Rolling Country 2006 Thread

nah, actually, the bones guy is even worse singer. probably reminds me more of some long-lost proto-alt-country cowpunk band i can place right now. but i like it okay. the band's blues-punk gunk is better, partly because it pushes harder. weird how much a sucker i still am for silly ancient backwoods birthday party/gun club shtick when i've never been all that big a fan of those two bands. (honestly, i don't own a single album by either of them, haven't in years, though once upon a time i did.) also "bulge" on the bones EP reminds me of one of those sub-fall late '80s british art-punk bands i used to like so much: three johns or janitors or membranes or somebody of that ilk.

A question for our Canadian correspondents: Any thoughts about Matt Mays & El Torpedo, who if I recall the press bio have had three top 20 hits in the great white north this year? Press bio also compared them to Tom Petty w/ Heartbreakers and Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse, I think. I guess I'm sort of hearing it, I dunno. Song on now is called "Cocaine Cowgirl." Matt's voice is not nearly as distinctive as Neil's or Tom's, I'm thinking so far. But his songs do appear to have some degree of drama to them. Maybe he deserves to be lumped in with recent Drive By Truckers? He's not bugging me as much as DBT's have on their past couple of albums, but maybe that just means my expectations are lower. None of this tracks are killing me, either.

On the live album? Sure he does, Don - I mention it in the review.

do all the Harp reviews have to be that short

Well, most of their regular reviews (except the lead one) seem short, but mine run in the print edition as a separate page known as "Last Roundup," sort of consumer-guide-like but without grades and not alphabetically ordered. So I tended to write them short to fit more albums on the page -- That was my own choice. (I wrote four such columns, two of which have run so far in the magazine.)

xps

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a3uPZ97AXU

Haha, she sucks.

Yeah, Don, heard the Costello/Toussaint. The DVD is the thing, actually, because you get to see Toussaint and Elv riding thru NOLA together. I find the record good, but as usual, why do I want to listen to Costello when I can listen to Lee Dorsey? But he does sing OK. I am probably going to sit thru all that crap at the Americana thing so I can hear Toussaint. Also going to catch, I hope, Carlene Carter late tonite, and there are a couple other things I want to explore. I guess Costello's gonna be there, too.

LOL

Ever hear that bizarre album he did for Casablanca in 1980, THE REAL THANG?

To call it, this was a strange, one-year-too-late attempt to jump on the disco bandwagon (this was well after the whole "disco sucks" movement had come & gone); when I interviewed TJW some time back, he referred to it as "techno swamp." But you know what? It turns out good in spite of itself; his attempt to go disco is so backhanded, it comes off sounding like Lightnin' Hopkins making a southern soul record, and that is a good thang indeed. He wouldn't have gotten past the velvet rope at Studio 54 with a record like this, but Bobby Rush fans would love it.

It even includes a new version of "Polk Salad Annie" with a reference to pot-smoking during the spoken intro (Tony Joe also told me that when he used to play at rock festivals during the hippie era, audiences thought that polk salad was another name for marijuana.)

What is this comp you speak of, and how does disco relate to Elvis' version of "Polk Salad Annie?"

americana: got a couple things to turn around today, but quickly, the best things i saw were hayes carll and jim lauderdale and ray wylie hubbard at this showcase where they all do one song and it's just like the bluebird café. hayes really has a country voice. he did a great one about this hotel where a former ramblin' gamblin' man is living by himself, in the middle of nowhere, and he's crippled or something so he can't leave. very spooky, nice, and hayes seems to me to have a real feel for that kind of thing. and a song from his "little rock" album. ray w.h. was incredible, funny, did "snake farm" about how much fun it is to fuck amongst snakes and so forth, and proved himself perhaps the greatest living or the last living talking-blues performer. good guitar, actually, proto-modal-blooze-non-lick/lick stuff. he had everybody laughing. lauderdale did a soul-ish ballad he wrote and one he wrote for george jones, and sang the latter sort of like jones. he's not a bad singer but he ain't jones.

hacienda bros. were entertaining, competent, and they did make the journey from cowboy music to soul in their set, wore cowboy hats, the guitarist sounded like he'd been studying his american studios guitar playing. good, nothing too heavy. dan penn was supposed to play but he only did a *bridge* with the brothers! we all missed it! cary baker had a picture of it on his digital camera, said "here, see, he played," and we're like, fuck, we missed it.

tres chicas was a buzz thing. personally i think they are nice girls, and goddam the mercy lounge was crowded for them, and they sounded like the byrds. the laggy tempos, chiming guitars, the affectless harmonies. i found it overrated and antiseptic. they sounded like the byrds, fairport convention--electric folk-rock of the high-minded variety circa 1968.

it was just too crowded in there, at those clubs on eighth ave. s., at some point. for me, anyway. i can't stay up late enough to see carlene carter, who started at 12-30 or something like that. heard she was good, good band, got a record coming out.

solomon burke was supposed to give off love in a meet-greet, but he did not show. he's playing the belcourt here for a taping, soon, and he has described the buddy miller record and sessions he did here as real relaxed, perhaps to a fault, with emmylou harris baking him cookies and everybody just pickin'. like he needs a cookie. i dunno, i like "nashville" by burke but it doesn't knock me out. he sings OK and there are certainly good songs. with joe tex dead and swamp dogg not makin' the goddam americana-fest, and gram parsons feared missing in the big hurricane that just wiped out new orleans well and for good, nothing's as fun as it used to be.

