Time Is Tight

A Time-Is-Tight Twist in a Country Veteran's Sobriety
Terri Clark's Life Goes On

by Don Allred
December 9th, 2005 3:16 PM Issue 50

Terri tears it down.
photo: Andrew Southam
Terri Clark
Life Goes On
Mercury
Stream "Life Goes On"
Stream "Damn Right" (Windows Media)

Deft and blunt, realistic and yet sexy, country veteran Terri Clark is also
good at setting bass sounds (guitar and drums) to rolling from one mandatory
rim shot to the next, adding not only juice but nuance. For instance, bass
elements growl and purr (while higher-pitched ones yowl and slur) at a b-a-a-d man
in "Easy on the Eyes, Hard on the Heart." Terri's Greatest Hits 1994–2004 has
14 keepers out of 14 tracks, and '03's Pain to Kill has 11 out of 12, but the
new Life Goes On has only six or seven out of 12. The first single, "She
Didn't Have Time," is about not having time to waste. (So she doesn't. The End.)
Such (newly dominant) wishful thinking tends to tighten concepts and
performances too much, until "I Wish He'd Been Drinkin' Whiskey" sends Terri down a
bassment staircase, toward a husband's cold new sobriety. And a refreshing twist in
her own: The "solace" of "Everybody's Gotta Go Sometime" sports a wickedly
bouncy riff, and "Tear It All Down," though thematically "cautionary," actually
sounds (via air-hammer drumming) like it wants to end this disc. (So it does.
The f-f-fitting end, too.) (And cheers to Tinita Tikaram for Twist In My Sobriety !)

(And o course Booker T & The M.G.'s Time Is Tight)

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Bodyssey

Vagabond Mississippi queen reinvents wheels in the sky

by Don Allred
October 24th, 2005 6:46 PM issue 43

Hope is a cold thing to hold.
photo: Kristin Barlowe
Shelly Fairchild
Ride
Sony Nashville
Stream "I Want to Love You" (Windows Media)
Stream "Fear of Flying" (Windows Media)

Country newcomer Shelly Fairchild's hot, sweet Ride is so tight, a drill
sergeant could bounce a quarter off it. If he's quick enough: Look yonder, she's
calling up your salty walls, "Hide behind them hides of leather, you and
Custer, fools of a feather!" Her feather, which brushes by, with a coup de drawl:
"Ah can tell by the way you walk, you're ready to f-a-w-l-l-l." To fall just
right (like that bouncing quarter), and thus learn to 'preciate the rider's sense
of balance.
Shelly challenges herself too, leaving her "Tiny Town," though carrying away
a sense of community. A community of sound (plenty soul, but hardly any solos,
just come-hither intros and hydroelectric dynamics). A community that uses
what it's got, not just what it's (dammit!) supposed to have. "Down Into Muddy
Water" cranks up what could easily just be good ol' Muscle Shoals and feeds
frustration to a fever.

But this is the same young woman who dared herself to declare, "I want to
love you," and now finds herself wailing, "You pore little thing!" in wonder.
Before coming back to a cautious, clear-eyed "I hope you get over your fear of
flying." Yeah, hope: That's a cold thing to hold. But it'll be a wheel (again)
someday.

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Wurlitzer Dawgs Out!

Wurlitzer Dawgs Out!
Big Kenny; Jon Nicholson

by Don Allred
October 7th, 2005 3:27 PM Issue 41

Jon Nicholson listens to the silence.
photo: Kristen Barlowe
Big Kenny
Live a Little
Hollywood
Stream "Candy Colored Glasses" (Windows Media)
Stream "Under the Sun" (Windows Media)

Jon Nicholson
A Lil Sump'm Sump'm
Warner Bros.
Stream "Just a Man"
(Windows Media)
Stream "Love is Alright" (Windows Media)

Live a Little, Big Kenny's pre-Big & Rich solo album, finally given a proper release on The Disney Music Group's Hollywood Records, brings the
noise candy, not the nose candy. It's a slowly spinning saucer, serving up a skyful of Purple Planet  gumdrops,
bursting on cue, presented 2 U by B.K., a psych-pop-goes-thee-country impresario and aw-shucks-ma'am workaday wizard, bopping through amber waves with his drum machine. Kenny's as much wistful crooner as carny barker when singing through a megaphone-like vocoder
about "a place where dreams come true." He gets his comeuppance in "Cheater's
Lament." Even more so, in "Think Too Much," with virtual drumsticks bouncing off
the cello-and-viola cloud growing around  this (Glittering Wilburys-flavored) future co-star/then-self-employed advance man's  semi-Orbisonic orbit.

The better, it seems, for a graceful lift of his feathered top hat to "Dor-oh-thee, and
Lit-tle To-To," flying by in "Rather Be."

Down here on the ground, where the air is brown,
Big Kenny's  young compadre Jon Nicholson can soul-shout all night long, while

 lil pauses keep getting in between the spooky teeth of Wurlitzer piano on his bodacious debut joint, A Lil Sump'm Sump'm. He can dream about a blissfully rolling, Michael Hurley-worthy "Grass River," and a "Grandma"  who gets high and flies to glory, with Big & Rich as escorts
on the chorus. He'll wake up, shook up by a girl who "steps to the car," tapping on the glass,  to ask if he's cool. Probably meaning, "Are you a cop? And/or about to attract one?"
But he's shivering: "Well, how would I know, how does anybody
know?" 'Til he's sounding like: is he, will he be, a gotta-be-me seeker, and/or (might-as-well-be) peddling whutever on just another dead end street---either way, sashaying toward a squint-challenging sell-by date? "If you listen to yourself, you're just lying to yourself."   It's OK, though. Jon's cool.

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Siano The Times

Siano the Times
Mercury rising as disco evolves out of  prior knowledge x convictions

by Don Allred
January 11th, 2005 2:14 PM Issue 02

Blissed-out, but not always totally
photo: Courtesy of Nicky Siano
Nicky Siano's Legendary the Gallery: New York's Original Disco 1973-1977
Soul Jazz import

In the early '70s, a teenage DJ named Nicky Siano traveled the space-wise
dancefloor of David Mancuso's Loft---officially DM's lowercase residence, via invitation-only rent parties
---before launching his own Gallery.
Despite acid, balloons, and the food bar, the Gallery wasn't always
totally blissed-out. As described in his and Tim Lawrence's CD notes,
Siano's Mancuso-influenced (though more commercial) sound design for living was logically based on and changing with the rooms and scenes he mixed in,
as the feast moved around NYC, not always voluntarily.

(Galleryite Larry Levan later levitated Paradise Garage; he and Siano
also worked with disco mystic Arthur Russell.)

The Gallery first materialized in the summer of '73.
Post-Woodstock couch-potato arena rock ruled. There and elsewhere,
DIY DJs and dancers (especially blacks, Latinos, gays) were among those,
at times closely observed,
who chose to carve their own solar systems from the vinyl beast.
Spinning out of this disc, the Gallery is mercury still rising, through
crosstown funk, soul, roots rock, and one gospel song, personalized:
Gloria Spencer proclaims,
"I got it! I don't understand it! I got it!" A jet blasts (like, "Amen!") out
of Exuma's "Obeah Man." The Temptations lay down the "Law of the Land":
"You might not like who you are, but you better start. 'Cause you sure can't be
nobody else." Yet the music rumbles and clatters like a roulette wheel.
Meanwhile, turns out that Bonnie Bramlett's "Crazy 'Bout My
Baby" is crazy like a tambourine and a fox, shaking in wait for that slowhand
dobro.

Loleatta Holloway, Bobby Womack, Bill Withers, the Isleys,
and Undisputed Truth also make the most of prior knowledge and surprise.
Without waiting for the remix: These are original (full-length) LP tracks and
seven-inch singles, with built-in dynamics. Breaks burst out of
 (and roll through)
good grooves, good songs. Often.

See http://www.nickysiano.com/ and http://www.timlawrence.info/.
(Update: also (soundtrack to TL's book) https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/love-saves-the-day-a-history-of-american-dance-music-culture-1970-1979-part-1) (pts 1 & 2 have sep bandcamp pages; 2-CD incl. both pts.)(Update 2: Those are sold out on Bandcamp, but you can still hear all of the follow-up: https://reappearingrecords.bandcamp.com/album/life-death-on-a-new-york-dance-floor-1980-1983

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Never Shut Up!

Loudmouthed belle of Hell won't shut up, demands more
Texas Terri Bomb!'s Your Lips . . . My Ass!

by Don Allred
December 21st, 2004 1:12 PM Issue 51

If the band called !!! wanted to live up to their name, they’d give this dame
a job.
photo: TPG Publicity
Texas Terri Bomb!
Your Lips . . . My Ass!
TKO

"I got a hit! I got a hit! I'm a one-hit wonder and I'm proud of it!"
Twelve-stepping, hairdressing, stripping on the Strip, and rocking the smog,
Hollywood's own Texas Terri Bomb! (Laird) surely must know she'll have to stay smart, travel far,
and get very, very lucky, to be even a one-hit wonder, unlike 99.9% of the rest of us.

But knowing and wanting are both broth for Terri's vivid-to-livid

Your Lips . . . My Ass!
She also knows how to curve her enthusiasm up into a sweetly self-mocking,
self-cautioning turn, drawling: "Rolling Sto-o-o-ne, yer mah new home," the
better to climb into your lap, mussing your quiff. Hell's Belle's covering for her
army of punk-times-glametal lifers (including a shot of MC5er Wayne Kramer),
as they pour in through the vents.
Holding her own with executive producer Jack Douglas's most straight-ahead Patti Smith
tracks (which share the storm-wrangling of his best 70s Aerosmith sessions),
Terri swings through a raging groan to a bellow and back: "She caww you on
the tellyphawwn, she aiyyn, gon leave you alone; she don't even know the
meaning of No! No! No! NO! Never shut up, Never shut up! Baby always wants mo'!"

A couple of songs are mo' like Larry and Joe (not even Curly). But Terri's
still surveilling "Raunch City": "More and more and more, you see the jungle
turn safe. I'd pick off a suit, but they're out of my range." Why? Cos you're
such an underdawg? At first, yeah, but then, "More and more and more, I'm makin'
friends with the enemy. Walkin' arm in arm"— she's too close to (being) her
target. "AH'M UH M-A-A-A-N."

