've ever heard from him. Finally, he earns his humility.
But accountability can be fun, as Prince of Nostalgia Kenny Chesney proves, even while carpe per diem a la LeeAnn! Yeah, he's still lookin' fwd to lookin' back, but tonight "The Good Stuff" is you, darlin', as he positively scoffs at the notion that you're "Anything But Mine." Time to call due, cos he's been sensitive a long long time, and no time for this "I surrender to the future" moanin' like his beach friend, Jimmy Buffet Table.(Yeah, havin' your tax cuts made permanent's gone be hard, Jim. But suck it up and go.)JB will fight no more forever, but KC will beat off fiercely to this next re-collection forever ever. Memories are made of this too, turns out. Down there on St. John's, could he have been reading some Hemingway besides THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA? Na.
And St.Toby's Christmas offering is a flat-out, no-moods(well, the woman involved has a bad moment, yknow how that goes, but), no-dues, post-cheatin',yet clearer-than-LeeAnn's--*adultery* song. Or is even that not whut whut? "There's things down here the Devil Himself wouldn't do,"TK cautions/advertises, but it all "Stays In Mexico." Stay! Good Devil! Another happy tale of furrin parts, like "The Angry American" and "The Taliban Song."(This 'un might've been inspired by psychologist Philip Zimbardo's TV interview, in which he referred to the "Carnival Effect" of perfect isolation at Abu Ghraib.) Shockin' Y'all indeed! Yet clearly still in country, or Country; that's what's really shockin'. Or anyway shocked. It's not just him, it's ever' thing.
Like Montgomery Gentry's album of hooraw rehab campfires, 'til back in the saddle with the title track, "You Do Your Thing," as in "You do your thing, I do my thing, and though they're not the same, it's beautiful," or whatever it said on that early 70s child's bedroom and/or halfway house poster. Now it's a very dark joke which seems to enclose an even darker jest in the gist: Here I go, no matter what you say, in fact, partly because of what you say, on another great screw-your-courage-to-the-sticking-point and quite possibly doom-your/my-thing (as even Toby's "American Soldier" video incl. Civil War, WWI, and more modern uniforms, with peace symbols on helmets like chalk on rust).
Doom's tapped and cut open, musical machines roll in and out of the Drive-By Truckers' DIRTY SOUTH. Cut out the mediocre median, and eerie ballads are very suddenly replaced by overdrive, but that's very Southern, and only DBT could get away with such an instigated-by-restless-pause-buttoned-meee, in extended parody of the 90s Altoonative slow-low-to-fast-loud shtick. They still need to write their story-songs about race (without editorializing, this time). And they need to get their sense of humor back. Especially if it helps in editing out some of the whiny crap before I have to.
Yet the Truckers, and all the above, are moment farmers, claiming and maiming all the non-nerf turf they can surf, rat now, or close enough. Like Eddie Hinton, Mississippi Sheiks, and Charlie Burnham x Blood Ulmer's 52nd St. Blues project. Not so much standin' on the verge of gettin' it on, but gettin' it on while standin' on the verge, just like Julie Roberts.(And old [but still alive, unlike Eddie and the Sheiks] George Strait, Darryl W.'s ideel, Ah bet.) Like Cyndi Boste, once captioned "cowgirl of the outback" for my "Alias In Wonderland" Voice roundup. On SCRAMBLED EGGS, she's still got those deep dark loamy tones, bare-bulb words, and now she's 'coompanied by clarion, fingerpicking mantras. Not too far from the extended, gentle gentile drrraaawwwwlllll of Big and Rich, who are themselves children of Richard and Linda Thompson's Anglo, 'ang on Sufi invocation, meditation, invitation, to "lose my mind and dance forever, lose my mind and dance forever, turn my world around." A steady circle dance, which, at its mirrored heart, is not too far from what wishful sinfuls before me called a "whirling dervish." Not too far. If the Lord's willin', and the creek don't rise too fast. (Despite dispensing blessings on self-pity and suicide*, vicariously cathartic [or anyway splashy!] self-gratification is Big times Rich's gift to the world, as the well-intentioned "Holy Water" sacrifices itself to prove. You can imagine what I think of Sawyer Brown and the supernaturally sacred steel guitar of Robert Randolph, at the "Mission Temple Fireworks Stand," handling rockets like they was snakes: "These things are made in China, so it's easy to see, how a man who worships Buddha ain't got no guarantee.")*Since I brought it up: In the climatic track, "Live This Life"("I'll live this life until this life won't let me live here anymore," goes the chorus), they venture downtown, and meet a man on the street who says his name is Jesus;"Thought he was crazy til I watched him heal a blind man." Later, they meet a boy on a bridge, who is "ready to go meet Jesus." They assure him, "He's a friend of mine, met him just last night, and it's alright, yeah." So empathy and the quest (incl. for drama) may take one or more too far, but they kinda mentioned that, on the previous "Real World," in which a desperately fantasizing kid keeps sinking back into the grubby daylight.(Like a considerably less exuberant version of Daniel Johnston's "Rock Star," with dubbed-in arena zombies cheering both ladverses on.) With or without a sense of humor, you may well need "uh prohh-zac, uh prohh-zac," or at least a pro. B&R are *two* pros, just in case! Posted by Don Allred

New in town, after staying with friends, I moved into a one-room apartment that a guy sublet to me. Nice guy. We knew some of the same people. He even helped me carry my stuff up the steps, and we had a last chat. As he got his coat on to leave, I noticed something on the floor by the refrigerator. I said, "Hey, what about your radio?" "Ah, keep it, that's okay," he waved as he left. I never saw him again. It had been playing when I visited him the first time, to talk about the sublet; sounded *really* good. What a nice guy!
