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 Planetberries,
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 squinted-out 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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