Which can only be topped by "To the Top": "To the top! To The Top! OF WHAT!"
Texas Terri Bomb! blows up, keeps going, gets a stress-relieving workout in
Iggy's purely assertive "I Got a Right," and showers with Thin Lizzy's short 'n'
curly "The Rocker": "He just looked at me and rolled me them big eyes, he
said 'Oh-h-h-h, I'll do anything for you!' " Quite.

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Bop Loves Pop To Death

Bop Loves Pop to Death Among the Killer Filler, for an Hour and Then Some
Miles Davis's Birdland 1951

by Don Allred
December 13th, 2004 7:00 PM Issue 50

Miles Davis
Birdland 1951
Blue Note

On Miles Davis's Birdland 1951, bop loves pop to death, squeezing the
peachy-but-preachy "Get Happy" (via chord surgery, circular breathing, and speed)
into "Out of the Blue" 's Paradise Now, as Miles's trumpet, J.J. Johnson's
trombone, Kenny Drew and Billy Taylor's pianos, Tommy Potter and Charles Mingus's
basses, and Sonny Rollins, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, and Big Nick Nicholas's tenor saxes
hot-wire and drive their Jackson Pollock scroller coaster around and around Art
Blakey's spotlit cymbal. (Miles and Art co-motorvate two otherwise different
lineups.) Birdland's (remastered yet) raw, live broadcasts are 67-plus New
York minutes of uncut 1951: new discoveries and ex-bootlegs, jumping turnstiles
between '40s ur-bop, later '50s hard bop, and '00s ears. Pieces o' woik in true
progress.
Including (among 10 tracks total) two versions of "Half Nelson," and three of
"Move"—killer filler, especially when the third "Move" moves out of the
second, and Sonny's ax splits into those of Lockjaw and Big Nick. Secretly I
associate Lockjaw and Big Nick's names and agile brawn with r&b (not as "smart" as
jazz). So mine is tainted love. But clean cool you will dig this too.

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Chutes und Ladders

Chutes und Ladders, Raft-Rapped Families, Bubbles auf der Barrel
Umphrey's McGee, Anchor Drops;Kammerflimmer Kollektief's Hysteria; Shukar's
Bear Tamers Music; Ladies W.C.

by Don Allred
December 7th, 2004 12:50 PM Issue 49

Umphrey's Mcgee:
Anchor Drops
(Sci Fidelity)
Kammerflimmer Kollektief:
Hysteria
(Quecksilber import)

Shukar :
Bear Tamers Music
(Sub Rosa import )

Ladies W.C. S/T
(Shadoks import )


Word on the nerdvine is that Umphrey's McGee just might be the next Phish.
But instead of phat patchouli and ghee glee, McGee have got Anchor Drops of
whiteout, bleak words, and voices, surrounded by multicolored bubbles of
accompaniment. Despite Jake Cinninger's brainy, heady mix of plucked and picked notes,
early results remind me of my old (8 a.m.) art appreciation class. Until
"Uncommon," which announces, "Something about me stinks." Confession is good for
the soul; ditto the subsequent carbonated SUVision of tracks 10 through
(unlisted) 14. With "Uncommon," an enjoyable half-hour.
Kammerflimmer Kollektief's reissued Hysteria contains (bonus miles of)
gazegrazing analogtronica and cracked chamber jazz. Despite the title, they're a
raft-happy family, in which bosoms of bubbles gently rock insomniac, increasingly
marginal honkers and tweeters. Pretty much the reverse effect of those
disappointing Anchor Drops tracks (the kinda pictures my dad used to buy just for their
frames)
(But I should say that the seemingly marginal or subservient or secondary elements of
several genres and subgenres
were my gateway, and increasingly what I find most appealing when  frontmen sound
 too predicable, incl. in a museum masterpiece way---bass and drums, sometimes
keys and others, pulling me back in, in ways I forgot to or never did really focus on.)

Still, McGee and Kammerflimmer both need the no-fiddling-about Gypsy boot
camp of Shukar's Bear Tamers Music. Shukar march mouths and spoons and "wooden
barrel's percussion" and also "primitive percussions" around, teaching us to
scatgrowl "Tamango's Jazz," though not tamely. BTM's a fresh breath of hairy
bubble thunder.

But Shukar's no-budget bubble-cise is a little too crystal ball for me, so I
gotta go visit Ladies W.C.'s Ladies W.C. Once an obscenely priced vinyl
rarity, it's now a mid-priced CD, and still vintage ('69) Venezuelan psychedelia,
sporting convincing enough Californiac lyrics and vocals, times an expansive,
homegrown exuberance. A few ballads, but mainly, "To Walk on Water" goes
"splash-splash-splash"; the wah-wah goes "oink-oink-oink"; jungles get smoked; 'shrooms
tattooed. On feet far too bare for Caracas, so (as tended to happen all over,
in 1969), this leads nowhere. But "nowhere" still translates as "Utopia" in
Ladies W.C., and also rat here!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check http://www.forcedexposure.com/ for Hysteria, Bear Tamers Music, and Ladies W.C.
Umphrey's McGee play Irving Plaza December 10.

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Karma Sutures

Karma Sutures
Ancient Teutonic drone-rockers take on Jersey art-hoppers

by Don Allred
October 5th, 2004 4:50 PM Issue 40

Faust vs. Dalek
Derbe Respecte, Alder
Staubgold

Not so long ago, a young Jersey trio of prodigious mad hiphopologists, Dalek,
undertook a European tour. How they suffered! Until rescued by an old German
kombo of legendary mad progologists, Faust. Transcription of (ob)session
follows:
Facedown bass-clown chews through plaster cast appeal and last appeals.
Artillery fire falls like fossils, into single phylum. Spinal columns of beats
stack, driven home, bent high; remixing bricks, carpets, and windows. In some
crumbling rumble's scratch, soundbeast crawls on. Barrel tongues roll years.

Inventory takes itself, junkyard ripples like hide riding a horsefly:
Groovation gathers. A thin blue flame suspends, not unlike the aural aura of organist
Larry Young, but he died long ago. Miles and Jimi never played together, but
he played with them both. It is also not unlike the gas-jet flame Miles's
autobio claimed to be his earliest memory, seen across a field of whitest stove
top. Atmosphere waits out the needle of such a tiny thrill. But its point has
been made. And if the listener's ear-hole cherry should regrow itself, sealing
feeling? Well. CDs last a while. This one will be waiting.

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Paranoid Pleasures

Fluent British Headzdance Genre Graveyard Shifts Into Paranoid Pleasures :

 Industrial Graft

You Can Take That To The Burbank

by Don Allred
September 10th, 2004 2:00 PM Issue 37

Grime
Rephlex

I'm sitting in my rockhead trailer, looking at a UK CD cover that's almost as gray as
me. Grime, it sez. Four tracks each by MarkOne, Plasticman (not to be confused with Plastikman), and Slaughter Mob.

MarkOne's first two are just bad-smelly jungle, bouncing dead syllables.

(Spoiler: such Halloweeny tricks can fit with Grime's crinkly consolations treats, at least as notions, once you've bagged 'em all.)

Then "Interference": a manly vocal sample (brief,
persistent) is shadowed by a girl-child band saw (sweetly whiny,  lovingly blended
and EQ'd),  in call-and-response: sounds like latchkey children, while Mama Blues is gone.

Instruments and voices find Grime to be more of a midnight melting pot than, say, the customized rap of grime prince Dizzee Rascal's emblematic Boy in da Corner. Yet rebel Grime's tracks and ears usually get fed well enough, one way or another. 

Especially by 18 juicy wheels of highway Plasticman's "Industrial Graft,"

where my spatial phobias get too stuffed to jump (too far).

Big spoonnful breaks also feature festive forklifts with a pulse, under fluorescent warehouse stripes, while the Moon checks in through skylight.

Below the afterglow, Slaughter Mob's deep-sea bass notes pucker, kiss, and
talk at hooky schools of higher sounds. "Yeh fi-yahed," old Trumplips-bass tries
to tell an uppity voice. Which pays no mind, has no mind to pay, floating in my trailer. 

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Intercepted From Air

Meteorological Avant-Transmissions, Intercepted From Air
Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory; Luc Ferrari's Les Anecdotiques

by Don Allred
August 2nd, 2004 3:30 PM Issue 31

Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory
Staubgold
Luc Ferrari
Les Anecdotiques
Sub Rosa


Avantricity's freebirds (Matmos, Autechre, Fennesz, many more) ride the
soundtrack of David Toop's new book, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory.
Right channel clusters, left one cloisters, then they're passing through (before and after falling and settling for) each other. In time as well as space, when (b) connects with (a) and (x) and (?) and (!) and some sounds better numbered.

Disc 2 is mostly ghostly instruments; Disc 1 is more: for inst., the singing

fry and fray of Alvin Lucier's "Sferics." ("Natural radio-frequency emissions
in the ionosphere, radiated from nearby or distant lightning," Toop notes.)
One weatherbird's ambushed by street sounds, but they're countered by
visionary description; violence gets safely aestheticized. The artist as museum
guard? Where is she later, when I hear a shovel blade in oily gravel, too near a
hypnotic/hypnotized-sounding muezzin?

On Luc Ferrari's Les Anecdotiques, voices are talking, frequently in female
and French, beware. (American's also spoken, in Chicago and "dancehall Texas.")
Often near bird-bordered beaches, while engines drive up and away.
Eventually, doors slam and then beat on—doors of a sea tunnel, turns out. Anecdotal,
yas: L.A. swings in and out of meaning, like a pendulum do.
Go listen to your pillow and be glaaad.

