Pages tagged “issue 16”

While slabs of pork smoke on a huge barbecue, ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha wanders around bombed out of his platinum-haired skull, ranting about vintage automobiles to anyone who’ll listen. A shirtless, wolf-hairy Har Mar Superstar spins vinyl poolside while two of his acolytes dance in front of him. And the gay/straight Mutt and Jeff duo Junior Senior roams the grounds, chatting up anyone with an exotic accent.

From their umbrella-tabled perch on the hillside of this Austin, Texas, Elks Lodge, Sharin Foo and Sune Rose Wagner survey the surreal scene—another chichi private party at this year’s bustling SXSW music festival—and grin in debauched delight. Their Copenhagen combo The Raveonettes lives for such twisted affairs, sighs the raven-haired, ebony-clad Wagner, who’d spun a few Cramps-sinister platters himself before surrendering the turntables to Har Mar. In fact, Wagner adds, he recently relocated to bustling New York City, mainly for its captivating aura of decadence. It’s exciting, he says, because noir-ish urban scenes—like the late-night action in Taxi Driver—just look good.

Hence the funereal title of The Raveonettes’ latest, Pretty In Black, a flashlight tour through the dankest catacombs of vintage American R&B, surf and rockabilly, complete with seedy sonnets about groupies (“Love In A Trashcan”), somnambulism (“Sleepwalking”), homelessness (“Seductress Of Bums”), suicidal romance (“Here Comes Mary”) and trailer-trash spousal abuse (“Red Tan”).

When he penned the set, Wagner confesses, “I was reading a lot of these tacky juvenile-delinquent novels from the ’50s, like Jailbait and Gang Girl—they were really entertaining, and all about the nice girl who falls in love with a gang leader while everyone disapproves.” He pauses to rub his eyes and slide even deeper into the umbrella’s protective shadow. “I’m sorry—I just don’t function that well during the daylight. It’s very hard for me to stay focused.”

The statuesque blonde Foo—outfitted in an Austin-appropriate Western shirt, skin-tight miniskirt and cowboy boots—takes over the tale. Sure, she says, The Raveonettes stunned fans with their first two albums Whip It On and Chain Gang Of Love, which blended sunny Shangri-Las melodies with grim Jesus And Mary Chain feedback. “But we thought of those records as appetizers, as just the beginning,” she explains.

And instead of layering her voice in tandem with Wagner’s, this time around she trills lead on several Richard Gottehrer-produced tracks, including a techno-pop cover of “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “Ode To L.A.,” a duet with the legendary Ronnie Spector. Other top-flight guests include Velvet Underground drummer Mo Tucker and original Suicide keyboardist Martin Rev.

“At ?rst, we were afraid that we’d get all disillusioned, meeting such idols,” Foo sighs. “But we were really lucky—we met three amazing people, and we love them even more now. And it just feels so right to have them on the album. Now, stylistically, we can go anywhere—we’ve opened all the doors for ourselves, and that’s a very liberating feeling.”

Wagner doesn’t understand why more bands—once they establish some street cred—don’t recruit their idols or work to expand stylistic horizons. “With this album, I couldn’t wait to do something different, to use my influences in a different way,” concludes the vintage-rock enthusiast. “That was the whole idea about it. Remember how the second Strokes album was sorta the same as the first album? There were some good songs on it, but nothing was really happening. I just don’t wanna fall into that trap. The Raveonettes are capable of doing so much stuff, so I think we should just do it, y’know?”

“This band is about doing something with your life,” says guitarist Michael Zakarin about his band The Bravery, which formed in the smoldering ruins of post-9/11 New York. “After the attacks, the life seemed to go out of people. It’s so easy to give in, take the easy way out and do the day-to-day shit job you hate. That’s not what we’re about.”

A year and a half after forming, The Bravery is on a much-hyped national tour in support of its self-titled debut, recorded and mixed in the band’s apartment. “We weren’t confined [by] studio time, studio money or studio pressure, so we could do what we wanted.”

Thick synth beats and thumping bass lines are The Bravery’s stock and trade. “We get compared to Joy Division and New Order all the time,” says Zakarin. “Those are really good bands, but it’ll be the end of the day before we put on ‘Bizarre Love Triangle.’ Bands like The Beatles or The Kinks are really our biggest influences.”

The Kinks with eyeliner, maybe. The Bravery is part of a resurgence of bands—from The Faint to Franz Ferdinand—who have successfully mined early-’80s sounds and styles. Headlines were made last spring when Killers singer Brandon Flowers accused The Bravery of aping The Killers’ sound. “He acts like he created all this,” Zakarin says. “Those guys are just a bunch of crooners from Las Vegas. We made our record long before we’d ever heard of them.”

“As the listener, I am the final element in the making of music,” writes Paul Morley in Words and Music: a History of Pop in the Shape of a City. In the recently released Bloomsbury paperback—Morley’s ambitious attempt to define the relevance and appeal of pop—the veteran British NME music journalist and Art of Noise member equates listener to musician. Without ears to hear it, music might as well be irrelevant. Fans aren’t passive disciples; they’re part of the band.

Morley’s greatest discernment in Words and Music is a reassuring one for avid album collectors who’ve picked up a guitar and failed miserably at wrapping their clumsy fingers around the most basic chords. After all, it’s nice to believe you’re part of the process after you’ve invested such a huge amount of emotional energy in it.

Even so, it’s too bad Morley was born a ramblin’ man. His message about the music indeed gets lost in the words.

Morley’s ambition to respect the listener is both what makes and breaks his work. While critics, by definition, must take themselves seriously as part of the music equation, solipsism frequently surfaces as one of the cardinal annoyances of rock journalism. You get lost between your headphones, your readers can’t relate, and it all turns out reeking of cheesy self-indulgence.

Paragraphs run on forever as Morley’s allegorical premise gets out of hand. Trying to arrive at the formula behind perfect pop, economy drops to zero as Morley’s two favorite artists—yin-yang pair Kylie Minogue and Alvin Lucier—take the reader on a voyage through the history of popular music from the second century B.C. to today’s mp3. Overly philosophical meanderings about Morley’s place in the universe get unbearably tedious. Wordplay about the sweeping subject “from the hip of Elvis Presley to the lips of Eminem” waxes obsessive, too.

That said, it’s understandable how efficiency might elude you when discussing a subject you love, and Morley’s love for music can’t be denied. He’s a skilled and inspired listener as he attempts to arrive at the mystery behind pop’s power. In describing what makes Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” work, he suggests perspicaciously that perhaps it’s “in the way it combines tension with relief, repetitions with surprise, lubricating the imagination with gentle twists and turns, opening up emotional possibilities with little drops in temperatures and subtle increases in pressure.” If you have the patience to wade through his verbiage, you actually might learn something about listening.

And, despite the tedium, he’s recognized as an authority by the authorities. Brian Eno, for whom Morley has written liner notes, endorses him as “the greatest thinker/writer/social critic/ TV presenter since Plato/ Keynes/Duchamp/Betjeman.” And it’s true that Morley’s inclusion of succinct, authoritative lists of essential works could easily double as a reading/listening list for The History of Pop Music 101 class your university probably neglected to offer.

As Morley says himself, one of music’s greatest strengths is that it “can communicate something specific to us even without the use of words.” By using fewer himself (by about two-thirds) and including a companion CD, Morley and Words and Music wouldn’t have to get in the way of the listening art form he deems so important. After all, it’s a craft. And only good, clean unadulterated practice really makes perfect.

Drive-By Truckers' brethren get political, rock out on sophomore set

This band of roughnecks is in the business of bludgeoning listeners’ eardrums with anthemic, sledgehammer Southern rock. But Snake In The Grass has as much to do with The Stooges, Led Zeppelin and early AC/DC as it does with Lynyrd Skynyrd. Anchored by singin’ (and guitar-slingin’) husband-and-wife team Adam and Wendy Musick, as well as a rock-solid rhythm section, Southern Bitch wails like there’s no tomorrow, raging against what they see as blind American injustice, armed with a bazooka-full of seditious arena-rock riffs and a 5,000-lb. bomb of righteous indignation.

“Can we not talk about Soul Coughing anymore?” asks the mercurial band’s former frontman. While Mike Doughty, 35, is understandably more interested in touting the virtues of his brand-new CD Haughty Melodic, he will always be inextricably linked to the quartet with which he made of some of the ’90s’most unique pop.

Combining such diffuse elements as old movie samples, hip-hop and beat poetry into an amalgam Doughty once described as “slacker jazz,” the band released three critically revered albums, Ruby Vroom, Irresistible Bliss and El Oso, before breaking up in 2000.

