Rolling Country 2006 Thread

Gotta be the case. Last time I saw her on TV she lives in one of the pit desert towns on California, making it hard to believe she'd care what the Voice publishes unless it was pointed out with the admonition to launch a protest. So please to remove "lock 'n' loll"
from that review, y'know.

You'll want to be on the lookout for Copperhead's "Live & Lost." Southern rock band with guitar density equiv to "Big Boss Man" by the Headhunters. (Although the copperhead is the northern Pennsylvania strain of the eastern cottonmouth, or water moccasin, so maybe they should have called themselves, Massassauga, the native American name for it and risked getting picketed.) Listening to it repeatedly convinced me my dislike of bands like the Drive By-Truckers is legitimate. Tunes-wise, it has
some good ones although the titles make you think "dreck."

And it has no relationship with the stoner rock contingent that tries
to regularly pass itself off as southern rock or influenced by Skynyrd/ZZ/blah-blah, anything classic rock to get you to listen to the same old horribly bowdlerized Sabbath ribs (and if you think this means I'm talking about The Sword, a contender for most foolish and annoying Texas band I heard late last year, you're right).

Killer version of "Whiskey & Mama" and it's not even the second or third best song on the disc. "Keepin' On" would be great for CMT and all of it would be like Keith Urban if Urban turned up the guitar,
added a loud organ and sounded as classic rocker who rides a motorcycle as he looks. Vocals don't sound Urban, they sound Ricky Medlocke.

Funny, these days I'm getting the best sounds off the frustrated and desperate vanity pressings distributed by CD Baby. If you can sift them on-line, not at CD Baby proper [and I'm not giving away my patented trade secret on how to do it, sorry, although ask private] there are surprises surprisingly easy to find. Which you can't locate via Google or by reading webzines, although -after- you find them, you can track down one or two reviews, almost always on web-only publications in Europe in foreign languages where they are still big on US classic rock. [Thanks Google "translate this page" tab.]

I think a lot of DJs were making the connections as soon as they heard the rockabilies' records; likewise some of the less up-tight press. Guralnick cites a Billboard review of "Good Rockin' Tonight" from Fall 1954: "Elvis Presley proves again that he is a sock new singer with his performances on these two oldies. His style is both country and r.&b. and he can appeal to pop." And another Billboard review from December 1954: "...the hottest piece of merchandise on the...Louisiana Hayride at the moment is Elvis Presley, the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat." Not exactly visionary criticism but kinda accurate. (We should collectively vow to reintroduce the adjective "sock" to the rock crit lexicon.)

if Pete Holsapple
was really Paul Westerberg,
and was on steroids

so, saw the Townes Van Zandt documentary last night. very sad, very troubling. you get the sense that VZ was this still figure around which the normal world whirled, and in everything he said there was this catch, this pause, before he smiled in the most fatalistic way possible. yet I found him very funny indeed, and I found myself admiring the way he simply didn't seem to care about fame, money, backup singers...and although I admire Guy Clark's music, I have to say that if there's an award for "enabler," it seems to me Guy Clark might well get it, as he lived with Van Zandt and seemed to idolize him beyond all reason. the creepiest moments came with Nashville DJ Ralph Emery, who was, uh, taken aback a bit by Townes. and it was even creepier when VZ played his big hit "Pancho and Lefty" on some Nashville Now TV show complete with goopy backup singers and band; he sounded neutered, out of it. but when Townes played Lightnin' Hopkins he seemed most himself, to my ears, so maybe the thing is that he was really a bluesman as well as a songwriter's songwriter...I haven't totally decided yet just how great a songwriter he was, some of what he did falls into my blind spots, but he was damned good, if not "the world's greatest songwriter" (I mean, Randy Newman?). so, fine film, even though it seemed to lay Townes's later problems on electroshock therapy and seemed to gloss over any other tendencies by saying that "Townes was the kind of kid you find in every family who could get anyway with anything, and who didn't care about all his advantages."

http://home.comcast.net/~eddycee28/

no, I don't remember that it did. it seemed a bit hazy and incomplete on his family history, actually. and it seemed to gloss over the conflict over the rights to his music (between Eggers and his family), too.

"Sunlight Breaks In" and "Just Like Me" (off *Tracks* by Uncle Billy's Smokehouse from I guess Worcester, Mass, or thereabouts) are like Guns N Roses crossed with Alice In Chains doing country-rock fit for CMT; the guy's high register actually pulls off its Axl attempts.
(The rest of the album is excellent too, but more hard rock than c&w.)