I would pretty much just come in from work and crash, unless I stopped off at my friends' house or somewhere else and hobnobbed. Or sometimes I would bring somebody to see my new home. Then I would crash. Wasn't much sitting alone and looking around the room. I made sure of that.
But eventually, I realized that somebody else had lived there before the guy I met, and this person had left clothes (way too big for my sublet dude). A flannel shirt, which I wore for years, as a jacket. An actual jacket, of some smooth, shell-like material. It would wrinkle at the inner elbows a little, but never the back, and if I hung it up properly, when I went back to get it (never less than a couple of hours later), it was smooth.
There were also letters. One from his lawyer:"I won't let you ruin my credit." One from a girl:"I love you baby but then this kind of shit pops up. I am so scared."
Some tapes had fallen behind something. Cassettes, not 8-tracks, which was unusual then. One was the Yardbirds. The cover was obviously reproduced from an LP, one I'd never seen before. The Yardbirds, wow. With Beck and Page, their best lineup, I had thought at the time.I'd missed this one, and here we were, way into the 70s. I did have a cassette recorder, of the face-up type, with the little grey mesh screen, like something you could fry an egg on, in between leaving memos for your secretary. I put it on the dresser and played the tape. Beck flashed, then everything wobbled, and I thought it was all about to speed up and break. It didn't, even though I let it quaver through several songs.I never played it again, but still have it. I don't know what happened to the rest of that stuff.

Pazz & Jop Comments(somewhat tweaked, like the Country Ballot comments in prev. post):
Much of HAUNTED WEATHER, the Albert Ayler sampler*, and SMILE are built around/of distressed (and being distressed/messed with by) commonly recognized sonic signifiers. Like everything else (we're all made of sound), but here the signs read me like a screen filling up with tap-tap (just you and me and rain on the roof). HAUNTED WEATHER'S "Sferics" sounds like baby birds, small fry being fried, while singing for supper; also fighting songs, as birdsongs so often are ("the singing fry and fray," as I said more compactly in the review). Fighting songs also in the sense of fighting the songs, resisting and changing/ distressing the aestheticizing of violence, and aestheticizing as violence, as imposition. Both artist and material square off, and do what they gotta do, if each can get the other to do wrong just right. "No wrong notes, if you can justify," is the old jazz alibi, and sometimes it works. "Sferics"(from "atmospherics") is an edited field recording, the air on the air, finely tuned in and selected by its composer-cos-he-justifies-by-providing-the-goods (before everybody went DJ), Alvin Lucier. "Sferics" is re-recontextualized by compiler David Toop, not far away from subway sounds that frame a computer, obligingly doing its impression of gunfire, in a passing arcade. Doors slide open, but sounds from the next track have already leaked in, fooling the Discman's counter or whatever you call it.
Street violence in the midst of a misty walking tour may be re-enacted as part of/the point of the tour, judging by comments gradually accruing (and recollected, recontextualized by what was about to be heard, just after the comments, spoken like brief notes to self). In any case, gunshots are responded to by apocalyptic commentary, almost as rapidfire as the street sounds, yet the reporter's images are florid, suitable for framing. (As are the street sounds, struggling in the setting's echoes).
Not too surprising to read that Arthur Russell took his music everywhere, walking through the city with headphones on, seeing how his latest mixes sounded in different (passing) scenes. He's audibly the young man from the plains, the wide open spaces, keening and rolling his oatey notes like the Midwest-to-Cali (Beach Boys') Wilson brothers.("Rooted"? well everybody's from somewhere and somewhere else, 'specially in suburbia.) Don't wanta be fenced in, but walk long enough and you're sweeping through the city, through the veil of illusion and allusion, with your nice-boy cello, and your get down/ambitious/romantic, yet somehow stoical dance music, that's also being messed with as it comes into existence. Fine, but you know the movie where Woody Allen's marching with his high school band, having to sit down and play his cello, then get up and run to keep up, so he can sit down and play again? Arthur's seen that too. He keeps walking.