After overcoming a heroin addiction five years ago, Doughty reinvented himself as an acoustic troubadour. Following a season of hitting the road solo while toting a pair of DIY releases, Skittish and Rockity Roll, Doughty is playing the record-label game again, recently signing to Dave Matthews’ ATO.

PASTE: It’s interesting that you chose Dan Wilson (of Trip Shakespeare and Semisonic) to produce—were you looking to bring out the “pop” element in what you do?

DOUGHTY: No, not really … Dan’s idea of a song usually incorporates more chord changes, a bridge, that kind of thing. His style is of a Beatles lineage, and mine’s of a more hip-hop or Velvet Underground line of thinking—hanging onto a repetitive groove for a long time. The fun of the collaboration was finding our middle ground.

P: How did Dave Matthews end up singing on “Tremendous Brunettes?” Of course, you’re on his label now, but it seems like an odd, and surprisingly conventional, pairing for a guy who used to work the door at the Knitting Factory.

D: I just think he’s awesome; his phrasing is exquisite. I opened for him on some big stadium dates, and was overwhelmed with the power his voice had, filling up that huge space. Anybody that finds him too conventional might want to check out one of those massive shows; it’s inspiring. He does “Big Rock” better than anybody I’ve ever encountered.

… The idea on the backing vocal was to do the hip-hop guest vocal thing; hand a verse to another artist, the way Busta Rhymes would guest on a Li’l Kim track. I detest it when the song says, “featuring so-and-so!” and it’s a backing vocal so buried in the mix it’s barely audible. I wrote the verse that Dave sang, but that was the notion.

P: You have a huge vocabulary and a lot of verbal dexterity, and your songs reflect this. Do you ever worry that your writing style is too much of a niche taste?

D: I can’t worry about it; what I can do is make the thing that moves me best. I think anything that breaks through to the larger audience has an exciting element of strangeness and newness to it. Look, I’m just not gonna break through by watering my lyrics down—it’ll sound half-assed. The only way I can be successful is by being the best version of myself I can possibly be. That’s what fascinates an audience. Soul, I think, is the purest, most uncut version of who you are.

P: Tell me about “Busting Up A Starbucks.” Is this—along with its shout-outs to metro NYC ’burbs—a statement about suburban homogenization?

D: Yeah, it is, kind of—though those suburb names, “Nyack!” and “East Orange!”… are more for fun than some kind of sociopolitical statement. It’s not an anti-Starbucks screed, but about youthful aggression, the darkness in revolutionary destruction—the Oedipal thing behind it. I love Starbucks, and were I to be separated from my daily iced triple grande soy latte, it would be a personal tragedy.

P: A few things haven’t changed from the Soul Coughing days—you’re still using the guitar as a percussion instrument, for example. What have been the biggest changes since then in how you write and perform?

D: Yeah, the guitar as percussion thing is huge in my aesthetic, and very conscious. The biggest thing in the new stuff is the way the lyrics are—more narrative, more stories. The word I use to myself, continually, is yearning. That’s the sense I’m looking for. I’ve also learned a lot more about who I am and what my motivations are, and that’s pretty fascinating for me. Overall, I’ve just become a confident, happy, optimistic guy, which I wasn’t for years—I was a depressed, cynical, desperate man.

I still write from pain. That’s still my source of material, though that pain is largely in the past now. But I feel these songs embrace the life that I have. I can’t regret those old, dark days—if I wasn’t there then, I wouldn’t be here now.

(Above: Tery Anastasio conducts an orchestra during the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. Photo by Michael Weintraub.)

Ever since the utopian dreams of late-’60s tribal gatherings birthed the Mega Music Festival it’s been a furious rock ’n’ roller coaster—the brilliant peaks like Monterey Pop and Woodstock helping establish a generation’s very identity, and the deep, dark lows of Altamont and Woodstock ’99 holding an unforgivingly brutal mirror up to the pop-culture flaws of each respective era. There’s something powerful and occasionally frightening about the combustibility of packing 100,000 or more souls in front of a concert stage, but if treated properly, every so often there’s a possibility for transcendence—or at least an occasion to revel in life’s muddy bliss.—Steve LaBate

THE GOLDEN AGE of the Giant Outdoor Rock Festival

When Bob Dylan plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, purists were shocked, but two years later and 3,000 miles away, 50,000 hairy youths swarmed the Monterey Pop Festival for a weekend of loud music from the likes of The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding and Janis Joplin—if there’d been a roof, these acts would’ve torn it off and ignited it with lighter fluid. Monterey Pop went off with nary a hitch—it was, after all, the Summer of Love.

In August 1969, hordes of music fans initiated a massive traffic jam in rural New York as they inched toward the Woodstock Music and Art Festival. Unlike earlier fests, Woodstock was a commercial venture concocted by a group of underground entrepreneurs who turned out to be really good promoters—maybe too good. The fences came down, the site was overrun and the organizers had no choice but to declare it a “free festival.” So more than 300,000 people got filthy, witnessed three days of inspired performances from the absolute cream of rock ’n’ roll and staggered away with something to tell their grandkids about.

During the early ’70s, enormous crowds continued to converge on festival sites as remote as Britain’s Isle of Wight, in 1970, and as incongruous as the Raceway at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973, determined to be part of another Woodstock. The Watkins Glen Summer Jam—featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers and The Band—drew an estimated 600,000-plus, the largest mass of people ever to attend a festival before or since.

Perhaps Watkins Glen, with its interminable sets, overflowing porta-johns, requisite thunderstorm and endless traffic jam, proved to everyone that the Woodstock experience couldn’t be duplicated. But the end of the Golden Age probably had more to do with the Boomers becoming adults, and grown-up reality doesn’t lend itself well to tripping for three days in a field of slime.—Bud Scoppa

FLIRTIN’ with Disaster

Since the virtually flawless Monterey Pop, not all festivals have come off so swimmingly. The true bookends of utter concert chaos are categorically Woodstock and Woodstock ’99, the low point being, of course, the deadly Altamont.

It seems no one could’ve prepared for the million people descending on Max Yasgur’s farm for the original Woodstock. In comparison, approximately 150,000 people enjoyed Monterey Pop. Luckily, a little less than half actually made it to Woodstock, otherwise the fest wouldn’t have been remembered so kindly by history.

Unfortunately the lessons of Woodstock were never integrated into the poor planning of Altamont, or as Jerry Garcia once called it, “the living picture of hell on earth.” Yes, it was foolish to think hedonistic headliners The Rolling Stones would gel with the local hippie mores embraced by the other bands on the bill (Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana). Yes, it was foolish for Mick Jagger to run his mouth, giving away the festival’s original Golden Gate Park location before he was supposed to, forcing the show to be moved, at the last minute, to the Motor Speedway where the audience could ignite hundreds of discarded tires, filling the air with acrid black smoke. And, yes, it was utterly ludicrous to have the brutal California chapter of the Hells Angel’s handle security. But the worst offense was having the stage only 18 inches off the ground. This cast a pall over the crowd, since none beyond the first 50 “rows” could see anything over the hulking “peacekeeping” barbarians. Then there was the death of Meredith Hunter, a young black man stabbed by the Angels (the murderous act infamously captured in Stones rockumentary Gimme Shelter). There were also three other deaths—two people run over in their sleeping bags and one drowning. Even Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin couldn’t escape harm. He was knocked unconscious by one of the Angels in a brawl near the stage. For many, Altamont was a bitter end to the ’60s dream.

Following Woodstock and Altamont, many local governments passed legislation restricting the size of events in their areas. But after the critical, logistical and financial success of major mid-’80s festivals like Live Aid, the organizers of Woodstock made an attempt at recouping losses from their original concert by cashing in on the festival’s 25th anniversary in 1994. Woodstock II had little to do with the Peace and Love vibe of its predecessor, but it was relatively harmless if overly commercial. But Woodstock ’99 was a different story. When it became apparent there was a lack of drinkable water, vendors jacked the already high prices. This combined with the world’s largest mud bath, 96-degree heat, no shade, a lack of showers and rampant drug use, resulted in looting, rioting, arson and gang rape. But even while such horrifying events unfolded, redemptive festival experiences were happening on other scenes, providing a hopeful contrast and a new model for future festivals.—Jay Sweet

THE PHISHY PATH to Rock Fest Redemption

In 1996, improvisational savants Phish rented a decommissioned Air Force base in Plattsburgh, N.Y., and built their own venue to stage a finale for the band’s summer tour. “The Clifford Ball,” as the festival was dubbed, ended up being much more.

Refusing to repeat the mistakes of festivals past, a production company, visual-design team, local artists and myriad regional vendors and businesses were brought onboard for months of imagining and planning before the actual execution.