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Josh Turner is not an alt-country guy; he projects his voice, and it's a warm booming baritone, I guess (inasmuch as I know how to identify "baritone"). Still not sure how much I like it. He did that long black train song last year that lotsa people loved but which, for me, was more like "lookit me I'm doing a long black train song, how dark is that, huh?" It was okay, though. So's his new album that's coming out, *Your Man,* or at least the 9 songs I've listened to so far --well, not all of them, not even most of them. But "No Rush" is a truly sexy lover-with-a-slow-hand song that reminds me that the Pointer Sisters had their country moments too (not that it remotely sounds like them). And there a song about buying "Loretta Lynn's Lincoln" that drops lots of classic country names that, okay, well, it sort of annoyed me so far I guess. And one called "White Noise" that's a duet with some familiar country voice from the '80s (John Anderson, maybe? Or maybe not) who isn't mentioned on my advance CD; the idea is that country music is "white noise" but one line's a disclaimer about how this ain't a question of black and white, it's about Johnny Cash and Charlie Pride, so I have no idea what the "white" part IS supposed to mean. And there's another duet with some way older country guy (Ralph Stanley, maybe? these are totally wild guesses mind you) called "Me and God"; first line argues that anything's possible with me and God, but at first I swore Josh was saying anything was possible with a MEAN God, which would of course be a much scarier yet more interesting idea, but no dice. So, um....at least ONE good song, the "No Rush" one. But maybe more. (And I am gonna be embarrassed when I figure out who I confused with John Anderson....okay, I'll check the internet: Gulp, it IS John Anderson; Josh co-wrote it with him -- I passed the blindfold test, yay! And "Me And God" IS Ralph Stanley!! I'm shocked I got those right.)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), December 23rd, 2005.

New Josh Turner winds down to a song about gravity that's sadly more metaphorical than scientific followed by the rote "Way Down South" that ends with some nice jaunty picking of "Dixie". Just remembered there was also an earlier tune about feeling out of place in the big city. If this was an *Entertaiment Weekly* review, I'd give it a B.

-- xhuxk (xedd...), December 23rd, 2005.

Actually, you kind of CAN sift through bands at CD Baby proper. Searching by subgenre seems to pull up a lot of chaff (though some of it inevitably looks interesting), but there's one search engine function where you can look for bands who theoretically sound like, oh, "Montgomery Gentry" or "Blackfoot" or "Johnny Taylor" or "Opeth" or "Teena Marie" or "Rick Springfield" or whoever else you plug in, and this links to their websites...I just started doing it in the past couple days, and it gets addictive. Will reveal results when I have some.

(They are also what Sufjans Stevens's Michigan album should've been.)

Pedant alert: They were a one-hit wonder, but not with that song. (It was never a commercial single and so never charted.) They followed it up with the Top 20 "Out of My Head," a disposable ballad that is to them what "Look What You've Done" is to Jet. They later did some stuff I really liked but nothing that clicked like "The Way."

P.S. Western PA is an underrated source for indie music today imho.

The numbers are fundamentally astonishing. They come in loads -- 200 at least per week, often as many as 800 some, through the end of the year as the entire catalog is moved on-line for download. Very few of these acts, thousands, get even the slightest mention in even the fringes of the media. Since so many are classic rock and the genres that the writing class likes to shun, it's predictable. Plus these are often bands so clueless they don't even know how to market to the urban slum genre pubs.

But that's where most of my good new listens to are coming from in the new year so far. Electric Boogie Dawgs, for instance, from California, have a name so terrible it's good (like Billie's Smokehouse), but their album is sure a lot better than the gobbler just issued by the Shack-Shakers. And I did like the latter's a year ago.

Anyway, one of the fellows is going out with a girl and her pop is a local country artist. He's so sincere and earnest he instantly inspires nausea. The kid plays electric guitar and does freeform emo Xtian metal which I couldn't stand either but might be someone else's bag if he got on Myspace or something. Heck, maybe he is in on Myspace.

I saw the first episode of "Country Boys.* Not sure if that one kid's student newspaper ever came out. Wonder how long it'll take for the other kid's goofy christ-metal song to inspire a wiseass cover of it.

elieen carey *hearts of time* on now. nashville-based, i think, but she put out the CD herself apparently. first two songs are pop-country backed by stones music, very mellencamp. and a couple of the slower songs that come later ("someone like you," "blue collar man" --nope, not a styx or BTO cover, but that's okay) are just as good.