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Busybodies Caught

Busybodies Caught in Concertina and on Suspenders in the Dark
NTX + Electric, We Are the Wild Beast; Metal Boys Featuring China, Tokio
Airport

by Don Allred
May 10th, 2004 1:30 PM Issue 19

Non-typical Texans NTX + Electric
photo: Carol Kelly
NTX + Electric
We Are the Wild Beast
Girlgang
Metal Boys Featuring China
Tokio Airport
Acute


In the 21st century, on non-typical Texans NTX + Electric's We Are the Wild
Beast, there are no drums, there are no bass (strings, that is). Here, time is
cellular. Erika Thrasher's filthy walls of fingers and toes squeeze keys,
pedals, and vacuoles, eliminating Brandon Davis's (writhe, not thrash) guitar,
eternally. Candice Vincent's Vaseline sax vestigially lights his way (and
everybody's). Nikki Texas's throat explains that behaving like barbed wire is "only
so we know not to tangle." Too late! But that was just a dream, underground,
waiting to be found by starving shepherds and taken to jaded hunters. Who will
fall on their bionic knees.
Doubt ye? Consider this: "The rain won't let my tits grow. Napalm you're so
good in bed. How many flies ate you today? Let's get hungry tonight." That's
China whinin', like a siren, on "Suspenders in the Dark." She sings for Metal
Boys (recombinant shards of Parisian punk pioneers Metal Urbain) on 1980's Tokio
Airport. Now unearthed, and still flying together/apart on every track, Metal
Boys' sexelectric dragon's teeth gnaw and gnash at China's objet
d'amour-hate, "Tokio Airport": the place, the sign, the song, the other designee? "Technofasceest," she hisses, and drives desperate, new
unforgivable-synth stinky toys through "the anti-climax of X-mas Day," leaving
them stuck inside a harmonically ravenous mobile tagged "Carbone 14." Later, in
penance and/or celebration, China dances barefoot for a "Paranoia Carnival," on
tone-nails of gilded Pong. (That's un certain game, kiddies. I hear it's coming
b-a-a-ack.)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

NTX + Electric play Sin-é May 14.

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Sandman Coming

Sandman Coming
Lucifer expands fractured fairy tale, sits alone at his piano

by Don Allred
January 28 - February 3, 2004 Issue 04

Noooman!!
photo: William Claxton
Randy Newman
Randy Newman's Faust
Rhino
The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1
Nonesuch

We're a figment of their imagination, a beautiful dream, it is true." Thus,
at an office party in Heaven, Lucifer sheds unforgivable light on God's punch
bowl. Light that becomes Randy Newman's Faust, 1995's fractured fairy tale, now
Rhino'd with a bodacious bonus disc of demos, incl. shoulda-rans, brought to
you by a chorus line of Ran's angels, chilling 'round his grand piano. He
"explains" the plot and undersings the principal roles: James Taylor, ultrasmoove
G-d; Don Henley, ultradork Faust; Linda Ronstadt, ultrainnocent Margaret; and
Bonnie Raitt, who brings Mr. (Ran') D. to his knees. (Oh, but when he
interrupts the Lord's hymn to Himself, don't the Devil's li'l eyes get their glee on?
Just like Seinfeld's own accursed "Noooman!!")
The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1 contains 18 units. Just a voice and that
piano, which is unappeasable on "Lonely at the Top," amputates the blues under
Mankind's appeal in "God's Song," and rings blue skies over the floodwaters of
"Louisiana 1927" (as has often "happened down here," where I live, the day
after "the wind have changed"). Voice and piano can't quite silkworm their way
back into "Marie," not without the original version's orchestra. Which later
planted sleeper cells in today's children, via Unca Randy's Monsters, Inc., etc.
soundtracks. Thus bridging the gap between us Disneyfried boomers and all
future candy forevers.

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Out Of Hand

Out Of Hand
A bar-stool freebird of yore avoids a million nights alone

by Don Allred
January 28 - February 3, 2004 Issue 04

His songs flash by like whole lives.
photo: Andrew W. Long
Gary Stewart
Live at Billy Bob's Texas
Smith Music Group

(The following paragraph was written for a country music poll ballot in
December, right before I glanced up from my laptop, and saw the chyron crawl

 beneath Larry King: "Singer Gary Stewart has just been found dead in his Florida home."
His wife died, their son already had, and he shot himself in the neck: a fairly slow way to go.)

On Live at Billy Bob's Texas, Gary Stewart is but a ghost of himself. Now
fitting the "quiet ones you gotta watch" barkeep's pro-file, this
free(dom'sjustanotherword)bird of yore---hyped as the "Springsteen of country," when he and B. were driving themselves through  mid-'70s murk---no longer shivers
and wails, but leaves dusty fingerprints all over gleaming, surging
honky-tonkcore, the Lost City of his Greatest (mostly shouldabeen) Hits. The band's
eager, but also well-disciplined, and totally unannotated, like ghost riders in the
sky.

(Later): Yeah, another dead guy. Once upon a time, he was Dr. Fun and Mr.
Doom (and self-awareness, and headlonging), simultaneously. Stewart still sounds impossibly corny, truly inspired, while flourishing and flinging single notes and phrases all the way through Out of Hand/Your Place or
Mine, his two best LPs on one CD. Songs flash by like whole lives, but really
they're just his moments, ticking away.

Billy Bob's cuts like "An Empty Glass (That's the Way the Day Ends)" turn the tides
down like blankets, till I'm bathed in (pace tua, St. Sade) the *truly* sweetest taboo (of self-pity).
Tiring, soothing. I just stare through his stare, on the rocks, as he
imagines/avoids/follows her stare. "Maybe you feel cheated, for having married so young,"
he mutters to self and/or significant other (wed in their mid-teens, forty-odd years ago now), while shifting on his bar
stool, in the still-rousing "Ten Years of This." ("A million nights alone!") So:
Mebbe getting married is cheating? No! Not always!

The Live CD is labeled with Gary's chipmunky, half-quizzical half-smirk.
("Crazy world, haint it.") Vividly painted. Like one of those commemorative plates
advertised on late-night basic cable. I try to put it away, but then a-l-l-l
his damned drinkin'/cheatin' songs start swirling through their rounds again.
Scores unsettle themselves, in Gary's man-made afterlife. (Reminding
25-years-teetotaling me: For the first time in eight years, I gotta find another job,
and now Bush wants Mars.) Art sucks.

See also: https://www.bynwr.com/articles/gary-stewart-the-lost-tapes 

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You Can't Catch Me

You Can't Catch Me
Can a banana change its spots, or make a wish for a potato?

by Don Allred
November 10th, 2003 4:00 PM Issue 46

The idealistic, stubborn, twang-twining, tree-bearded, tight-jawed Suntamana
photo: Bryan Leitgeb
The Suntamana
Another
Drag City

The Mars Volta
De-Loused In The Comatorium
Universal

Dysrhythmia
Pretest
Relapse


The Suntanama: idealistic, stubborn, munchkist name for rusticrustacean
whiteboys, amidst tall buildings; secret name, chewed and growled over as if by a
cub, spit carefully onto the stray leaf, curled and stuck pointing (in) to
where another precious moment of seeking, noticing, forgetting lets you know
you're still alive. So the Suntanama front you (yet!) Another (CD, that is). Sun
through enough such leaves leaves a spotty tan. 101 golden radio-spots of garble
spark the lyrics, az written and semi-ticulated (perhaps tighter-jawed
descendants of pioneering psychedelibillies Holy Modal Rounders, now rattling
infectiously through finally released Live in 1965? Your Momma should know).
Twang-twining, tree-bearded arrangements find themselves, headphonically (calling,
"C'mon in, the water's fine"). Another gets better as it goes along, 'til
starseed's glorious gathering/farewell, "Late Night At the Fountain." Bound to hitch
a ride on yon school bus, westing to . . .
Mars Volta. Whose big bananaspots slip electrically elsewhere: through stabs
of light (purple bursts of trans WhoZepYesRush-
QueenQueensJaneRageSystemRedHotFugaziSantanaAtTheDrive-InEmoScreamo trajectory),

which nevertheless tend
to bounce off crystalline towers of voice, on account of "Joycean wordplay" in
the midst of Revelation. It's a challenge, but appropriately so. For inst.
(one of their easier pieces), song-title "Cicatriz esp" can refer to headshrink
and/or vaccination mark: Either way, you're in goood hands, Mr.
De-loused at the Comatarium blackhole-visionary guy. Whose defiantly
creative/self-destructive internal cosmography (runs) rings through
ricochet-maze/shields of gloved ones Mars Volta's implosively arty art. Once, before
artist-junkie-De-Loused dedicatee Julio Venagas woke up and finally succeeded in killing
himself, he and MVs/ex- At The Drive-Ins Cedric and Omar were friends, and it shows.

Philadelphia's Dysrhythmia got no weird words (except the name). They're an
instrumental-"only" rock trio, which, on Pretest, can mean a theme dreamed like
Medusa's hotcombs through their own zone-variance of ricochet-maze (incl. not hummable
tunes but tunefulness: reassuring/intriguing bait). Sideswiping fusion, prog,
punk, and metal, Dys are Deans of Fairplay Rockspoticism. They never push
originality or influence too hard (unlike heroes of previous paragraphs). Results
speak: "Running Shoe of Justice" was slam-dunk-christened by an audience member,
when he first heard the untitled instro. But Dysrhythmia aren't just about
smelly ol' shoes, smelly ol' justice; they're loud and mellow too. Guitar-bass-drums and back,
playin' a little keep-away, like Suntanama, Rounders, and Mars Volta after
all. (Smoke signals seem to read: "Soon as listeners think they completely get
any music, they basically stop listening." Untrue, guys! [ Guys?])

.

Zgryz

Zgryz Stole the Graham Keeshka From the Monkey Butcher Shop
Groovski

by Don Allred
October 29 - 4, 2003 Issue 44

Polish jokers
photo: Anna Chudy
Groovski :
Groovski
Groovski Records

Hey Body, look alive. At ghostly door of recently concluded elementary school
Halloween carnival, which groan open like G. Washington's wooden teeth. Is
Judge Groovski, moonlighting. He thus intone, "Come und stand next to electric
Poles, Godzilla vould like, to step on your toes."
Grace notes chime, bass notes grind, and we're off. No, not to see the
gizzard; next up on Groovski is grown-up "Glupi Stamos." Translated gist: "John
Stamos, stop with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, oh her toes!" Bailiff-guitarist Leslie
Blatteau is feminine-sensible: "Who ever heard, of just one sandal."
Nevertheless, in "Social Skills," bassist Adam Malec is ripping his Judge mask off,
getting happy again, with a "faul-ty, sensory device!"

Which cuts no ice in "Mockery of a Mockery," as tight time tilts guilt-edged
graffiti down the gullet of "Propensity to Consume." So by "Eclectic on
Sundays," Ex-Judge compulsively cross-examines: "Do you emancipate monkeys? Do you
anticipate car keys?" But can't stop the music, and soon his head is exploding
("Is this what you call foreiggghhhhn?") into waves of gravity. (Surfing
U.S.A.? You betski.)