Phish was the only band performing (three sets per day), though a specially assembled orchestra provided a symphonic backdrop for an afternoon air show. “The Ball Square,” an interactive installation, simulated a town square, mixing reality with fantasy. An actual working post office sat nearby a building that did nothing but emit foam; mail a letter home, then pop next door and slather your friends with bubbles. Attendees became active participants, creating personalized adventures while unwittingly contributing to a shared group experience.

Phish went on to throw six additional, equally unique festivals—from a millennium bash on an Indian reservation in the Florida Everglades to the band’s bittersweet farewell performance last summer in Coventry, Vt. The wild gatherings evolved over the years, incorporating everything from hot-air-balloon rides to massive bouts of band-encouraged glow-stick tossing—fans repeatedly hurling neon capsules into the air like mortar boards at high-school graduation—during the multi-part epic “Harry Hood.”

Though the band and these festivals are now history, they continue to influence, inform and inspire. In 2000, Superfly Productions hired some of the crew from Phish’s festivals and created the three-ring circus known as Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. Now held annually on a farm in Manchester, Tenn., the smooth-running, tastefully eclectic Bonnaroo boasts three days of bands on multiple stages with lineups that consistently rival—perhaps even surpass—the original Woodstock. Not to mention the non-stop extracurriculars (stand-up comedy, yoga classes). Bonnaroo is currently the country’s largest recurring rock festival; a new breed that after a few years seems to have settled into an undisputed reign as World’s Greatest Music Festival.—Benjy Eisen

Sweat-soaked live document from redneck rockers proves way Pabst due

You don’t have to hail from the South to be seduced by the Drive-By Truckers, though it doesn’t hurt. After all, this Alabama-bred band of brothers wears its Dixie-fried heritage like a badge of honor (or, more appropriately, a Purple Heart) that’s as unavoidable as the upside-the-head-whacking piece of hardwood referenced in lumbering, swaggering tune “The Buford Stick.” With its lawman-as-villain/outlaw-as-hero perspective, it’s prototypical Drive-By Truckers—one of the many songs from the band’s latest studio recording, The Dirty South, featured on this two-hour DVD culled from an August 2004 two-night stand at the 40 Watt club in the group’s surrogate hometown of Athens, Ga.

Actually, it’s not just lawmen, but virtually all authority figures who are viewed with a combination of fear and loathing in numerous DBT songs—in particular, those penned by Patterson Hood (the son of famed Muscle Shoals session bassist David Hood) who formed the band back in the mid ’90s with fellow guitarist/songwriter Mike Cooley. And whether it’s attacking greedy bankers in the bitter “Sinkhole” or decrying governmental priorities in the workingman’s blues “Puttin’ People On The Moon,” Hood’s compositions ripple with a combustibility articulated most strongly in “The Southern Thing,” the don’t-tread-on-me centerpiece of the group’s ambitious 2001 concept opus, Southern Rock Opera, that is likewise this DVD’s showstopper.

Were Hood the band’s only songwriter, all this attention to matters of pride and prejudice might overload listeners, but the strong presence of co-founder Cooley acts as a vital counterbalance. His Dirty South songs performed here, such as the race car themed-“Daddy’s Cup” and the Sun-dried “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac,” deal more with everyday life than the Big Picture— between them and the introspective contributions of DBT's third writer, chief lead guitarist Jason Isbell (represented in particular on this show by a brooding, intense version of “Decoration Day”), both the group’s subject matter and approach are considerably wider than the Redneck Underground-ed image they’ve acquired over the years.

With so much of this image also caught up in the Truckers’ reputation as a formidable concert band, this basically straightforward documentation of their live act (outside of a bit of backstage patter, it’s wall-to-wall performance footage) should be a welcome souvenir for longtime fans. It may also serve as a fitting introduction for those curious about what happened to the Southern rock tradition after it was impacted by both the punk and grunge movements: you can hear vestiges of the former on the Ramones-ish chord changes of “Careless,” and of the latter on the bristling “Lookout Mountain.” Ultimately, though, the Drive-By Truckers’ music, in all its rough-hewn, ragged glory, is about one basic value—honesty. And you can certainly appreciate that regardless of where you come from.

A fascinating look inside the album that helped flannel trump leather in rock couture

Kurt Cobain and I were born a month apart. I’ve lived in Seattle my entire life. I can’t watch this DVD without feeling punched squarely in the gut.

There’s nothing unexpected in this straightforward and entertaining rock doc on the making of Nirvana’s seminal record. Interviews feature surviving members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, producer Butch Vig, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Sub Pop’s Jonathan Poneman and Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke (the Ron Jeremy of music docs: you can’t shoot one without him). All share their tales in a straightforward manner, free of nostalgia or palpable emotion.

Which is perfect, really, because the archival concert footage burns with images of Cobain tearing through “Drain You,” et al. And the crowd’s stagediving theatrics seem poignant now—a reminder of a time when you leapt headlong, trusting you’d be caught.

When they first became stars in 1957, it seemed like the Everly Brothers had been dispatched from heaven above—God’s idea of what rock ’n’ roll angels might sound like. With their fresh-faced good looks and ethereal singing, siblings Don and Phil became instant teen idols, and songs like “Bye Bye Love” and “All I Have to Do Is Dream” became hugely influential hits. Drawing from Appalachian traditions, the intricate two-part harmonies developed by the Nashville-based brothers became sacred texts for duet partners as far-flung as New York’s Simon and Garfunkel and Liverpool’s Lennon and McCartney.

Perhaps because the Everlys’ ’50s Cadence recordings loom so large in pop history, their output for Warner Brothers—the group’s label home during of the ’60s—is frequently overlooked. While some of it was undeniably hit-and-miss, they still cut some terrific albums for Warner. Thanks to Collectors’ Choice Music, which has just reissued fifteen of the duo’s original Warner LPs, that work appears ripe for re-discovery—and re-evaluation.

One collection that certainly warrants greater attention is 1960’s A Date With The Everly Brothers, which underscores the profound effect they had on the nascent Beatles—and not just their vocals, either. You can hear it on tracks like the riff-based take on Little Richard’s “Lucille” and the clever guitar-bass-drums interplay of “So How Come (No One Loves Me),” written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote numerous Everly classics. Date also includes The Bryants’ “Love Hurts,” which, along with “Sleepless Nights” (found on the same year’s It’s Everly Time!) became touchstones for Gram Parsons and virtually all country-rockers since—as did much of the Everly Brothers’ music.

This part of the Everlys’ legacy has definitely received short shrift over the years, and to that end, I suggest seeking out Roots, their stunning, final Warner studio set. Produced by Lenny Waronker, inventively arranged by guitarist Ron Elliott (from underrated country-rock pioneers the Beau Brummels), and featuring panoramic versions of songs by everyone from Jimmie Rodgers (“T for Texas”) to Randy Newman (“Illinois”), Roots was well ahead of several curves when it first appeared in late ’68.

Also highly recommended are: ’66’s Two Yanks In England, featuring both compositions and accompaniments from The Hollies; 1970’s intimate concert recording, The Everly Brothers Show; and The New Album, a ’77 set of rarities previously available only in Europe. Sadly, it’s been mainly overseas where Don and Phil Everly have remained appreciated—and with far more loyalty than here at home. Hopefully this treasure trove will change things.

Robbie Fulks isn’t trying to become the king of country put-down songs, but on his new album, Georgia Hard, he offers what could be construed as a sequel to his infamous Nashville kiss-off, “Fuck This Town.”

Though he says the song is about the country music industry, and his new tirade, “Countrier Than Thou,” is about fans, he admits, “They’re definitely connected by my own wrathful contempt. They’re both putdowns of country-music appendages.”

While the fans and industry are appendages, Fulks is at the heart of country music, or would be, at least, in a Nashville less-driven by glossy pop. Still, delivering a sound at home in honky tonks from Bakersfield to Birmingham, Fulks’ Chicago exile is an apt illustration of how Music Row has changed.

That’s not to say Georgia Hard is alt.country. At least, Fulks doesn’t think so.

He mentions ’70s country stalwarts such as Gene Watson, Mel Street and Don Williams as influences, but other voices pop up—George Jones hovers over novelty song “I’m Gonna Take you Home (and Make You Like Me),” sung with Fulks’ wife, Donna. And Loudon Wainwright III could’ve penned “Countrier Than Thou”—which also takes a swipe at President Bush.

But the album’s biggest impact comes from a tune with no yuks involved: the hankie-puller, “Leave It to a Loser.” It’s a lovelorn slice of perfection just waiting to become a country classic—whether Nashville likes it or not.

The title of Dwight’s Yoakam’s 2000 album Tomorrow’s Sounds Today is one of the greatest musical in-jokes of all time. Yoakam has made a 20-plus year career out of brushing the cobwebs from yesterday’s sounds—in particular, rockabilly and the classic, loping mid-’60s Bakersfield swagger of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard—and transforming them into something fresh and relevant. So one suspects that beneath the cowboy hat perpetually covering his face, Yoakam had tongue firmly in cheek.