Albert Ayler, especially with the hypersensitized (but never overdone) reactions of violinist Michael Samson, keeps finding his way to and through and back to all sorts of recognizable tunes and tunelets and rivets and rivulets. Songs of church and state and work and play. The effect can prefigure Jimi's revisions of "The Star-Spangled Banner," with the exhilaration, but not the violence, of the Woodstock performance, and the sweet yearning, but not the peacefulness, of the RAINBOW BRIDGE version. Albert's distressed gospel songs, etc., are already distressed by the times; he's just making us A Coat Of Many Colors, like in the Bible, and like Dolly Parton's poverty-fighting momma did, way back in Butcher Holler.
But one false move and you might as well be in, I dunno, Grant Wood's "American Gothic," or some other cliche, like "End Of The Trail," the yardsale kitsch painting of the poor ol' Injun, who found a "new" homelessness on the range, on the cover of the Beach Boys' SURF'S UP (wow, heavy recontext). Brian Wilson, leader of that "psychedelic barber shop quartet" Jimi derided, finally finishes what he started to do in the 60s: turning over his personal-and/is-political heritage of fantasy, reality and all (or a lot; his lot, of) dualities, stuck together inextricably with cliches (and karma, self-appointed "Buddhist Bubblegum"shoe Arthur might point out). The significance of Brian's worldview is that he has one! He's the old boy in the bubble, who just keeps rolling along, peering out from the crowd of voices, and telling them and us what he sees. "Columnated ruins domino!" Ruins can do that, if you find the pattern, and the way to play! He wants those playgrounds, even those barnyards, and next time he might even take off his shoes or his hat (sure). And by George he wants those wide open spaces too; he is them. But "timely hello welcomes the time for a change. Lost and found you will remain there. You'll find a meadow filled with rain there. I'll give you a home on the range." Who will? "Who ran the iron horse?" You did! You will! You are! You and the voices, rolling like tumbleweeds of sh-a-a-key nerves, on a mission and a ghost town and a jones town too. Plymouth "rock, rock, rock and roll oh-oh-oh-ver."
So. Iron Horse say surf's up when it's not down, and it's not just the Daddyocracy that's to blame, but to credit, for picking up the pieces of his Daddy's and child-Daddy B.'s own messes. "I wanna be around, to pick up the pieces," workshop's on that, tight as a cartoon. He also loves his vej-tables. And by now must have heard the old one about Brian himself being a favorite vej. That's more of the crap he has to work through and with, getting informed listeners working their own fields and mounds of Brian-associations. Did I mention heritage, his lot, and k-k-karma? "Sleep a lot, eat a lot, brush 'em like crazy." No cello looms, not yet; still, better "run a lot, do a lot, never be lazy." But also,"I threw away my candy bar and I ate the wrapper." Can't even do junk food right! Worse, "And when they told me what I did," at least they pointed it out,"I burst into laughter." A long way from the poor kid who "tried to kick the ball but my tenny flew right off. I'm red as a beet 'cause I'm so embarr, assed," and already thinking up that vej joke? On and on, rolling up in more and more "rock and roll over" grub revelations, recycled junk, at least. "Fire" is now titled "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"? Perfect (enough to win itself a Grammy, reports Time Traveler), ya dumb Mick who has now relocated to the Midwest (still an Illinois resident, I think). Let's not forget the Timothy Leary way of nearness to that title, either.("Is it hot as hell in here, or is it just me?" And "Grand Coulee/Coolie workin' on the railroad," yow, there's a lingering drive-by.)
But I'm also convinced that he's met a real live girl (not just a "Wonderful" bubble-nymphet projection of his own "good" side), in "Good Vibrations." "I-I bet I know what she's like." Perception, ree-cognition, ignition, somewhat based on (artful, or otherwise earned-seeming, yet dicey) projection as means, not ends. And so he needed his "Wonderful," just as he needed to accept, in some aesthecized fashion, the reality of his "Heroes And Villains." containing/maintaining the hostage/songbird-in-a-gilded-cage/muse figure Margarita, whose memory is "still dancing" in the remix of the memory-myth of "the bullets that brought her down." And he needs to keep going back to another (despoiled, yet equally persistent) memory-myth, wrapped right 'round the verdant blues map of "Blue Hawaii," mainlanders, pirates, hula dancers and all. So finally he could be ready to Smile (not specifically a happy or smiley smile, not now). Going out with (real enough, familiar and new enough) Miss GV. Who may be AKA Miss Alice D, age 25: "I don't know where but she sends me there." Or maybe she's an agent of the muse, although that's not necessarily any more reliable, judging by his track record. But in any case, they do go out, and go out rockin', finally (ain't you glad), including the cello (reincarnation of Arthur's original-"GV" wakeup call?) And the rest of the orchestra follows along, "back through the op'ra glass you see the pit and the pendulum drawn. Columnated ruins domino!" Oh, waiter, checkmate! (And Happy Valentine's Day--T.Traveler)
* I listed Albert's entry as"HOLY GHOST sampler," after being told it was okay to cite the single-disc promo. But P&J dropped "sampler." I'm sure the box is very nice too.