Also including guitarist-vocalist Tim Borkowski and drummer Bogdan Chudy,
Pleasant Beach, New Jersey's (all but Leslie) Polish American Groovksi cite Joy
Division/New Order/Cure (/Amon Düül II/Hawkwind?!) as influences. Credo (from
what movie?) might well be: "ALL, is ART! The rest is graham crackers." Yum.

.

Sharp Blessed Men

Sharp Blessed Men

by Don Allred
October 30 - November 5, 2002 Issue 44

Sharp Dressed Men: A Tribute To ZZ Top
RCA
The Charlie Daniels Band
Redneck Fiddlin' Man
Audium/Blue Hat

The Charlie Daniels Band
The Ultimate Charlie Daniels Band
Epic/Legacy


Hooks-laden, woman-(ec)centric (not too intimidatingly enlightened),
unimpeachably Texan, yet too dang messin'-with-the-boogie for some (especially re CD
mixes of hallowed vinyl), the ZZ(aftig) Top legacy is a good bet for
Pop-Goes-the-Country's dude rodeo. Recent (if not Late) Hat has a lot of
rock-metal-blues in its closet—on its sleeve, even. With generations of lamination having
been sandbagged by Soggy Bottom Boys (O Brother, indeed), what the heck. Thus,
NashVegas ubersuit Joe Galante and ZZ's personal mogul Bill Ham hereby negotiate
Sharp Dressed Men: A Tribute to ZZ Top.
None of the resulting tracks are bad, but some just aren't greasy enough
(duh), and where my girls at? Didn't dare hope for Madonna in her albino Muff
Daddy chaps, lookin' for some "Tush." But imagine Dixie Chicks, strapping on
"Cheap Sunglasses" to go out and meet the masses. Or Dolly P, Shania T, ooo-wee
(Babeh).

Howsomever. Montgomery Gentry's "Just Got Paid" is sung and played with a
surging tension. These solos ain't nobody's "breaks." They got paid today;
somebody's next in line: "Black Sheep Black Sheep have you any wool? Yes I have,
three bags full." Perhaps overly encouraged by the dogged drama of his hit "I'm
Tryin'," Trace Adkins has lately sung schlockier stuff with too tight a jaw, as
if resisting it, or trying to chaw into something worthwhile after all. Here,
he discovers an awesomely euphoric tension: This is where he belongs! In the
temple of "Legs."

The way ZZ told it, the suave "Jesus Just Left Chicago" disappeared into a
sweaty little guy "Waitin' for the Bus." Hank Williams Jr. and his Bama Band
milk the medley for big bottom kicks, and maybe that little guy would too, if he
could. Hank III's "Fearless Boogie" is a Top-notch cartoon, with his Elastic
Man twang scrolling and tumbling all through the locoweed locomotive-breath
beat. Willie Nelson's Western Swinging along, thinking out loud about a certain
someone who makes nice to him just 'cause "She Loves My Automobile" (no
complaints).

But the best thing about tribute (or any) albums is the (rare) Billy Bragg &
Wilco Effect: when people you've written off suddenly rise to the occasion.
Several flare-ups here, but the finale kills. Courtesy of none other than Alan
Jackson, who's usually so humble that he apologized "for humblin' you to death"
at a recent awards ceremony (and thus got us again!). But as soon as he
launches into "Sure Got Cold After the Rain Fell," we know he's going to honor one
of the most unfiltered, plain-as-the-water-on-your-face ZZ ballads ever. And
you can't get too humble if you're gonna be that plain. See, right in the eye
of this dust—it's a hoedown. YEEEHAWW—OBrotherland Security busts a mood!
Unforgivable! An outrage! Ah, but then, then: Alan starts singing again, right
through each and every sinus cavity in his head (how many are there?),
out-countrying these faux-po'-mountaineers, squeezing every bit of blues out of
bluegrass, riding and guiding that fickle fiddle down into the cold's groove, the
rain's groove. These notes can't break, they can only bend some more.

Speaking of fiddles, and guitars for that matter, why isn't Charlie Daniels
on this thing? There's a very metal-fistic "Sharp Dressed Man" on his '98
Tailgate Party, and the Charlie Daniels Band certainly helped unroll the Interstate
of pop-rock-country crossover. The CDB hitched a surefooted, rollcalling
(own-namedropping) "The South's Gonna Do It Again" (do what? "It"? Mercy!) to the
otherwise often unwieldy new Southern Rock bandwagon. "South's" stitched a
"Symphony Sid" jitterbop riff through Allmanesque flow, showing even Les Brers
how to get real concisely gone for a change!

But Chazz doesn't just run up a musical flag or lay out a picnic blanket
(although that pre-ZZ beard's a sparkling white napkin, across his
crimson-cowboy-shirted belly). No, the good licks speak in many tongues, especially to each
other. His latest, Redneck Fiddlin' Man, is a bit off its feed, fave rave "My
Baby Plays Me Just Like a Fiddle" notwithstanding. Yet even Redneck's
thinned-out dancefloors do sometimes get prowled by cinch-gutted riffs (shades of his
ol' Volunteer Jam/talk-radio buddy Ted Nugent), and coiled/"laidback" ones too.
The latter bring to mind '75's supposedly glazed "Long Haired Country Boy,"
talkin' blues, cash, and other trash (he's still with us, on the well-named
Live Record: Now he'll "tell a joke," not "take a toke," but one's as dry as
t'other).

On The Ultimate Charlie Daniels Band comp, whole flotillas of crap, like
"Simple Man" and "What This World Needs Is a Few More Rednecks," get an answering
salvo from the angry world-populism of "American Farmer," the multikulti
mini-saga of "Talk to Me, Fiddle," a brief-lived fiddle-and-mandolincarnation of
the ever elusive (Persian-fairy-tale-named) "Layla," and the "multi-colored
junkyard" expanses of "Honky Tonk Avenue." Which leads to a "Funky Junky," for
more crass sand in your pearl, Merle.

Not bad but certainly nationwide, Charlie's got all this stuff he has to
carry around. Stuff he sees from the stage (as in "All the world's a . . . "),
while insatiably touring. (CD's 1971 s/t debut album started out as mellow as his production clients the Youngbloods' Elephant Mountain--but soon enough, his guitar was clawing its way across that roadmap on the cover.) Maybe that's what he really kneejerks (and sometimes
headbangs) against. 

(Whereas ZZT can abrasively embrace a kind of stoic hedonism, paying the cost to be the boss, the tosspot, whutever, with "Beerdrinkers and Hellraisers" fueled up for default damage

-- and then there's the gear-grinding "Lowdown In The Street": some of the people in that one are still too close to my windows, mirrors, other apertures. Usually, of course, they maintain their cool, playing the blues life card, as close as the Zig Zag Tops Rolling Papers ever get to a church bulletin.)  

Also on Ultimate is "Trudy," in which a sweet, green
gambling table detours into an avalanche of details. After which the narrator's
attention span is equally split between the distant Trudy and a certain missing
high roller. Our boy can't sort this out, but he done, son. So the music rocks on
through his cell block, and into the jigsaw skies.

Meanwhile, Rev. Dylan's old sideman Bro. Charlie just keeps
rebuilding some jigsaw soapbox, planing and playing over all its creaks and leaks.
Sometimes the spirit finds its own level, even so. Like on 1999's Road Dogs, where
rapneck-grabbing powerchord purgatory finally exhales "The Martyr." This
song brings the legend of Cassie Bernall, who supposedly said "Yes" when asked "Are you a Christian?" and
was then killed at Columbine---a story since refuted by survivors---which could have made for the most horrendous (or mere) musical
kitsch. Instead, he imagines her last moments, quietly reminding me of a "mushroom
cloud" we were shown in school (actually more like a rose, in that case). A
rose in this case slightly dampened by proximity to "Wild Wild Young Men," his
first whiny scolding ever.

But not his last. Tighter than Ultimate, early 2002's Live Record's
band-as-fiddle dynamics ultimately clunk into the (studio) rant "This Ain't No Rag,
It's a Flag" ("and we don't wear it on our heads."  Better check your
current audience, CD). Less snarlin' than gnarlin', "Rag" gets drowned out by
"The Last Fallen Hero" 's solitary drum on Redneck Fiddlin' Man (parade's end,
but no rest). "Amen," sez the fiddler, sawing a blues out of "The Star Spangled
Banner." And, on How Sweet the Sound 's (2001) Elvis-brushed hymnbook, Charlie D.
tends to send us way up yonder in a (Woody G.-echoing Millennium's) minor key. And that's alright now, Mama.
It's the gospel truth.

.

Goin' Out Walkin'

Goin' Out Walkin'
Dixie Chicks' Home

by Don Allred
September 25 - October 1, 2002 Issue 39

Climb a mountain, turn around.
photo: James Minchin
Dixie Chicks
Home
Open Wide/Monument/Columbia

Soon as I saw the video of "Long Time Gone," debut single from the new Dixie
Chicks album, Home, I knew there was gonna be trouble, and not necessarily as
cute as the usual D.C. trubble (re: fried green tomatoes, served with Thelma &
Louise's picnic-ready peas, so "Goo'bye, Earrrrrrrll." Ha! Ha! Mah name's not
Earl).
I (swallowing the reviewer bait) mean, sure, now they're singing the "I" of a
country-boy narrator who always knew he was different, and "went to
Nashville, tryin' to be the big deal." He gets pumped up, vows he'll be a star. But
then abruptly (star or not?), he's back at home, sitting with the woman he'd left
behind, and everybody and everything's still here, but not quite. Including
the music on the radio: "They sound tired, but they don't sound Haggard/They
got money but they don't have Cash/They"—OK, OK! But, in this vid, we don't see
Mr. Sourgrapes, or any of the people he talks about. We see the Chicks (that
is, destiny's choice Natalie Maines, with founding/hiring/firing foresisters
Emily Robison and Martie Maguire). Holding court in a cantina, looking the best
they've ever looked, as well they might, in ethnista (-sewed?) finery, and the
blondest, regalest realness a freshly re-re-renegotiated contract can buy.

Exhilarated by the smell of Sony Suit blood, mega-mega-Diamond (ho-hum for
your mega-mega-Platinumb) Conquistadorables descend once again from their
2000/2001 A.D.-long Family Values-Trekking Mamaship, currently hovering over the
trembling Nashvile skyline ("Long Time Gone?" Gulp!). Even worse, they're
laughing, tossing away these "righteous" lines aimed at dim Radio, from whose now
finally Chicks-replenished loins Las Chickitas once sprung!