Between filming the final takes of his latest movie, Bandidas, Yoakam found the time to record a new album. Blame the Vain, Dwight’s 18th full-length, is somewhat of a departure for the veteran singer/songwriter. It’s his first stab at production, and his first recorded output with a new band that features players as varied as guitar slinger Keith Gattis (ex-George Jones) and seminal Motown percussionist Bobbye Hall.

“I think it’s incumbent on any songwriter to find new inspiration throughout his or her life,” says Yoakam. “And in the last couple of years I’ve been rethinking just how to go about this process. This time I wanted to go for a more stripped down, austere sound, and I’d been playing with the Sin City All Stars in L.A., sitting in with this loose collective of folks who love to play country and country-rock music. It just seemed like the logical place to begin when I started recording the new album.”

Blame the Vain’s 12 songs are split equally between the rockabilly rave-ups and Bakersfield honky tonkers for which Yoakam is best known and the sad-sack ballads that have always characterized the best country music. As always, Dwight’s singing and songwriting is first-rate.

“The best songs tend to write themselves,” says Yoakam. “I just try to be still long enough so I don’t interfere with the process. The songs on this album just led me along for the ride. On ‘Intentional Heartache’ I started out with just the first two lines: ‘She drove south I-95 straight through Carolina / She didn’t use no damn map to find her way.’ I really had no idea where that song was taking me. But... Pretty soon there was a story there, a whole history there, that I could have never envisioned when I started.”

The process is nowhere better realized than on “I Wanna Love Again,” an update of the classic Bakersfield sound that is part cornball-romantic lament and part existential angst that could only come from the deepest recesses of the heart.

“It’s funny in a way,” says Yoakam. “You start off with a stereotypical love song, and eventually you realize that you’re writing about middle age, and a loss of joy in your life, and a desire to recapture that sense of reckless spontaneity and abandon. This whole album is like that. It took me places I didn’t expect to go. And I hope that sense of fun and pure joy in making music comes through. Almost everything else has changed, and yet it all comes back to the joy of making music.”

In the end, that’s the conundrum with which Blame the Vain confronts the longtime listener. Yoakam has managed to re-invent himself, find new wellsprings of creativity, and still sound like no one but himself.

Patriotic
by Nevin Martell

Dave Matthews Band’s sixth studio album, Stand Up, finds the Charlottesville, Va., quintet collaborating for the first time with producer Mark Batson—a man best known for his work with the likes of Eminem and 50 Cent. His influence manifests itself most noticeably in Carter Beauford’s drumming, which possesses a newfound hip-hop sensibility with its sharp rhythmic phrasing. These head-bobbing beats are well-paired with Matthews’ engaging lyricism, which swerves between his usual lovestruck declarations and more serious post-9/11 ruminations.

Tracks like “American Baby” are Matthews’ most politically outspoken to date and imbued with a true feeling of innocence lost as he intones, “If these walls came crumbling down / Fell so hard to make us lose our faith” and as he later laments “Nobody’s laughing now / God’s grace lost and the devil is proud.” Thankfully, the fivesome hasn’t lost its knack for writing jammy, feelgood tunes, like the country-fried stomper “Hello Again” and the neo-soul-influenced “Everybody Wake Up (Our Finest Hour Arrives),” a perfect panacea for these dark days. So even if Stand Up only inspires listeners to get up and dance—rather than march or protest—it will have done its small part to bring some light into the darkness.

Idiotic
by Dave Sims

Dave Matthews’ somnambulent croak has always been more suited to prurience than protest, and Stand Up makes for a nice case in point. The album opens with his trademark heavy-lidded leer, eyes locked like a smart-bomb guidance system on a south-bound bead of sweat, rolling over in rumpled covers, and hey babe, y’know, let’s make love. But he attacks the politically tinged “Everybody Wake Up” with his voice draped in the same gauzy purr, giving the impression of a well-meaning MoveOn.org’er who can’t seem to shake a hangover.

A couple of hazy mood pieces (“Out of My Hands,” “Steady As We Go”) fail to coalesce, and the 16 Horsepower reference of “Hello Again” feels less like experimentation than a desperate grab for musical distinctiveness. When Stand Up isn’t wandering around in search of a hook, it’s straining past a perfunctory sense of outrage, and in both cases generally gives up and turns the track over to Carter for a drum solo. The inexplicable closer, “Hunger for the Great Light,” is a bizarre, disjointed attempt at mystical vision pulled to earth by greasy sensuality and bombast. If aimlessness and overproduction hadn’t already grounded Stand Up, “Great Light” could have done the job by itself.

Reader's Poll Results

Patriotic (for): 69%
Idiotic (against): Idiotic 31%

Costello’s excursion through Americana gets the royal treatment

Considered the ugly duckling of his catalog in 1986, the roots-inflected King of America is now thought to be among the brightest jewels in Costello’s crown. Depth of storytelling and ace performances on material like “Indoor Fireworks” and “Our Little Angel” overcompensate for a lack of hit singles. Songs, including the rambling “Glitter Gulch,” feature guitarist James Burton, who gained notoriety playing for that other Elvis. Rhino’s remaster gives notable improvement to full-band arrangements when compared to Rykodisc’s 1995 version, though spare numbers like “Little Palaces” seem to lose their sparkle.

The real treat here is the ample bonus disc. The Coward Brothers (Costello and producer T-Bone Burnett) appear on “The People’s Limousine.” “I’ll Wear it Proudly” is illuminated via acoustic demo. A set from New York’s Broadway Theater includes covers of Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways” and Mose Allison’s “Your Mind is on Vacation.” The live band features Burton alongside Jerry Scheff, his bandmate in Elvis Presley’s TCB Band.

With Seinfeld in perpetual rerun, you might wonder why anyone would shell out $50 to own it on DVD. After all, most of us have seen these shows so many times we can pull up classic scenes in our minds faster than we can fumble with a remote control and a DVD menu.

But if you were only to buy one set of Seinfeld discs, Season 4 is your best bet. This is the season that includes “Bubble Boy,” “The Pitch,” “The Junior Mint,” and “The Contest,” the episode that established Jerry Seinfeld as the Master of His Domain and hooked the nation on a show about nothing.

Deleted scenes, a look behind the scenes, audio commentaries, new clips of Jerry’s standup, and 1-2 minutes extra per episode (the original network versions, not seen in syndication)—the DVD set is loaded with special features that let you obsess over the show the way George would, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Having the gang back in your living room is like a surprise visit from old college friends. You don’t mind how long they stay and can’t believe they still make you laugh as hard as they do.

(Above [L-R]: HAL's Stephen O'Brien, Dave Allen and Paul Allen)

“When we reached the end, we couldn’t believe it was ours,” gushes HAL frontman Dave Allen, voice giddy, words caked with thick Irish brogue. “We knew we had made the record that we wanted to make. Now we just have to hand it over to the rest of the world.”

It’s not particularly uncommon for Allen to slip into paternal clichés when discussing his work—he cradles HAL adoringly, clucking, grinning and gurgling with pride, seemingly oblivious to the ironic detachment common in American indie rock. His earnestness can be oddly disarming: Allen describes the band’s partnership with U.K. indie Rough Trade as “a relationship of trust and love between people,” he thinks music is “just for people to enjoy, it should be accessible, it’s there for everybody” and also considers his folk-singing father HAL’s most important critic. “We gave him the rough mix of the record and he said, ‘This record is going into my record collection, next to Joni Mitchell.’ He was so proud! He couldn’t believe it was actually us,” Allen happily beams.

HAL’s self-titled debut—a charming collection of polished pop that reflects effusive Irish spirit rather than drab Dublin weather—has already earned the band (drummer Steve Hogan, keyboardist Stephen O’Brian and brother Paul Allen on bass), a mess of comparisons to compatriots The Thrills. It’s a link Allen finds increasingly wearisome. “We grew up within a three mile radius of each other, but we’re completely different bands,” Allen sighs. “I hope the record will prove that.”

Strange and syrupy, HAL’s sunny songs borrow The Beach Boys’ eager, saccharine harmonies, but the record ultimately deviates from the familiar Cali-pop formula, nodding, instead, to songwriting greats Carole King and Burt Bacharach, mining the catalogues of Harry Nilsson and George Gershwin, and integrating classic, early-’70s AM radio into contemporary pop rock. Allen cites the Brill Building songwriters as a significant muse. In the ’60s, the Brill housed an alarmingly integrated army of music-industry recruits, with arrangers, producers, promoters, performers, managers and writers plowing away under a single roof.