Other goings on included idiotic panels about Americana Image Makeover and booking agents telling people that it's not worth touring Europe cause you can make just as much in the lower 40. WTF. Evening showcase pleasures included Anne McCue, nervous but intense, covering Tony Joe White, right before he took the stage to descend fully into the primal blues ooze; Scott Miller loud as fuck; Carlene Carter looking sexy for having put on about 30 pounds and rocking and singing strong despite a meh band; a bracing solo James Hunter set in the Internet Cafe lounge; and a 1:30am set by Ray Wylie Hubbard, backed up by Seth James and Gary Nicholson on mean cat guitars, hilarious and iconoclastic without ever trying to be more than he is.

I'd go again, just for the free smokes all week. Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. pretty much subsidized my trip. Next time, Edd, we have to hang at the after hours hospitality suite. Open bar till 4am.

listening to sliding on the frets, the hawaiian guitar collection, there are several tracks where the volacaztions move from something hawaiian to something either bluesy (oscar woods here) or bluegrassy (the blue ridge ramblerS), or strangely enough yodelling
(the jaw dropping bezos hawaiian orhestra, singing sti honoloou(sp)...

i know that there was a hawaiiana craze in the southern united states (well in all of the united states in the 20s and 30s), and i know that the steel guitar came to country thru that craze, and the linear notes make some tennous connectections b/w blue grass, native hawiaan music, and the blues, among other things, so:

1) does anyone know anymroe of this history
2) how did hawaiian guitar become so popular in appalichia
3) did the work function the opposite way, is there a wakiki blue grass scene
4) w/ ww2, statehood, and the like, i understand the hawaiiana craze from the mid 50s, but have no idea where it came from the 20s or so?
5) also, does anyone know where else i can here this kind of thing

dierks covering barbara's alleged "fast lanes and country roads" now. it rocks.

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE67818DE4EAD7E20C79A3A40CDAD67FD1BFE5AFB86112F0456D3B82D40AF1844C34FA39A81B8E576B466ADFF2EA21606D9C8EF5CFDDB764C40&sql=11:6gjveaw04xg7~T5

how hard is it to find the box set on ebay or something?

Also great on the (potentially eddy 2006 top ten) mandrell tribute: leann rimes's over-the-top adult r&b "if loving you is wrong i don't want to be right" (apparently previously sung by bobby blue bland, the drifters, isaac hayes, luther ingram, the emotions, and most significantly in mandrell's case millie jackson -- she did other millie j. songs too, right? though i doubt she ever sat on a toilet taking a dumb on an LP cover); terri clark's rocking "sleeping single in a double bed"; blaine larsen's very jazzily western swinging "i wish that i could fall in love today." wow. (paisley's sabbath/blondie rhythm track turns out mainly to be a hard boogie.)

also, bruce's "stand on it" wasn't done by mac mcanaly (whoever he is -- i've heard he's good but not sure i've ever heard him); it was done by mel mcdaniel. i always get those two mixed up, but mcdaniel (of "louisiana saturday night" fame) is the one whose best-of album i was retarded to have gotten rid of once upon a time. (xgau's '80s book gives the LP with "stand on it" a B; the greatest hits a B+.)

Well, Kenny Chesney talks about "Jack and Diane" (along with Steve Miller's "Keep On Rockin' Me Baby" --that's what he calls it; what is it really, just "Rockin' Me"? -- and Billy Joel's "Only The Good Die Young") in "Live Those Songs." That's one. (The Leather Nun talk about "Pink Houses" in "Pink House," but they probably don't count.)

ha, basically who it totally sounds like (except with a girl singing) is Rednex! (Was their "Cotton Eyed Joe" a two-step hit in the U.S., or only a techno dance hit in Europe? Now I need to know.)

Now Bomshel's totally unnecessary but perfectly entertaining "Devil Went Down to Georgia" cover is making me wonder about apparent non-sequiturs I never gave a moment's worth of thought to before:

"The devil's in the house of the rising sun": I'm assuming this means the whorehouse itself, and is hence a moral warning? Except the house is in New Orleans, and he's in Georgia. Dude gets around!

"Chicken's in the bed pan, pickin' out dough." Or at least that's what it sounds like. I guess it would make perfect sense if you work in a bakery. But what does it have to do with the rest of the song? Was Charlie appropriating an ancient square dance call, or what?