And spring again. For behold, Radio quickly sits on its squawk box, the
better to gobble up said nutritious enrichious po-mouth razzberries, and, in the
name of the songbirds' boutique label, Open(s) Wide, adding four more "cuts"
from Home to its "singles" (virtually mythical morsels) playlist. Thus
buffet-table-buffering "Gone" 's possible impact (as if anyone's really going to say,
"Hey, Chicks're ratt," and click off the radio and go do something more than
whistle along to a cheery car-tune, 'bout a good ol' scapegoat, like we all
need).

So far, so fine, but I hope that the Chicks are laughing because they know
their dear Sony/Columbia stubbornly carried Cash past peaks through some creative and.or commercial dry spells.  Sure, Johnny stirred later,
as did Merle, after they finally got dumped, and went to smaller labels (will
Radio take its Chicks-cue, when Johnny's new album comes marching down home
this fall? Stay chuned!).

Also (re: Radio "soul" versus "junk" food), surely Natalie, Emily, and Martie
recognize that primo Cash stash could wax almost as bubblicious as their supersize, as
he bounced through that "Ring of Fire," with kazoo-like trumpets too. And "I
shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die"  gives great novelty-shock value and more,

 sure as "Heroin."  Pop and Art still need each other, and sugar's best when it's got the
juice.

Juice pumped by heart not rote, and jumping, via Home's questing overview
(stern Chicks, now all in black, watch and wait on the cover),
to where "Long Time Gone" quickly sketches it into  a paper airplane, and which the
no-BS, star-as-fan version of Stevie Nicks's (steady-as-she-goes) "Landslide" further
clears, to bless even a "Travelin' Soldier" with a speck of luck.

Conversationally direct and engaging as "Gone" and "Landslide" and the
recruit himself, all of "Travelin' Soldier" adjusts the album's first
third-person, early-experience lens, to a bareness the girlish-not-girly vocals make
plainer than they let on. Can't even this high school chick tell that the
older kid, whom she briefly meets,  is just passing through, looking for a
sweeter, greener past, and a chance to write,
"I close my eyes and
I think of you"?

I  want to yell, "Don'r go! Come back!" at both of them, as the music slips away again.
It's plain as days, between the lines of his letters,

way before she hears his name called from a list, across
a football field. "Never gonna hold the hand of another guy" is all she can cry,
 so far, but of course it's already too late. His leaving, his isolation, has become hers,
 added to it.

So: "Plainer than they let on," yeah. There's something really up front, yet
always shading back, about Home. Room for spacious (mostly night) skies. And a
beat or two, with or without drums. But notst ju a tastefully shaded, homefront
retro "purity," or anything else too simple. (Nat-debut Wide Open Spaces fell
into a happy/sad/happy/sad running order of tracks, but its closing triple
rippled into Fly, which scored every which way, incl. lobbing its own lonely-planet
title song across Home's simmering [contem] plate).

When another (?) lady reads "Truth No. 2" from what sure sounds like) her own list,
"This time when he swung the bat, and I found myself laying flat, I wondered,
What a way to spend a dime," then chases it with "Swing me way down South," is
she still talking to the same person? Or is she now asking the guy who swung at
her to swing her? Is she alone? I think so, but when she continues, in her odd
stop-start mountain (?) chord-cycles (angular, also "circular," is how they
sound to me, carrying the ear like an eye's got horizons: When a cycle stops
stop-starting and makes a circle, that's progress, or at least a chord's notion
of "progression," isn't it?), offering to "bring you pearls of water on my
hips," does she mean what I think she does? If so, it's not something you (or at
least I) would say to a mirror, although there's one on her list. Her
idiosyncracy seems like a defense, not a freeze-out. To whom it may concern.

Despite the Irish hillbilly twang, "White Trash Wedding"

 is not a bad girl,
or even weird. She's taken (by) the normal course, only really compressed:
"JustsayIdoand-kissmequickthebaby'sonitsway." Mama's got a squeezebox, and Daddy
better not sleep tonight. "Wedding" is fast enough to be mistaken for her
older, rowdier kissin' cousin,"Tortured Tangled Hearts."

 See, there's this subset
of increasingly (are-they-gonna-mush-out-now? There! Oops, not quite yet)
maturing ballads, culminating in the (star-as-fan, no BS) Everlys/Orbisonic,
bolero-istic, D.C. original, "I Believe in Love," WHAP! Cold wet washcloth, care of
those drive-by wisenChicks,  past even cooing, "Bless their tortured, tangled hearts."
What a relief, to look back once again, through that third-person lens. You may
come away with a black eye, but this 'un'll scrub off. And put a cackle in
your twang.

Someone's getting wished "Godspeed," by Chicks and Aunt Emmylou, till they
all disappear, behind a big warm bass. While an old man's awake, with wishes
piling up, drying like leaves. Strings trickle in, useless as tears. 'Til the
bass leads the way to "The Top of the World," and because he's still on this aluminum-backsided  label, he/s spinning toward associations with Jimmy Cagney's "Top of the world, Ma!" before blowing himself up in White Heat: not that kind of perversity, but maybe his own, and certainly some of the same sense of fixation, and momentum. ("Dramatic Stasis, " it's called by Nashville songwriter Alice Randall, also author of The Wind Done Gone.)  I want to hear him again, but not too soon.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Recent/latest releases from this album's writers include: Patty Griffin
("Truth No. 2," "Top of the World") (also wrote Fly's "Fly"): 1,000 Kisses; Radney
Foster ("Godspeed"): Another Way to Go; Bruce Robison ("Travelin' Soldier"):
Country Sunshine. Darrell Scott wrote "Long Time Gone," Maia Sharp nd Randy Sharp wrote "A Home" (dreamy verses, brittle chorus).,  Gary Nicholson and Tim O'Brien wrote"More Love." 

The rest are by the Chicks, sometimes with help from
heavy friends: "I Believe in Love" and "Tortured Tangled Hearts" were both
written by Natalie, Martie, and Marty Stuart, John R. Cash's old accomplice.

.

Pull My Chain

Friendly Ghost of a Mullet
Toby Keith's Pull My Chain

by Don Allred
May 24th, 2002 7:45 PM Issue 22

Toby Keith
Pull My Chain
DreamWorks

Funk upon a time, when the hairy Feminazi darkness spread across the land, it
became necessary for a clown prince to assume the position, a wise fool who
could justify or sugarpie the base ballin' ways of batman to wombman. Thus,
from Jughead's Archie to Meathead's, from Ozzie and Harriet's paranoid Ozzie to
Paranoid's (and The Osbournes') Ozzy: As the wig is bent, it came to be, from
sea to shining sea.
Except in the country which is just called Country, 'cause y'all know where
to find us. We had such a---premisable prince, at least—Garth Brooks —butt after
a while he was hardly ever home. So it was that, from the ranks of
stud-puppets, one must step up to the plate (others gradually
to be sacrificed for the evilcological balance of the herd). One son who would
never stray, just conveniently go 'way (for your beauty rest), and then come
back with grapes peeled like you never saw!

Or so you'd be ready to tell him, this Toby Keith, this Oklahoma! Citybilly,
this formerly oil-refinin', pro (well, USFL) footballa, with eyes, brains, and
pipes under his Jimmie-no-crack-corn (prophylactic) hat. Ready or not, he
comes chuggin' 'round the cloudbank, with his high voice (zero faux-Mexicali
Marty Robbins hair-tonic trills), and his low vibrato (free of Waylonic soft-soap
opry). Nothing forced. He's too busy to belabor a point, much less a note.

Such chuggin', from a John Waite "Missing You"/Puff Daddy "I'll Be Missing
You" (but not Stones "Miss You," not yet) template on his dogtag, also would go
good with fiddles, if he bothered. No banjos either, and there's only one of
him (sob), and he's Homecoming Court-bait like his old tourmate
Shania—therefore he's not quite the Dixie Chicks, but if he were a gal, he'd be called
spunky, and that's close enough. 'Specially since the actual D.C.s are busy in
non-Homecoming court, and anyhow, it just wouldn't work if we didn't hear a big ol'
guy's guy ode-ing up to the joys of submission, for instance on the (burns
like a paper sun and candy rain) title track of his current doghouse penthouse prayer, Pull My Chain.
So of course it's "Pull my chain, Toby Keith!" on his message board now.
Netgals also hijack "I wanna talk about mememememe," from "I Wanna Talk About Me,"
in which a Good Listener just gets taken for granted, as Toby discovers then
erupts over, in a David Puddy way that slays 'em in the whenhouse. He also flows more
rapneck genius than was even dreamt of by Fred Durst (Fred: "B-b-but it was written
by Bobby 'He Stopped Loving Her Today' Braddock! No fair!" True).

When "You Leave Me Weak" (goood depletion) gets followed and swallowed by
"Tryin' to Matter" (bad depletion), and identifying with the artist gets cold,
the ladies have gender lines to scurry back across, if they want 'em. I could
use an escape hatch myself, from recognizing the persistent hopefulness (rather
than the expected Country Western self-pity, served up jest ratt) that makes
"Tryin' " so painful (as I'm sure Tobe knows) (bitch). Hope might also be the
wild hair that makes the faithful married man roar, struttin' about not being
one to "Pick Em Up and Lay Em Down" ("down, down, down," he mutters at one
point). And hope prods the twisting sheets of "Forever Hasn't Got Here Yet" (the
verdict just in: "makeup sex," but not Seinfeld's).

The previous album, How Ya Like . . . ('scuse me, Kool Mo Dee) How Do You
Like Me Now, was a chug-to-glide-to-hover-to-Hova-to-ova (title track, anyway,
livin' inside your radio) airshow of lifelines. This one rocks harder, dreams
paler, rarely in black-and-white; this ain't Pleasantville, it's Burbtown. (In
late Spring, we're green and gray, OK?).