“I’m a huge fan of all that music,” Allen admits, “of the songs and the production and the arrangements. I love the idea of building songs. I love the entire idea of the Brill Building—of songwriters going in at nine and working in an office with a piano and coming up with a beautiful song by five. That’s amazing.”

(photo: Paul Kaye as Frankie Wilde)

Ibiza is an island filled with every fantasy imaginable: The sun shines year round and the beaches are always welcoming; luscious greenery sprouts from the most fertile soil on earth; people party beyond Vegas proportions; clubs known the world over are spinning tunes twenty-four hours a day. Here on this beautiful island, a revolution was born.

Such a myth is Frankie Wilde, “Deaf DJ” and subject of dance “biopic” It’s All Gone Pete Tong.

With its interviews of dance leaders Carl Cox, Paul Van Dyk, newcomer Sarah Main and, of course, a special appearance by legendary British DJ Pete Tong, himself, the film moves so naturally—and the acting is so casual—you’d swear you were watching a documentary. The movie claims it’s based on a true story, yet the name Frankie Wilde and the details of his story are not familiar to even the most fervent dance-music enthusiasts. This leads to the audience’s obvious question at the film’s New York premiere: Fact or fiction?

Getting the answer from charismatic Brit Paul Kaye (Wilde) and amiable Canadian Michael Dowse (writer/director) proves messier than an Ibiza foam party. “It’s a true story,” says Dowse, totally deadpan, over coffee in the bustling lobby of the Grand Central Hyatt, just prior to the premiere. I’m asking about the meticulous publicity campaign portraying character Frankie Wilde as a real person.

Pushed a little more, the co-conspirators hesitantly glance at each other then start laughing.

“It’s a true story,” repeats Dowse, this time through a grin and a chuckle.

“Someone told us it was a true story,” Kaye chimes in before inclining, “it’s an urban myth. A lot of it’s built in, sort of built up around it. It’s just kind of tales of hedonism. ‘The Frankie Wilde Story,’ you know?”

The Frankie Wilde Story. A gritty and humorous look at the sleazy, drug-fueled world of dance, with a mythical DJ epitomizing the entire culture.

Tong positions the character best. “I don’t know anyone like Frankie Wilde,” he says initially, sipping Earl Grey on the roof of the posh Soho House, a day after DJing the premiere’s after party. “There’s every cliché and every eccentricity I suppose you’ve ever seen or heard about in DJing all rolled into that one character.”

He pauses, reflecting on all the DJs he knows, and says, “There’s a little bit of a lot of people in him.”

The film’s title comes from a phrase well-known in the U.K.—it’s cockney rhyming slang for something’s gone wrong. Tong essentially brought dance music to the masses in the mid ’80s, inspired by the thundering beat from clubs in Chicago, New York and Ibiza, and was a household name in the U.K. when the phrase was coined by a dance fanzine about 15 years ago. His weekly show on BBC Radio 1 is still preaching what’s good and new in dance music today—as it has been for over a decade.

“If the show helps, I’d never stand there and take credit,” he says, shrugging off the burden of helping create a mega-industry. “All I did is reflect and play what’s there. I think I sped up the process—I’ll take credit for that.”

The film stands in contrast to such modesty. Excess and self-promotion are the norm from the opening scene with thousands chanting “Frankie!” while Kaye, in Christ-like pose and garb, is lowered on wires from the rafters of famed club Manumission into a pool below.

“It’s the opulence which I wanted to take the piss out of,” says Dowse of the lifestyle that many a superstar (DJ, rock star or sports hero, he points out) lives today. “Not so much the fact that they DJ—it’s what gets presented to them because they are DJs. It’s a one-man show, and they get paid obscene amounts of money for two to three hours of work—they’re mixing other people’s records!”

“People like me because of what I play and people like me the most when I play what I like,” Tong explains. “Over the years it’s always been picking other people’s music, putting it in the right order to make people happy I suppose.”

These hordes are made so happy they declare DJs gods, close to the heavens for “setting the mood,” as Tong puts it. In such a situation, believing your own hype means there’s no way but down.

And in It’s All Gone Pete Tong, that’s precisely where Wilde must go, with no one to console him but the freakishly scary persona the DJ’s cocaine addiction takes: A man-size, snorting, growling, buzzing, frothing-at-the-mouth, apron-wearing badger. Because, as Dowse says, cocaine is a “badgering drug.”

The film’s first half is fueled by a hilariously honest take on the music industry and the clubbing world in general. As momentum builds, the extravagance increases and so does the music’s volume, until a persistent buzz begins afflicting Wilde. As he goes completely deaf, the DJ is abandoned by his wife, manager and everyone he thought cared, leaving him with nothing but the drug-induced badger and the silence to taunt him.

The music reflects the mood throughout the film’s many twists. The soundtrack, helmed by famed DJ Lol Hammond, comes in two parts, “Day” and “Night.” Songs—from Shwab’s “DJs in a Row” to Orbital’s “Frenetic”—portray the madness of life in Ibiza. Sobering tunes from The Beta Band and Depeche Mode serve as the backdrop for Wilde’s descent, with Penguin Café Orchestra’s “Music For A Found Harmonium” and The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” setting the tone for Wilde’s ascent back.

“We always thought that it was more of a rock ’n’ roll movie,” says Dowse, who has shot videos for groups like The New Pornographers. “I always loved films that were music-driven, like Danny Boyle or Wes Anderson. They really push the narrative with the twist that they make with the music in the film.”

“That’s the difference,” adds Kaye, “when it’s used constructively as opposed to 38 f---ing promos glued together to make a movie.”

It’s All Gone Pete Tong’s tale of celebrity excess, implosion and redemption is one told countless times in the world of music, film and sport. But in Ibiza, under Dowse’s direction, it’s retold in gargantuan proportions with visual, sonic and narrative pizzazz.

Although it’s been six years since Emiliana Torrini’s last album, the Roland Orzabal-produced Love in the Time of Science, the Icelandic beauty has been busy though largely hidden from view. She performed the haunting “Gollum’s Song” for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, wrote and toured with Thievery Corporation, collaborated with Smog’s Bill Callahan and provided Kylie Minogue with her 2003 #1 U.K. hit “Slow.” Lastly, she readied her sparse, whispering return to the spotlight, Fisherman’s Woman, an attention-rewarding listen bearing few traces of her lavish debut.

Based in London, Torrini had already begun the songs for Fisherman’s Woman when she met Brixton-based producer/multi-instrumentalist Mr. Dan, with whom she had an immediate affinity. The pair quickly concocted Torrini’s new direction in Dan’s basement studio. It’s a joyous melancholy and powerful quietude that suggests the dark whispers of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen. To that end, Torrini forbade certain blandishments from consideration. “I banned things from the recording,” says Torrini, “things that I felt were a huge crutch, like violins and the big stuff that can make a record very dramatic. I thought to make the songs whisper the things rather than shout it at you.”

Torrini’s methodology was also different on Fisherman’s Woman. With Science, she wrote the songs while she and Orzabal were in the studio recording, while the songs on Fisherman’s Woman were largely ready ahead of time.

“This time I just wanted to write the songs and make the song tell me what it wants to have on it,” says Torrini with a laugh. “It’s like a kid—you can’t just put your daughter into a fluffy, poofy dress if she doesn’t want to.”

After months of campaigning tirelessly for a Kerry/Edwards victory, praying hard over cold black coffee, lashing flags to guitar strings, wailing and riffing and huffing 'til his heart damn near burst, Bruce Springsteen spent the night of November 2 watching his hoped-for America disintegrate into a small, sad pile of—what else?—Devils & Dust.

The resulting record, Springsteen’s 19th, sees America’s reigning pop-folksinger regressing, searching frantically for a way to reclaim the country he (and John Kerry) unceremoniously lost last fall. And while Springsteen may be desperate to salvage the slab of land that’s been the spiritual and emotional nexus of almost every epic he’s penned, the jilted partner he’s skewered and re-romanced hundreds of times over the last three decades, the central question of Devils & Dust remains: Is it real?

Hookers in Reno, fields of blood and stone, last calls, homemade maps, kids cocooned in sleeping bags, silver palominos, blind men waving by the side of the road: Devils & Dust is a roadtrip through an America untouched by contemporary homogenization—anti-corporate and illusory, more like a Robert Frank photograph or a snippet from On the Road than anything from your own backyard.

Springsteen has a long, celebrated history of channeling personal defeat into indubitable fight songs, and Devils & Dust is Bruce at his best and worst—apologetic and disillusioned, brave and steadfast, disengaged and hopeful. Opener “Devils and Dust” spotlights Springsteen’s spare acoustic strums and gorgeously worn growls (think 1982’s impeccable Nebraska). Head down and hands in pockets, Bruce bellows staid Guthrie-like proclamations. It’s impossibly earnest, so sober you can hear the streaks of dirt on his Levi’s, feel the curl of his beard. Alone and unnerved, Springsteen bemoans the plight of a man without any viable options: “I’ve got my finger on the trigger,” he rumbles. “But I don’t know who to trust.”

