Saturday, September 02, 2006

THIRSTY EAR FESTIVAL: FRIDAY NIGHT

Once again the annual Thirsty Ear Festival kicked off at Eaves Movie Ranch with a night of New Mexico music with an admission cost of $1 plus two cans of food.

I got there too late for the Vigil Family set, which I regret. I've said for years that the festival should incorporate more homegrown Hispanic music. (I'm still hoping for a big Al Hurricane set some year)

Unfortunately for Alex Maryol, the Rain Gods decided to do their thing during his set. Brought back not too distant memories of Frogfest . I wimped out and hid out in the KSFR tent. I know the rains have been a blessing this summer. The wildflowers are nice and it's great that the pinon trees aren't all dying. I was afraid that what's let of our forests were going to burn down this year and that the city would be regulating showers. But, Christ, it's been Hell for outdoor music in Santa Fe the past few weeks.

But the rains subsided for Chipper Thompson & The Feast. And that was extremely fortunate. Chip and gang were on fire. I've heard him with various musical backup through the years. (I'll never forget the magical/mystical rendition Chipper and Mason Brown did of "Oh Death" at one of the early Thirsty Ear Festivals. This was before O Brother Where Art Thou and thusbefore everyone and his duck was doing the song. It also was just shortly after Chipper's wife died.)

But Friday was the first time I'd seen Chipper with a full-blown electric rock 'n' roll band. Some of his regular cronys are in the group: Kim Treiber, playing bass and Don Richmond on fiddle and a bunch of other instruments. Plus he had another guitarist, a keyboard player (who also is a fne background vocalist) and drums.

The electric arrangements do real justice to Chipper's backwood stomps. They played the songs that first made me love Chipper's music -- "If I'm To Blame" and "Rainwater Bottle." Robin the keyboard player amazed and delighted with her background vocals on "Will You Let Me Stay With You?" And "Steel Vines" just plained rocked.

Chipper, rightfully, mainly does originals. But the few covers he did were inspired. There was a flawless "All Things Must Pass" (somewhere in the Universe, George Harrison was smiling) and a fun run through of Del Shannon's "Runaway." (Chipper's voice hit nearly all the high notes during the "wah wah wah wah wonder" refrain.)

But best of all was the Tex Mex version of the bluegrass classic "Rank Strangers." Chipper introduced the song talking about the plight of Mexican immigrants. The arrangement reminded me of The Mekons' Fear and Whiskey period. The Feast version of this song would make Jon Langford extremely jealous.

First full day of the festival is only hours away ...

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Laurell Reynolds substituted for me on The SF Opry Tonight so I could go to the Thirsty Ear Festival.

She e-mailed me her playlist:

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens & The Buckaroos
BJ Thomas-Raindrops Keep Fallin On My Head
Elvis Presley-Don't Cry Daddy
Jerry Reed-Guitar Man
Stephen Terrell-Solar Broken Home
Neil Young-Here We Are In the Years
-Lookin For a Leader
Jannette & Joe Carter-Through the Eyes Of an Eagle
John Denver-The Eagle and the Hawk

Merle Haggard-I'm Gonna Break Every Heart I Can
Roseanne Cash-Lovin Him Was Easier...
Hank Williams-Men With Broken Hearts
Freakwater-Smokin'Daddy
Tarnation-Yellow Birds
Eleni Mandell-Don't Touch Me
Hazard County Girls-Knoxville Boy
Neko Case-Set Out Runnin'

Johnny Cash-You Wild Colorado
John Prine-Some Humans Ain't Human
Billy Joe Shaver-Live Forever
Iron & Wine-Naked As We Came
Tom Rush-No Regrets
Linda Ronstadt-Go Away From My Window

Pete Seeger-Black Is the Color
Ian Campbell Folk Group-Liverpool Lullaby
Cordelia's Dad-Three Babes
Clarence 'Tom' Ashley-Coo Coo Bird
Fred Cockerham-Little Maggie
Dirk Powell-The Keys To the Kingdom
Lizzie Miles-I Hate A Man Like You
Sippie Wallace-I'm A Mighty Tight Woman
CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Friday, September 01, 2006

THEY FIRED THE DEAN!

Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics has been fired by the evil corporate Huns at The Village Voice. He had been at the paper for 30 some years.

Writes Christgau:

We both believed I had won myself some kind of niche as gray
eminence. So I was surprised Tuesday when I was among the eight Voice employees (five editorial, three art) who were instructed to bring their union reps to a meeting with upper management today. But I certainly wasn't shocked--my approach to music coverage has neverbeen much like that of the New Times papers.


Read more HERE and HERE.

NASCAR CANDIDATES


Longshot, dark horse, maverick Republican Congressional candidate Ron Dolin might face an uphill battle in his quest to unseat popular Democrat Tom Udall. And true, his blunt and often non-party-line talk about the issues has resulted in the state GOP establishment practically disowning him.

But Dolin continues to send the most clever and enjoyable press releases of the 2006 campaign.

This morning Dolin e-mailed his modest proposal for campaign finance reform:


The massive unchecked flow of money from corporations, lobbyist, unions, PACs, and financers to politicians has exploded in recent years. This legal, but potentially unethical, method of influence peddling mimics corporate sponsorship of sporting events.

"In sports," Dolin explained, "you know who the sponsors are because they name stadiums after corporations or place advertising logos around the venues. In politics, it is far less clear."