The Last Poke Chop

The Last Poke Chop
Hank Williams Jr. Almeria Club; Hank Williams III Lovesick, Broke & Driftin'

by Don Allred
March 20 - 26, 2002 Issue 12

Cosmic foodie junior
photo: Dan Majorie
Hank Williams Jr.
The Almeria Club Recordings
Curb
Hank Williams III
Lovesick, Broke & Driftin'
Curb


The Almeria  Club Recordings is based in and on a still extant place in which Hank Williams is said to have recorded and run from the shots of a jealous lover with first wife Audrey, for once on the same page:lore too early to be remembered by then-tot Hank Jr., yet also creative association warm enough for him to prove a somewhut unexpectedly tolerable host for most of this set's listening time. 

Junior, do you know
Michael Hurley's "I Heard the Voice of a Pork Chop"? Ah, Junior's already too busy asking hisself

tonight's first musical question:
why-o-why did he leave that last 'un, still calling, all alone on its plate.
If you are foresighted and/or reading ahead, you may be asking yourself, how,
pray tell, does Junior get from such insatiable fun to "America Will Survive," and what is
it like when he does? Well, in "Last Pork Chop," he announces, "We devoured
each other!" He indeed devours that D-word, and it's an image that (how did he
know this?) fits my own political perspective (if, you know, the White House W. son
pushes his/our sizzling, score-settling dream luck too far, also pushing back on the
cold prudence of Dadwar).
And those freshly fried carcinogens are s-o-o juicy (as life do get messy); yum. Meanwhile, Junior lets his once impregnable
Conservative/Missing Link persona bump into "The 'F' Word" (realizes: even baaad-ol'-boy
country artists dasn't use it!). So he  semi-seriously "counsels" Kid Rock, who's half straight
outta his own roots-therapeutic Cocky, and much more audible when they duet on
CMTs concert series "Crossroads." And in "If the Good Lord's
Willin' (and the Creeks Don't Rise)," Junior draws some swing out of Hank Sr.'s
 (previously unset) lyrics; via jazzy little countermoves, star-spangled-'n'-ready for
that uppity creek.

The centerpiece is "Tee Tot Song," named after the street singer Rufus Payne,
whom child-father Hank Sr. followed around. This could've sunk the whole album
in mawk---O Lawd, Flag(s?)-bearer follows in footsteps of learnin'-hungry Daddy
and his Authentic Old Blues Man---but when Junior, playing his resonator guitar,
 gently and fearlessly persists with "Won't you Show me/ Show me/Show me,"
 he tilts my view-finder, sets me (and here-denoted  "little Hiram-Hank"), down into
"Get your peanuts, fresh peanuts,"
Daddy Govt. Name Hiram's own blues-spun pitch, as cosmic foodie Junior can't fail to note.

So he's got me there, and then (still in the midst of the resonating headspace named
 for the  joint his parents sometimes played, also fled, for once on the same side of the gun,
 even if as a Coalition of the Unwilling) comes that "Cross on the Highway," something
else Hank Jr.'s learned the hard way to see, since two of his close friends
were killed in a car crash. A gospel choir (and a searchlight church organ) help
him through, but you can hear "Highway" 's still grieving, swaying cry, again
breaking through the massing acoustic-to-electric "When the Levee Breaks"
chords (and other measure-for-measured accruals/reprisals) of "America Will
Survive." It's the courage of this song, rising above the isolationist fantasy of
his original "A Country Boy Will Survive," that makes it so powerful, and then
so disturbing. He just seems too sure of himself now, and of us (Americans, that is).

Which is why, after yet another reasonably satisfying spin, I'm never sorry to leave
 The Almeria Club..., and go meet up with Hank III, out on the road. He's a foot soldier,
 anthem-less, frankly Lovesick, Broke & Driftin'. Still, even with "7 Months, 39 Days"
 to go, he thumps an empty jug high/low, till time to get "pure drunk in
the Mississippi mud," like Hank Sr. hardly ever sang about doing, much less enjoying.
 But then, Hank III doesn't have Sr.'s Wife/Mother Demon Muse to attract lightning bolts of
inspiration either.
Nor does he  have his own father Randall Hank Jr. (born sic, though Sr. was indeed
a born Hiram)'s self-described earliest memory-cloud incl. being dressed like
 the Daddy he says he's never remembered at all, and being led on stage to the cheers of his
Daddy's fans.
No concept (except mebbe "no concept") album here: This horndawg
lives song by song, calling through dustbowl afterimages of his granpaw. Possibly
creeping out sleek Daddy Junior, who hangs more with (self-anointed) "rebel son"
Kid Rock.

Hank III's press releases say he only gave up the "$50 punk gigs" because of
a paternity suit "and a $300-a-week pot habit." So, hats off to the possibly
future Hank IV---"He don't have my name, but he's out there"--- for helping
hemp pull his moseyin' biological, officially and previously known as Sheldon, from the grave of---
 an untitled life---?
 III also states that he's got a rock album which (Hanks-personas-"conserving")
Curb Records won't release. Once, on "Trashville," he does use ZZ Top's Billy F. Gibbons
 as a no-frills-flight chordal backdrop, wheeling around  the speed trap,
while III growls about real country—
he's a big Misfits fan, and this is "real country" to him. All reports indicate that he rocks quite
thrashily in clubs (after the rent party-ready country set), so that's another reason
for staying on or near the road, the trail---where his tumbleweed tail brushes right by the likes of Mike
Curbdawg. All his breakups and crack-ups are behind him. And ahead,
 to some extent (it's nature's way).

Hank III does venture into Babylon once, stepping up to Lovesick's own killer finale,
"Atlantic City," the only non-overloaded version of this Broooce-song I've heard.
 III just tells his girl, forthrightly, almost lightly at first, about all the crazy stuff that's
been happening in the casinos: mob hits, snitches, like that. He gets more
rueful with "I got debts no honest man can pay," but he knows he's gotta face
'em. He's still talking to her, steering her along, he and we and she are
getting almost too used to the ongoing Situation, till he suddenly gives out a very
brief, Hank Sr.-worthy "yodel." The instruments echo and extend his blue note,
in slow motion. The fiddle steadies, carries Hank III and his silent
companion into another, eerier view of his repeated instructions,
"Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight,
in Atlantic City." The couple
stops to look in the same direction Hank Jr.'s pointing, all along the prime
cut of "this whole land." But what's past that? Anything? You din't tell us,
Unca Sam Rebel Yankee Doodle Daddy Hank Junior!
"Now, why did I lee-eave, that last poke chop?"

.

Gimme Three Stepsisters

Gimme Three Stepsisters
Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera

by Don Allred
February 20 - 26, 2002 Issue 08

We all did what we could do.
photo: Daniel Coston
Drive-By Truckers
Southern Rock Opera
Soul Dump

"Bobby's skull was split in two, my girl was partially embedded in the
dashboard," but that wasn't enough. "The next day at graduation, everybody was
saying that the paramedics could hear 'Free Bird' still playing on the stereo—you
know, it's a very lawwng sawwwwng."
As you might suspect, the Drive-By Truckers (singers-writers-guitarists
Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Rob Malone, often co-[de]composing with bassist
Earl Hicks and drummer Brad Malone) are professional Southerners. Which, from
the White House on "down," means, of course, professional Weirdos. These 'uns
have well-connected brains behind their mirrorshades, even when working under
titles like Pizza Deliverance.

The people in their songs do tend to believe in some kind of Deliverance, by
pizza and/or other. On 1999's live Alabama Ass Whuppin', Truckers' real-life friend
"The Living Bubba" briskly advises, "Be careful of who you screw, I can't die
yet I've got another show to do." On the new Southern Rock Opera, a
self-described "feeble old man" is ranting to the beat of "The Guitarist Upstairs"
despite hisself (he calls the cops anyway). Next morning, a white-collar rehabee's
well-scrubbed skull keeps Everclearly bouncing back (and forth) to the zesty
phrase "Dead, Drunk, and Naked"—in that order. The Truckers' characteristic
gear-shifting rumble brushes by suggested afterglow/afterlife, ratt now. Even
on a highway full of "heat that holds you like a mother holds her son, tighter
if he runs."

Amen. 'Cause, down home (down here), one thing you don't get Delivered from
(only to), is Connection; for instance, urban sprawl just gets strung out
thinner and thinner, never quite disappearing, it's all in your grill, and in that
of a punkass backwater kid, sick of himself and his girlfriend and ever'body
else, swearing one day he'll hit the road to "Zip City" (and he will, he'll
have to. But don't think of it as a "commute," Buddy, just consider yourself "on
tour"—'ello, 'ooterville!).

Thus, the (Dee-luxe) scenic route: Southern Rock Opera, two discs, 18 songs,
94 minutes, layers of reverie, association, urban legends, and other goo,
sinuously/abrasively unwound, spilling blue skies, blue notes,
banknotes, other bills, into and out of the bug-spattered POV of a nomadic indie club
combo, with boondocks high school parking lot eight-track nickel bag etc memories of Skynyrd's flights, from which they have drawn the oneness of their shining name, Betamax Guillotine (true Skyn fans will get the officially apocryphal, def apocalyptic reference: as DBT's liner notes helpfully sum,
"Video killed the radio star!"). With ID presented only in notes, yet effectively never too far from the recurring, community-minded,  conceptual continuity device/namesake of Sgt.Pepper's  Lonely Hearts Club Band, BG's  evidently in sonic convoy with other contemporaries and
descendants still floating in the dust of King Tut (a/k/a Lynyrd Skynyrd),
thee potentatin' post-Video Wave eternal traveler, still on tour, still re-re-repackaged, still top tribute band to its former self, still workin' for MCA. Viewpoint x attitude of classick LS line-up is also emphatically spliced in.
For openers, "Ronnie and Neil" delves into the supposedly "complicated friendship"

of once supposed arch-enemies Van Zant and Young (I thought their musically implied
 relationship went something like "Hey Hollyweird, you thank 'Southern Man'
equals 'Lyncher Man'? Kiss mah Sweet Home Alabama!"
"Ah . . . you're from Florida . . . ?"
"Well it's a metty-for, Son, you a writer too, c'mon, squeal lak a pig," but that's not
the words to this tune). I dunno how true the song is, but it sure shows what
"Ronnie" and "Neil" can mean to hot rusty voices, finally 'llowed to testify,
"Southern Man still needs them both around!" (These Truckin' voices, more than
 their picking, also remind me of the hairier geetar solos sprouting from Skyn's carefully
groomed strut.) (Wisely, Drive-By Guillotines never try to sound all that much like LS, but low-budget flights get close enough for their purposes.) This heated discussion resolves into a chorus of firewater strum, as
inevitable as Young's latest buckskin mudslide ride, as purposeful as purported
Taskmaster RVZ marching his ornery troupers from Hell to breakfast and vice versa.