Alas, the album’s title track proves an unmerciful tease. Ninety seconds into it, tense drums start to quake, keyboards pound and superstar producer Brendan O’Brien (the knob twiddler behind ’90s alt-rock heroes Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, as well as 2002’s The Rising) gestures for strings, leaving Bruce and his spit-addled harmonica to contend with gooey violin waves and bombastic, made-for-arena swells. The effect should be majestic, but instead it just feels false. Ultimately “Devils and Dust” somersaults from humble and inspiring to horribly puffed-up, bloated with self-importance, wholly divorced from the rousing, epic clamor of early masterpieces “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run.” It makes depressing sense, then, when a dry-throated Springsteen laments to a faceless Bob (Dylan, presumably): “We’re a long, long way from home, Bobbie / Home’s a long, long way from us.” Or, later, when he muses: “What if what you do to survive / Kills the things you love?”

“All The Way Home” fares better under O’Brien’s heavy hand, packed tight with butt-twitching hollers of “Woo!”—it’s classic, Born in the U.S.A.-era Boss, dressed up with wailing steel guitar, stunningly discordant electric sarangi (an Indian fiddle), and persuasive invitations to dance (“Now it’s some old Stones song the band is trashin’ / But if you feel like dancin’ / Baby, I’m askin’”).

Inching strings are back for the grim, prostitute-starring “Reno” (even O’Brien can’t pretty up a graphic menu of sexual entreés and their inevitable consumption), while the excellent “Maria’s Bed” sees Springsteen’s scratchy pipes hopping up to a weird quasi-falsetto, backed by a chorus of na-na-ing background singers and big, pounding drums.

The falsetto returns (thin, shrill and wholly disembodied) for “All I’m Thinkin’ About,” which finds the Boss straining and crackling, wiggling away from his deep, much-beloved rumble and mewing in disguise. Surprisingly, the tune succeeds, despite its cracks and squinty stretches—by eschewing his trademark roar (and the gravity that inevitably goes along with it), Springsteen frees himself up for a light-hearted stomp, full of longing and giggly delight.

Spectacular closer “Matamoros Banks” recounts the death of an illegal immigrant attempting to cross the Rio Grande, moving backwards from his corpse (“The turtles eat the skin from your eyes / So they lay open to the stars”) to his hope-heavy desert dreams (“I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again”), laid out over tender guitar, wisps of dobro, and—is anyone remotely surprised?—yawning strings.

Springsteen’s lyrics are no longer infused with the giddy wordplay he’s wielded on past albums, but, oddly, the liner notes still periodically offer glib footnotes to his verse (for “Reno,” this means not only English translations of the three Spanish words used in the song, but also a “This Song Contains Adult Imagery” disclaimer for anxiously vigilant parents). And while Bruce and company seem increasingly worried that no one will get it, Devils & Dust is remarkably self-contained and perfectly linear: here is the aftermath of The Rising, when the plains go quiet, the windows shut and we pray, pause, and plot our next move.

Omaha rapper cooks up something fresh for hip-hop fans

Let’s see … Omaha hip-hop: check. Debut album out on Team Love (a.k.a. Conor Oberst’s label pet project): check. Grimy yet accessible production: check. We can stop right there, ample fodder for appropriately wry jokes and winking nudges abounds. The thing is, Mars Black and DJ E. Babbs’ first proper release is pretty dope. An MC who namedrops both Bob Dylan and KRS-1 in the first song on his record, “The Trouble in Little Omaha,” Black neither makes excuses for his influences or fronts on his hometown. And this is a good thing since his rhymes—which occasionally rise to a gruff bark as he gets deeper and deeper into a song—provide a candid snapshot into his particular world (“Mars Black coming back like a cardigan”). But don’t be fooled, this isn’t indie rock disguised as hip-hop; this is Oma-hop from an artist who doesn’t appear remotely concerned with the tired conventions of mainstream rap.

The Deathrays shoot for power-pop glory

You might expect a band called The Deathray Davies to have a serious Kinks obsession. And you’d be right. But this time out lead singer/songwriter John Dufilho unkinks the musical knot a bit, tones down the keyboards and emerges with 11 power-pop gems that are equal parts The Beatles, Weezer and Fountains of Wayne. There’s nothing new or particularly innovative here, but it’s hard to find fault with the band’s unabashed British Invasion influences, endless hooks, witty wordplay or the unmitigated joy of three fuzzed-out power chords and a backbeat. You can play this one from morning ’til the end of the day.

It’s late February. Pitchers and catchers reported to spring training a week ago. Opening day is a little more than a month away. It’s that time of year when Midwestern Americans, weary of winter’s onslaught, dream of sun-drenched summer days, the crack of the bat, the commingled smells of newly oiled leather gloves and stale popcorn and freshly mowed grass, the sounds of vendors hawking peanuts and ice-cold beer in the stands. Anything and everything is possible. The Chicago Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series in 97 years, are still undefeated. And Steve Goodman, a terrific singer and even better songwriter who lived for the Chicago Cubs and died far too young, still might one day receive the critical and popular acclaim he deserves. You never know.

Diagnosed with leukemia when he was 21 years old, Steve Goodman spent his entire recording career with a death sentence hanging over his head. In one of life’s ironic jokes, he recorded his first album in 1969, the year the Cubs blew a nine-game late summer lead to the New York Mets, and his last album in 1984, the year the Cubs lost to the San Diego Padres in the National League championship series. Chiefly through Goodman’s song “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” the fortunes of the man and the baseball team will forever be linked. The Cubs never made it to baseball’s Promised Land; Steve Goodman never made it beyond a small but dedicated cult following. You can view it as futility if you like; certainly Cubs fans know the feeling all too well. Or you can view it the way Steve Goodman did in one of his earliest recorded songs:

All the good times going by, got to have ourselves a few.
Where I’m going has no end, what I’m seeking has no name.
No, the treasure’s not the takin’, it’s the lovin’ of the game.

For Steve Goodman, the game could not be contained by a season or a stadium. Nor could it be defined by a single genre or stunted by a death sentence. His eponymous first album, released during the year of the Amazin’ Mets and the Chokin’ Cubs, was a folk-rock classic. It was highlighted by “City of New Orleans,” a future hit for Arlo Guthrie and now a folk-music staple, a song Kris Kristofferson and John Prine have called “the best damn train song ever written.” I can’t argue with them.

Throughout his career Steve Goodman confounded listeners and critics by tossing musical changeups and curveballs into the mix. Pegged as a sensitive singer/songwriter folkie, Goodman turned around and wrote hilarious parodies of country music (the David Allan Coe-popularized “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” which skewers every cliché ever lassoed to a two-step shuffle), covered jazz standards from the ’30s, and enlisted stalwart bluegrass mandolin picker Jethro Burns to be his musical foil. Pegged as a serious, literary writer, he thumbed his nose at pretension by concisely summarizing the plot of Moby Dick as a twelve-bar blues. Also pegged as a musical comedian, he turned around and wrote songs full of regret and sorrow—“My Old Man,” a wry, wistful remembrance of his late father, “The Ballad of Penny Evans,” a bitter, angry denunciation written from the point of view of a Vietnam War widow. And always he wrote about his beloved Chicago, firing broadsides at the notorious Lincoln Park Towing Company, simultaneously eulogizing and sending up longtime mayor Richard Daley, echoing the prayers and doubts of millions of Cubs fans worldwide.

By the early ’80s the leukemia was well advanced. The albums were numbered, and so were the days themselves. The cover of Artistic Hair showed a beaming Steve Goodman in front of a barbershop—bald as a cueball from his chemotherapy treatments. Then, finally, Affordable Art, which featured “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” It can break your heart if you’re a Cubs fan. Or a Steve Goodman fan. But it will also make you smile. That was Steve Goodman, too:

Do they still play the blues in Chicago
When baseball season rolls around
When the snow melts away,
Do the Cubbies still play
In their ivy-covered burial ground
When I was a boy they were my pride and joy
But now they only bring fatigue
To the home of the brave
The land of the free
And the doormat of the National League

All too soon he was gone.

A 1997 tribute concert featuring Jackson Browne, Lyle Lovett, Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris and John Prine—Steve’s buddy and regular performing partner—belatedly brought recognition to Goodman’s talent and his musical legacy. Commenting on Frank Sinatra’s song “My Kind of Town,” Chicago humorist and concert emcee Studs Terkel put it in perspective. “What the hell does Sinatra know about Chicago?” Terkel growled. “Steve Goodman is Chicago’s true musical laureate.”