Dr. Dolin wants to help voters wade through the murky quagmire of political sponsorship by requiring all political letterheads, websites, emails, and campaign literature to prominently display the logos of their primary sponsors in a manner similar to the logo system used by NASCAR. This would also apply to newsletters incumbents send out under the auspices of legislative updates.

Having politicians publicly recognize their sponsors helps voters better anticipate how a candidate may vote on future legislation. At the same time, this NASCAR logo-like system helps explain an incumbent’s past voting record. ...

If implemented, political media would take on the artistic flare of a NASCAR automobile.

"The larger the sponsorship the larger the logo." Dolin said. "That way voters get visual confirmation of who a politician’s major sponsors are."

TERRELL'S TUNEUP: BROWN & ALVIN

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican
September 1, 2006


Two artists with impossibly deep voices and a ruggedness not usually associated with the often precious and wimpy singer-songwriter and folk genres are appearing this weekend at the Thirsty Ear Festival.

Greg Brown, surely the finest songwriter to emerge from the jungles of Iowa, is playing at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 2, and Dave Alvin, lead guitarist of the Blasters in the early 1980s, is playing at 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 3, with his band the Guilty Men. Both have terrific new albums and are bound to perform material from them at the festival.

Brown’s new album, The Evening Call, produced by longtime guitar crony Bo Ramsey, is a punch in the face with a velvet fist. It’s a blues-drenched collection of wry, wistful, and sometimes weary songs that might remind a listener of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. That’s most obvious on Brown’s song “Bucket” (“Write it in your journal or prop it in a nook/It oughta be illegal when you give me that look”). With its recurring guitar blue note and standup bass, this song is a musical grandchild of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain.”

A real sense of foreboding runs through the album. “The world we’ve made scares the hell out of me,” he confesses in “Eugene,” a spoken-word song about getting away from civilization and fishing in places where cellphones don’t work.

This existential dread is apparent in songs like “Treat Each Other Right,” which has some horrifying images (“Somebody killed a bunch of children, said it was about their godly way”) but ends on a note of uneasy hope (“My friend had a dream, it about made me cry/He said he saw two stone Buddhas rising where those towers had filled the sky.”

In “Cold & Dark & Wet,” Brown puts himself in the role of worried man and political cynic. “Jobs I guess are like wild geese/They went flying overseas ... Morning in America is cold and dark and wet.” But his humor is never far away. The song starts out with bitter memories of a “twisted girl” he’d loved. “She found a new man on the Internet/Wham I’m spam and it’s cold and dark and wet.”

“Kokomo” is a contemporary hobo ballad. Over a musical backdrop reminiscent of James McMurtry’s “Too Long in the Wasteland,” Brown growls, “With a payday loan and a migraine I crossed Contrary Creek/Looking for a gal that I knew as Sal, we were married once for a week.” Later in the song he sings of another woman. “You know she was just my type: deranged, middle-aged, and crude.”

In several places Brown is looking back on his rough and rowdy days. “I had my fun, my fun had me,” he sings in the title song. In “Pound It On Down,” he’s having a “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” moment. “I’m drinking one drink for each one tonight,” he sings.

One verse in “Joy Tears” just has to be about Brown’s wife, Iris DeMent. “When you start your singing, honey, the heavens open up with grace.”

But the album ends on a sweet if somewhat uneasy note. “Whippoorwill” is a love song, but it starts out on a pessimistic note: “If you ever leave, and I imagine you will ...”

Jolting, yes. But it’s that unpredictable quality in Brown’s lyrics that makes fans love him.

Dave Alvin’s new CD, West of the West, is a tribute to songwriters from his home state of California. He covers a lot of ground here, from Merle Haggard to Brian Wilson. There are songs by Alvin pals like Tom Russell and David Hidalgo and icons like Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, Jackson Browne, Kate Wolf, and John Fogerty.

Fittingly, one of the best tracks here is “Between the Cracks,” a conjunto-flavored tale of crime and poverty co-written by Alvin and Russell. It’s the only songwriting contribution Alvin makes to this project. Although his skills as a songwriter have been impressive in recent years, Alvin seems to be conserving his original material. In the past decade he’s released two live albums, two cover albums (this one and Public Domain, a 2000 collection of old folk songs) and two albums of mainly original tunes (2004’s Ashgrove and 1998’s Blackjack David). But what an original idea it is to honor songwriters from a single state. (Someone should do that for New Mexico.)

My favorites are Alvin’s cool-blues-shuffle rendition of Browne’s “Redneck Friend” and a snazzy, doo-woppy “I Am Bewildered,” written by Los Angeles R & B giant Richard Berry (whose best-known tune was “Louie, Louie”) and Joe Josea.

Alvin does impressive interpretations of Los Lobos’ “Down on the Riverbed” and of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s gambling tale “Loser.”

But the best is Fogerty’s “Don’t Look Now,” which Alvin does as a Chicago blues number. Though it wasn’t a hit single, this is one of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s most poignant songs. When it appeared on Willie and the Poor Boys in 1969, it was a jab at the underlying antagonism between the self-satisfied hip and working-class reality (“Who’ll take the coal from the mine? Who’ll take the salt from the earth? ... Don’t look now, it ain’t you or me”). Now it sounds more like a cold look at globalization (“Who’ll make the shoes for your feet/Who’ll make the clothes that you wear?”).

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

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