In "Birmingham," a Neilian harmonic sliver goes spiraling through
bass-generated smog, around Young/Van Zant-worthy lines like "I can't wait/ to see your
face!/in Bir-ming-ham." A ghostly Truckload of faith, getting a lot further
(under this old paleface Bombingham native's skin) than the sputtering about raceheads in
"Ronnie and Neil" (just as Ronnie's tolerance lecture "Curtis Loew," was
overcome by his posthumously released "Mr. Banker" and "Walls of Raiford":
Delta-to-gatorbowl-blues, working race/class right through if not past the graveyard
shift). Although "Ronnie and Neil" 's "Four little black girls killed for no
goddam good reason" has me wondering, "What would a good reason be?" Good
question to be led into, during a war (for instance).

In related news, our correspondent in the field Patterson Hood has
discovered, while inspecting "The Three Great Alabama Icons" (Bear Bryant, Ronnie, and
George Wallace), that George is now in Hell. Not in spite of his alleged
"change of heart" re race relations, which helped get him re-re-re-elected. No,
because of it. That fortuitous flip-flop (actually back to his pre-gubernatorial
moderation, 'twas claimed), fake or real, seals the deal, provides yer
"closure." The Devil wants to keep his homeboy close;  seems like one uncanny opportunist
recognizes another. "So put another log on the fire, boys..."

H'm-m-m. Maybe George met Ronnie and the Devil, walkin' side by side? Ronnie
(somehow) knew just how to spin "Sweet Home Alabama," for instance with that
slightly blurred "boo! boo! boo!" right after "in Birmingham they love the
Guv'ner." C'est finesse! He even got an honorary lieutenant governorship—oh yeah,
and a platinum nest egg—out of it. Also, in "Gimme Three Steps," Ronnie made
talking your way into a chance to run from a fight seem cool—it was cool,
especially when presented with manly enough flair. He'd be back for more.

But that's not why Ronnie's in Hell (or the Other Place). I'd say it's
because, according to Trucker-talk, he succeeded all too well in
selling backup singer Cassie Gaines (played on several tracks by suavely-belting
guest star Kelly Hogan [whose kaleidoscopic Atlanta-based art pop band The Jody Grind lost two members, and their opening act, poet Deacon Lunchbox, in a 1992 Alabama van crash])
---also selling himself---on this:"When it comes your time to go, ain't no good way to
go about it, no use thinking about it, you'll just drive yourself insane. Living in fear's
just another way of dying, so shut your mouth, and get your ass on the plane."
The sooner they all do that, the sooner they can "give this piece of shit back
to Aerosmith!"

Later there's someone on the ground, amid "Angels and Fuselage," calling
toward "what's coming next." (Here, it's better if you burn [or, in my case, dub]
in a Pizza Deliverance song, "Mrs. Dubose," in which another voice, somewhat
like Ronnie's, is overheard, among ordinary afternoon sounds: "You were such a
flower, now there's dust running through your veins, when my body dies, will
you remember my name?" I believe so).

The Drive-By Truckers have just been signed to open for Lynyrd Skynyrd, on
three early March dates, in Skynyrd's own Florida. They'll perform
Southern Rock Opera, natcherly. Especially heavy because bassist Leon Wilkeson,
 one of the few heretofore-surviving original Skyns, recently slipped out of the blue,
and into the black. (See drivebytruckers.com, grassrootsmedia.com, and
skynyrd.com for more information.)

.

Ah Know How To Undress Me

Ah Know How To Undress Me
Sensitive Maleness in CMT's Countdown

by Don Allred
July 18 - 24, 2001 Issue 29

Montgomery Gentry! Eddie "Peanut M &" M and Troy the G (uitarist, mainly)
often seem like they're dreaming on bar stools, yet somehow took CMA Award for
Duo of the Year 2000 away from eight-time winners Brooks & Dunn (not a lot of
competition, I'd say: duos?). Now, in sporty new MG hit "She Couldn't Change
Me," Eddie triumphs over post-Dixie Chicks itch/initiative by just chillin',
"settin' on the porch in mah overalls," 'til his prodi-gal finally brings it on
home to him (or them). Kind of The Odyssey in reverse, obverse, converse—anyway,
whatcha say, TROY?
Still, Brooks & Dunn's current big 'un leads CMT's Top 20 Videos: haunts the
crossroads between Das Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" (not a power
ballad, but romantic breathy-metal) and Neil's "Like a Hurricane" (but not Dyl's
"Hurricane"—this is mellower); B &/or D declare "Ain't NOTHIN' 'Bout You Baby"
(he or they don't like). Likewise, Aaron Tippin's "Kiss This" (" . . . and Ah
don't mean on mah rosy-red lips . . . ") stomps like Bob Seger and Huey Lewis
meeting Kenny "Footloose" Loggins, but then again, he's quoting a woman: It's
a conscious party all over CMT! Charlie (actually married to a Destiny's—er,
Dixie—Chick) Robison's "I Want You Bad": candid courtesy, with a good hard
solo toward the end. Live (!) clip of Billy Ray Cyrus, still trying to outlive
that "Achey-Breaky Heart"—too breathless to sing, finally, but he and his band
break into the most Bachman-Turner-Overdriven coda ever. He's your gladiator.
With each "Me Neither," Brad Paisley has to top himself, while trying to top
stubborn you, making something positive of your every rejection. (Wanna dance?
Him neither! What a relief!) But the guitars get to chatter like young folks
should, before Brad can paint himself out of the picture. And Gary Allan's "lo,
oh, vin', you! has made a man of me" matches the Monkees' (and Sex Pistols',
on live bootlegs) "I, I, I, I'm! not your steppin' stone"—flippin' the script?
But not necessarily contradictory at all, No Ma'am.

And oh, Lee Ann Womack's "Ashes by Now": She's real little, cute, (a
wised-up) Paula Jones after the nose job—in other words, cute in a Real People way,
like Chickspark Natalie Maines, but Lee Ann's flinging sexy accusations at a
faithless hill of beans, as if to say, "Look what you threw away, Fool." Arms
raised, she could be dancing by now; hip twitch, just enough to oops bump you off
the Tallahatchie Bridge. Dig if you will, Miz Maines—no boom boom Big Room
moves here. Girlfriend's smooth as a measuring spoon. Madonna and Prince were
this country-versatile when need be, after all: Arena tightens to lair.

.

Alias In Wonderland

Alias in Wonderland
Buffalo Gals and Mustang Sallys

by Don Allred
April 30th, 2001 7:00 PM Issue 18

Cyndi Boste, cowgirl of the outback
photo: Paul Fiddes
In 1972, a singer named Mary McCaslin flushed Hollywood and headed into a
West she'd seen only from airplanes. An open-eared folkie in the Age of Dick (Nixon) and
Quaaludes, she carried a notebook, a guitar, hard-won studio expertise, and a
hard-fed appetite for something more. McCaslin soon scored a (reformed)
outlaw hubby, Jim Ringer. Together they assembled The Bramble and the Rose,
recently reissued on Rounder/Philo.
This album contains: death and dreaming, "Geronimo's Cadillac,"  "Hit The Road, Jack," and Christmas---well,  as seasonal suggestions via the jingle-jangle twilight of fresh air "Strawberry Roan", anyway, which generously scatters phosphorescent, undersea-like associations over the Rockies, for de facto lagniappe
---not too far from the high lonesome call to the Reaper, to "spare me over for another year"---
just call it all seeds 'n' needs. Traditional and Contemporary Songs of the American People, simple and subtle as you please. Something in the songs and/or the singers tries to keep
its distance. But like death and dreaming, like life, the music they make
passes through everything; one damn thing leads to another. And of course, it all
started with a woman, pulling her hat down over one eye.

The first time I laid eyes on another Hellywood Kid, Maria McKee, fronting
her "cowpunk" band Lone Justice (a name that makes the same kind of sense as
Blazing Saddles), I saw her as an ancestor/descendant of Bette Midler and Stevie
Nicks: a Gold Dust Woman, (re-)born to raise the stakes and stage in Silver
City (prospectors shooting down chandeliers in appreciation). (Bette Midler?
Western as Hawaii, as in "Who you think brought-um steel guitars, Paleface?" And speaking of Midler, she's Jewish,  as possibly was Annie Oakley a/k/a Phoebe Moses---O rabbithole, spare me over for another point.)

McKee's new Ultimate Collection (Hip-O) , while discreetly tweaking Big 80s blare,  nevertheless unleashes a careening career saga, yet leaves out her self-written, unreleased "To Deserve You" (credibly covered by Midler, on Bette of Roses). Here, a young girl avidly peers out the window at women whose otherworldly beauty and grace come from their virtue. She wants to "shine in
your eye like a jewel," to be as good as, well, gold. This song clarifies (or at least uncovers an especially striking facet of) MM's sometimes distractingly refracted raised-religious-in-Tinseltown
sensibility. She was onstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with her big brother Bryan McLean,
ex-member of punk-psych pioneers Love, when she was only three. (He was also a romantic,  Christian-speculative songpoet, whose "Don't Toss Us Away"t was first launched into lonely orbit by teen McKee on one of the earliest known Lone J. demo tapes.). "Soup, Soap, and Salvation" depicts the wee McKee as pounding a tambourine (and even the Sunset Strip?!), with her allegedly ex-beatnik/born-again parents, belting Gospel to the glitz-blitzed.

But Bryan also turned her on to Broadway, and Maria's teen dreams included
studying with Sondheim at Juilliard. Regarded by some in her hometown as a
proto-alt-country vanguard artist turned Corporate Rock wash-out, she wrote (and released)
"Panic Beach" (included on Ultimate...): Here she finds herself spending another day
by the bee-yootiful sea, taking her place in the sideshow of invisible
friends, eternal Hollywood Hopefuls, utterly ignored. At first the sweet 'n' salty swirl recalls McKee's art based on vintage poster images of L.A, beach areas mirroring Coney Island,  then it's like being trapped inside
the ever growing mural of "The Burning of Los Angeles" in Nathanael West's The
Day of the Locust. But all in her mind—which is finally obligingly
noticed—and then swallowed, by the depths of the now alarmingly reverberating stereo
sky.