Steve was scheduled to sing the National Anthem at Wrigley Field for the first game of the 1984 National League playoffs, but he succumbed to leukemia on September 20, 1984. He was 36 years old. Four days later the Chicago Cubs clinched the National League East pennant. It was their first playoff appearance since 1945, three years before Steve Goodman was born.

Ed: Steve Goodman’s ashes now are buried beneath home plate at Wrigley Field, home of his beloved Chicago Cubs.

(Photo [L-R]: Scarlet Johannson with director Paul Weitz, Topher Grace [as Carter] and Dennis Qaid [as Dan])

Synergy. That was the original title of writer/director Paul Weitz’s comedy about corporate ethics and family values. But the name didn’t stick. “Most people thought it was a science-fiction term,” he explains. So, the filmmaker settled instead for In Good Company. “I feel like I’m pretty good with titles,” he admits. The film—which opened to high praise last December but was lost in the noise of Oscar hype—may finally reach a larger audience on DVD.

“Synergy” is a buzzword employed by up-and-coming suit Carter Duryea (That ’70s Shows’ Topher Grace) to describe his vision for the future of the marketing employees under his supervision. Duryea works for a corporate giant called Globecom that has just commandeered a sports magazine and dethroned its beloved veteran supervisor Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid). Foreman, a 50-year-old veteran of the business, must grit his teeth and take orders from this twentysomething punk, even as he patiently tries to teach the boy a thing or two. To further complicate matters, he soon discovers Carter is dating his daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson).

Carter may look confident in front of the office, but his ambition is costing him his integrity and self-respect. It’s no coincidence that he spends a lot of time on a treadmill. Weitz wanted viewers to remember Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate, a young man who was always running, and then to see Carter as the guy who has gone a step farther. “He’s gotten into plastics,” he says, “and now he’s running in place and he’s not getting anywhere. Carter is into the surface aspect of things because that is all that he can see. He didn’t grow up in a happy family situation.”

“Carter’s parents were both absent,” Grace adds. “Once he goes to [Foreman’s] house, he starts to see something that he really wants but doesn’t know how to get. He would trade it all in just to be the fifth member of the family.”

Foreman’s a big-screen rarity: a traditional family man portrayed as admirable and respectable instead of buffoonish and tyrannical. He has two daughters, but something’s still missing … a son. “What happens in the relationship between [Dan and Carter] … I think it’s by design,” says Quaid.

So perhaps the rat race isn’t so bad after all, if it can help us distinguish between what we want and what we need. “That’s what’s of interest to me,” says Weitz. “In this situation, are these characters going to react with any grace and dignity? Are they going to become humanized?”

U.S. Highway 61, the most famous highway in music history, no longer winds through the sleepy Mississippi Delta towns and hamlets of bygone days. The corporate takeover of the blues and the homogenization of America have seen to that. McDonald’s restaurants and Wal-Mart superstores now dot the alluvial flood plain from Memphis to Vicksburg. Tunica, Miss., where James Cotton was born in a tarpaper shack, now houses Casino Row, the largest gambling complex in the United States outside of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

The Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale provides a multimedia overview of the music in the comfort of a newly renovated, air-conditioned former train depot. A few miles away, not far from the junction of Highways 61 and 49, where Robert Johnson allegedly made his infamous pact with the devil, Hopson Plantation’s Shack Up Inn offers guilt-ridden or curious white folks the opportunity to stay in renovated sharecropper cabins. Here visitors can experience the hardscrabble ambience of a tin roof overhead, a sagging front porch on which to meditate, and an uncomfortable bed on which to dream of crossroads and blues greats. And air conditioning, of course; there’s no profit in making life too authentic, particularly given the blistering Mississippi summers. It’s genuine simulated poverty and misery, an almost, but not quite, uncomfortable blues experience. For a price. And for a night. Then it’s time to head back to that Hilton next to the resort golf course.

But it wasn’t always so neatly packaged.

Summer, 1961

One of my earliest memories involves an aging black man named Roosevelt Samples: Roosevelt and his family live in a three-room sharecropper’s cabin on my grandfather’s farm outside Caruthersville, Mo. They don’t have air conditioning. They don’t have plumbing, for that matter. Abe Lincoln may have freed the slaves almost a hundred years before, but you couldn’t convince my grandfather of that. You probably couldn’t convince Roosevelt, either. And there on my grandfather’s farm in the boot heel of Missouri, 80 miles up the Mississippi River from Memphis, life continues much as it has for the past 150 years. My grandfather doesn’t own a plantation. He owns 80 acres on which he raises cotton and soybeans, and where he struggles to support his family. And Roosevelt, like thousands of other poor black men in the Jim Crow south, works a portion of my grandfather’s land, shares in profits that never quite equal his expenses, and struggles to survive. On Monday through Saturday he picks cotton in the fields. And on Saturday night he drinks homebrew moonshine with his friends and picks and sings the blues on his front porch.

It’s my grandfather’s regular summertime entertainment, a redneck version of Saturday Night Fever, and I tag along with him. “Let’s go watch that damn fool of a nigger,” he says, and hoists me up into his pickup truck. I am too young to argue or protest. And so we pass a dozen or more summer nights of my early youth listening to an old black man play a battered Sears and Roebuck guitar, drunk out of his mind, howling at the moon. It is my introduction, although I don’t know it or understand it then, to an ugly world of bigotry and racism, a deeply embedded social cancer that has changed precious little since the Civil War. My grandfather doesn’t care about the music at all, but he likes the homebrew moonshine, and he likes the chance to get away from my pious, churchgoing grandmother. I don’t like any part of it, least of all the music. “Baby, please don’t go / Baby, please don’t go,” Roosevelt sings. “Baby, please don’t go down to New Orleans / You know I love you so / Baby please don’t go.” It’s a famous blues song, but I don’t know it at the time. I’m only too happy to go. New Orleans would be fine, but home would be even better, far away from this strange culture and these frightening sounds. I want to be anywhere but where I am. It turns out I have the blues. But unlike Roosevelt, I can catch the nearest passenger train out of town and return to freedom, chase the blues away by simply sitting next to my mother and riding the rails to the North. It’s my own private northern migration, at the ripe old age of five.

Summer, 1977

I’m a college graduate now, ready to face the world with an almost useless degree in creative writing, a half-dozen crates full of albums and a total ignorance of American black music and culture. I do what any unemployed, nearly penniless, directionless young man would’ve done; I move back home with my parents. It’s an uncomfortable period in my life, and I spend part of it doing what I’d been meaning to do for a long time. No, not looking for a job, although that’s inevitable and can’t be postponed for long. Instead, I organize my music collection, carefully arranging albums in alphabetical order, cataloguing artists according to genre. And for the first time it dawns on me. I’ve been an avid music collector for many years. And I have assembled a fine, representative collection of lily-white music.

Among my favorite bands and musical artists—The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers, Cream and Eric Clapton—the same songwriting names keep resurfacing: M. Morganfield. C. Burnett. W. Dixon. R. Johnson. Who are these people? I have no idea. But I know they write great blues songs, and that it’s time to move beyond my narrowly defined musical world.

I come home from a university music store clutching an album called Muddy Waters At Newport, 1960. And there it is again: “Baby, please don’t go / Baby, please don’t go / Baby, please don’t go down to New Orleans / You know I love you so / Baby please don’t go.” I suddenly remember Roosevelt and his moonshine. And I remember the feeling of hopelessness, the humid oppression of the Missouri summer night and the desperate desire to escape.

This is not the flashy electric blues of Clapton and Zeppelin. There are no jaw-dropping guitar solos. It’s rougher, more raw, more ragged. But there’s an undeniable power and majesty in the vocals, an insistent cry at the heart of this music that startles me with its intensity. I want to hear more—a lot more.

And so begins a journey that continues today. I chase the blues because the blues are hotwired to my soul, an electric jolt of sorrow and joy that can rouse me from the lethargy of unending, monotonous days. It’s difficult to escape the grey, drab dreariness of routine. But the blues are life in Technicolor, an inexhaustible wellspring with a thousand rivers and tributaries, the most constricted and limited of all musical forms, and yet infinite in variety and nuance. I chase the blues up to Chicago with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, Magic Sam and Willie Dixon. I chase them down to the humid Delta with Robert Johnson and Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and Charley Patton, and over to Memphis with B.B. King and Sleepy John Estes and Furry Lewis. I chase them out to east Texas with T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins, across to California with Big Mama Thornton and Lowell Fulson, up and over to the rust belt with John Lee Hooker and Robert Lockwood, Jr., across the country with the great blues-rock guitar slingers—Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter, Roy Buchanan. I chase them across the Atlantic with Eric Clapton and John Mayall, Jeff Beck and early Fleetwood Mac.