However, once in said sky, she learns to ride the whirlwind she hath reaped,
playing guitar like Mick Ronson and swinging by the star once called Ziggy,
into her personal-space odysseys (freshly cherry-picked for UC, from her 1996
breakthrough, Life Is Sweet). She even whistles like Bowie did in "Golden Years," but spookier, a
coded refrain, on "If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)"—from the Pulp Fiction
soundtrack, appropriately enough. She's one of those Western Women, like
Belle Starr and Calamity Jane, Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena, forever having to
migrate through dime novels and disappearances, trespasses and transports.
Straying is the tradition—that Satellite o' Love always needs more lasso.

Further West, Cyndi Boste has been called "the Lucinda Williams of
Australia." And both artists do bear down, on what could otherwise easily remain mere
backwatery blues-mindedness. But Car Wheels on a Gravel Road usually works best
when Williams looks up from her road maps, and lets the music unwind, even
snake around some. On Home Truths (Warrior) Boste keeps playing her cards (hungry
textures, tiny solos, rationed hooks) close to the vest, but her game's always
gaining momentum. Meanwhile, she's gathering scattered impressions, impulses,
hoarding insights and courage. Sounds like more tension, friction, than Car Wheels.
At just the right moment, she does cuts out, through the day's apparently endless scrutiny of

things-as-they-are, into the desert night, where "new" things start to move around
differently—she wanted it, she's got it. No time left, even after "Daddy Comes
Home," for the world to end, or begin. The deep rich voice intensifies its
clipped delivery of key phrases. These click on by, like slide shows, empty
chambers, telephone poles: she's making a long distance call.

Back in the U.S.A., two girls, sisters, stand at the sink, doing the dishes,
relentlessly critiquing their encounters with guys, maybe even The Guy, when
all's (ever?) said and done. Meanwhile, outside the kitchen window, Guy Life,
High Life (the blue sonic boom 'n' slide of air patrols, stunt pilots, crop
dusters), goes on all around them. Oh, sometimes they get taken for rides—in more
ways than one! "I'm not Sally," they have to point out. True: They're Stacy
and Rhonda Hill. But I'm Not Sally is the name of their band.
 They own this whole yipee-yi-sky show, lock stock 'n' Guy-wire. Neat. Recorded in David
(Camper/Cracker) Lowery's studio and involving, for instance, known pedal steelist
Eric Heywood (who also plays with deft, deadpan dyad sirens Freakwater); still, I've
never heard anything quite like their Jewels and Fools (Big Prank). Alt-country
cowpokes come a-courtin', inspired by "Don't Fear the Reaper," rather than the
Byrd-bleached "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"? Giddyup!

Cyndi Boste's Home Truths and I'm Not Sally's Jewels and Fools can be ordered
from http://www.milesofmusic.com/
(Update: When Lloyd Maines played his daughter Natalie's audition tape for the hiring-firing Dixie Chicks foresisters, "Panic Beach" got her the meeting.)

.

Clockwork Pinata

A Clockwork Piñata
The Mollys' Only a Story

by Don Allred
August 16 - 22, 2000 Issue 33

Once upon a time in the west

The Mollys
Only a Story
Apolkalips Now
Buy

Go right in, they've stopped charging cover: "Tha ball-oons, are all falling
a-wa-ay, you can see them slipping down in the corners like the day." That's
Nancy McCallion, commencing Only a Story, the new Mollys album. "They're
pulling up the dance floor in the ha-ah-all"—her "small" voice always gets in
the keyhole. "You think you've found your Elvis, then you watch him choke and
fall." Sure enough, here comes another Molly, Kevin Schramm, bound to fall
like a King Kong Presley, limping and wheezing (right past her!) like an
accordionist shouldn't. Sometimes he pauses, still grinding away, moments piling up.
Then he lurches on.

I know: he's just making sure we really get "Don't Come On Strong and
Run"—Mollys don't coddle no Good Intentions. Tucson's Mollys ARE
Arizpanictential Celtic Country Polka —which, for the past decade, has usually added up to "Rock'n'Roll by Other Means." 

So I'm bumfuzzled by this opening song, which gets funnier, more Mollyfried, but settles into/for a heretofore uncharacteristically "oh well" kind of groove.

 I keep waiting for it to take off, like "Kathleen" on 1995's This Is My Round: "I seen the girl you're living with, a-climbing up the hill, she had a pack upon her back a-picking through the rocks, and she and your old milking goat were dragging a big box." Not exactly Anna Nicole Smith in your
DeLorean, Pappy, but close enough for these quarters.

 Don't mistake Mollyspeople for low-expectations-having, though. If so, they wouldn't be coming so far just to start all over—and over again, like Kathleen. Her kind ride righteous orecarts to the last exit and start walkin'. No hosses in these westerns—plenty drumming down the street, though---often driven by co-lead throat Catherine Zavala, all the way from London, where she and McCallion long ago did behold The Pogues and Los Lobos on the same bill (CZ, likely a fan of pioneering conjunto bandleader/song stylist/accordion queen Eva Ybarra, also and especially flexing x shivering husky vocal timbers-timbres, oying and oi!-ing, on the very live limited edition 1996 Wanking Out West, http://www.mollys.com only), with chief scribe McC. tin-whistling daylight through bullet holes in cowpoke ballads. Why? Well, as 1997's Moon Over the Interstate puts it, "I want to polka, but nobody polkas alone."

The polka connection is key here, no matter the moment's rhythm, and songs can just keep breathing like an accordion, even when it's not playing.

Looking for a new partner? You might find a new dance—or find yourself
drastically realigning an old one. 1995's Hat Trick ska-pogos an impossibly bright
"Ode to Joy" riff 'til it's Ludwigging "All Around My Hat," willing a husband's
desertion toward Golden Opportunity: She used to know some other men?! On
Moon..., a more cautious soul looks harder before leaping through a
sand-surfing-with-Vikings pipeline, into "And I won't settle for anything less, till I see
what your love has, do-oh-oh-ne." In the new "Don't Want to Outlive That Man Too
Long," McCallion takes Western Swing through scary places it rarely admits to going.
She uses the bad stuff (now including that occasional "Oh well" sense) as a motorvator to whip up the good stuff. So maybe any new glint of jade is just age's cornplasters sticking better to midthirtysomethings who've always
portrayed Cool Old Broads so well.

Into the headphones: "Only a Story" herself. Tango-istically inclined. Plenty
atmosphere: dim blue cold dry digital AZ a.c. Sure, Schramm's accordion's here
(leaves falling on cue), Dan Sorenson's skull-wrinkling (now skulking) bass.
Gary Mackender's tapping and scraping a snare. He co-wrote this song with McCallion,
they're the main two you hear. A woman is listing the steps of seduction.
She's a tour guide, a hunter, a living display. "It's only a story," she keeps
singing so you know that she knows it—you know that the more that she knows it,
the more she knows it just can't be true.

Everything stops but the drum. But eventually she resumes. "For you were my
thing, and I followed that thing, night and day." She's counting
silently—through the guy, the ideal, the process, the story they made up together, handed
each other. "Let's go at this thing one last time."

Her eyes close, but I'm wise. Because here's where I can always draw a breath
and say, "Yeah, I see your jewels, Honey—tick tick tick." Anything
this clocklike is all too easy to watch, from whatever distance. But meanwhile the rhythm
continues to wear through her waiting, like it wears through mine, like it could
wear through all creation, to time to think once again: more likely the
beat's only the winding-down, tenacious, telltale heart of Story. Yet somehow, tonight, in the
middle line of the chorus ("Sleep, little darling, s-l-e-e-e-e-p") McCallion begins to wail
that last word, whereupon I suddenly remember another chorus, from Moon...:
"D-a-a-a-n-c-e with me Johnny, for so in love am I," sailing repeatedly out  of ever-shifting, unbidden, inescapable, murder scene, courtroom spectacle, chopping the ripple of  dreams, memories, afterimages (including mysteries, but never far enough from the evening news, and personal re-runs of a "Tramp Steamer," sailing to exciting prospects in America, where one's daughter exits her car in the dark, keys held like a weapon, the better to make it to the front door, sometimes.)

Trying to touch something—maybe one more last round will push through to everything, anything else, and be done with it.

So Only a Story's title cut winds up sounding even more like it did as I
left: fearless, dissolving. Yeah, she got me. Now I keep listening for the witch
from track seven in every song, and I hear—more than before. Even in the one I
thought I understood (and still love) best.

Mariachi horns turn around to greet us calmly. "I swallowed the poison, I got
on the airplane"; "My Manda" (sung and co-written by Catherine Zavala) is in progress. A "mule" is carrying cocaine into the United States from Colombia, so "the son of my son can rise from the dust in the streets." She's tough, angry, set—in the plan, in the scenes of her life—always adding up to this
present. She sees the cities below her, the clouds alongside; she feels the rubber tear, the cocaine burn; she bears down. Everything is contained, and contains her. She continues flying on, past any expected Tragi-Glorious Climax. The horns just give a final nod, and that's it.

Pushing notes through noses, nooses, earwax, whatever's in the way: I 
think of the Mollys (now minus Zavala and Mackender, plus new electric
folk-blues-rock guitarist-vocalist Danny Krieger and drummer Marx Loeb, since Story's release)as still tromping along, stealing that sign from
Lonely Street, crunching past an
old man with no small talk: "But now we're a country of ser-vi-ces, ain't
noo-body serr-vicin' meeee." Who nevertheless, like most Mollyspeople, has "had" a
few friends: "And one of them, Jo-Leene . . . " Sing along now! " . . . and
then the young man said come on with me. . . " (Uh, sir? Oh, sure thing,
kiddo—after you.)

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The Mollys play the Rodeo Bar August 20.

(comments on the Mollys' Trouble incl. in this round-up of '03 releases: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2004/03/even-more-guest-mentalism-from-don.html)(subsequent McCallion and Zavala albums---none with each other, alas, but all still worthy of all these "mixed-button Accordion-Americans," according to my 2004 comments, kicking off Mollys-related coverage in  The Freelance Mentalists archives:

McCallion, Take A Picture of Me: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2011/01/hand-down-your-head-tom-doobie-main.html  McCallion, Go To Ground: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2021/01/nscene-in-submeme-country-etc-ballot.html  Zavala/Minute2Minute, Postcards From El Bossa: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2017/01/from-lifes-other-side-2016-releases.html)

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