The blues are life writ large—they cut to the chase and cut to the bone, every time. You won’t find flowery, lofty language here. But you’ll find life distilled to its most primal qualities—love, sex, betrayal, violence, grinding poverty and oppression, the devastating effects of floods, tornadoes and drought; crossroads that point the way to anyplace but where you are, and railroad tracks that invariably head out of town. And death. Always death.

Summer, 1979

My grandfather has succumbed to colon cancer. We’ve said our goodbyes, attended his funeral service, planted him in the ground not far from his cotton and soybean crops in the hopes he’ll rise again. My grandmother has decided to sell the family farm. And now we journey to Greenville, Miss., to visit my uncle and aunt, one last family reunion to remember and celebrate. I haven’t been here since my youth, and I’m curious to see what has changed.

We take Highway 61 out of Memphis, wind our way through the Delta past Robinsonville and Tunica and Clarksdale, deep into the heart of the south that I longed to escape many years before. My uncle stands over his barbecue grill, preparing one last family feast, and I head outside in the blistering Mississippi heat to join him.

“What ever happened to Roosevelt?” I ask him. He looks puzzled, then remembers. “That old nigger?” he says. “Why, he drank himself to death years ago.”

Not much has changed.

November, 1981

A cold, blustery night in Columbus, Ohio. Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morgan?eld, would be dead in less than a year and a half, but here he is in front of a crowd of fewer than 100 people in a smoky bar, stalking the front of the stage, growling and roaring and moaning. He rolls his eyes upward in some heavenly musical ecstasy and rips through his greatest songs, holding nothing back, the sweat pouring down his face. He is 66 years old.

His band lumbers into “Mannish Boy,” and that thunderous guitar riff, embedded deep in rock ’n’ roll’s DNA, explodes from the speakers. “Ain’t that a man?” Muddy shouts, and the crowd, all 75 strong, bellows back, “Yeah.” It’s love of a sort, between this old black man and those who have been touched by his music. It’s a call and response that’s better than church, a give and take that leaves everyone moved and changed. The crowd shouts in unison; Muddy beams from the stage. The devil’s music, some have called it. Not this night.

“Baby, please don’t go,” Muddy sings near the end of the concert. “Baby, please don’t go / Baby, please don’t go down to New Orleans / You know I love you so / Baby please don’t go.” It’s one of those transcendent moments every true music lover knows well. I sing along at the top of my lungs, as does everyone around me. I believe I can die a happy man now. It’s Muddy’s song, but it’s my song, too, taken up and made a part of my life, as the best songs always are, a signpost that tells me where I’ve been and that points the way home.

Muddy leaves the stage with a wave. The lights come up and I stumble out into the Ohio November chill and head home, exhausted, exhilarated. But I can’t fall asleep. I don’t want to fall asleep. It’s one of the best nights of my life.

I wouldn’t mind staying at The Shack Up Inn if the air conditioning was working. And I think I could probably enjoy the Blues Experience, as marketed by corporate America, if the Hilton wasn’t too far away. I know something about the blues, but I’d prefer to keep that knowledge theoretical and relatively abstract. I don’t like to be too uncomfortable. And I hate it when people die.

All of them are gone now; my grandfather, my mother, my uncle, Roosevelt, Muddy. Long gone. You live long enough and you get the blues, no matter what your station in life. You hope, you fervently pray, Baby please don’t go, and Baby goes anyway.

February, 2005

Another cold winter evening in Columbus, Ohio. It’s not been a good few years for the blues, or for Chris Duarte, the hotshot Texas guitarist I’m seeing tonight. Blues festivals are folding, public funding for the arts is dwindling and Duarte, once heralded as Stevie Ray’s heir, hits the stage 30 minutes late after waiting in vain for the crowds to appear. It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for me, either. My father-in-law died a week ago, and I’ve just returned from my third funeral of a close relative in the past nine months.

Midway through the concert Duarte finds his groove. The notes spatter like machine gun fire. The voice moans and soars like Muddy or Howlin’ Wolf, and I’m transported to a better place. It doesn’t matter that Duarte is white, that his long pony-tail owes more to Haight-Ashbury than the Mississippi Delta, that the bar is half empty on a dead Thursday night in the middle of a Midwest winter. He’s doing what I’m doing, what we’re all doing. We’re chasing the blues.

Like another “First lady”—Jackie Kennedy—Faith Evans has managed to survive some hard times: the assassination of her husband (Evans is the widow of the Notorious B.I.G.), endless public scrutiny, fair-weather friends and serious self-doubt. And although she prefers Roc-A-Wear to a pillbox hat, on her fourth album, The First Lady (her first for Capitol Records), Evans proves she’s one class act.

Lyrically, The First Lady offers plenty of revelations: First, we hear from the good-time gal on “Goin’ Out,” which features Pharrell Williams and Pusha T. “Me and my girls are goin’ out tonight,” a sassy Evans states on the number. “Tonight I’m hangin’ with my girlfriends / And I’m startin’ a new life.”

Next, she breaks all the rules on “Again,” offering a birds-eye view of her recent stint in rehab, admitting, “If I had to do it all again / I wouldn’t take away the rain / Cause you know it made me who I am,” then sagely deciding “Nobody knows what life may bring / It might make you happy / It might make you sad.” Hardly the topic you’d expect for a hit single, but Evans just might create the exception.

We get a glimpse of a fragile Faith on “I Don’t Need It,” when she croons “I’m here alone again / You know I’ll do what it takes to hold you down / But all this lyin’ to myself is starting to stress me out.” Later, on the ballad “Stop N Go,” she proclaims “I’m not super woman / So I can’t see what’s goin’ on in your mind,” before concluding “I know if I break down / I’ll be wanting more … I’ll be wanting a commitment from ya.”

Although Evans has managed to find love again, the song is a cruel reminder of the difficulties of being single in this day and age, juggling motherhood (she has three kids, including Biggie’s son, who was born in late 1996), a career, and her own insecurities without a dependable man to help shoulder the load.

Over and over again—singing atop dance beats, ’70s-soul riffs and punchy funk numbers—Evans examines her life, particularly the contrast between her early (i.e. poor) life and the complexities of newfound wealth. “Even though my money changed / I try my best to stay the same / But you know with more money more problems came,” she notes; a few songs later, she confesses “I’m not ready to trade in all my Kelley bags [or] take the Bentley back.”

In less capable hands, listeners would be rolling their eyes about the poor little rich girl—but Evans’ soaring, sorrowful voice and perfect control paint a powerful portrait of her difficult life. And just when you’re about to feel too sorry for her, Evans pulls out the delicious “Mesmerized,” a modern-day love song on par with the late Lyn Collins or hizzoner Soul Brother #1. A funky breakdown, spirited backing vocals and a righteous attitude—the sentiment on this cut is guaranteed to make her soul sisters shout.

Jeff Buckley’s influences are no secret. The few recordings he made before his drowning death in 1997 reveal his muses—pretty much everyone and everything, it seems—so Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley’s exploration of how he himself inspires is a welcome perspective.

First-time documentarians Laurie Trombley and Nyla Bialek Adams interviewed musicians, friends, family members, writers, artists and more about the imprints Buckley left behind. Their sensitive and thorough approach lets Buckley, his music and his legacy do the talking.

The film’s enlightening moments show how his art has endured despite a lack of major commercial attention. Popular artists like Duncan Sheik, Chris Cornell and even Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach talk about Buckley’s integrity and gifted songwriting, as do an orchestral composer, a choreographer and a painter. There’s plenty of footage of Buckley performing and speaking (mostly making jokes), as well as some biographical tidbits. The dimly lit, sepia-toned footage of the troubadour singing “Grace” at the film’s end ignites simultaneous feelings of sorrowful longing and euphoric satisfaction.

This reverent, powerful film doesn’t answer any questions about Buckley’s death, but it assures that his greatest gifts are still with us.

Edwyn Collins-produced, London-based power trio flexes muscles on lean, bloozey garage-funk debut

Little Barrie’s debut is tough meat clinging to the bone. Without effects, ironic distance or fancy production, frontman Barrie Cadogan’s guitar glides effortlessly between hotted-up blues riffs, rolling funk and expressive solos, twitching all around the beat and the soul koans of his vocals. Lewis Wharton’s bass is less foundation than second lead, cycling through clipped melodic phrases with a precision that ballasts the wanton guitar. Wayne Fulwood’s drumming is the model of restraint, eschewing clutter in favor of a deep, fluid pulse, and his background vocals sound strikingly realistic—the rich, honest production preserves the sense of distance between the two singers. No smoke, no mirrors: A timeless confidence oozes from Cadogan’s unprocessed licks and sizzling moan, and while the same pared-down, consistent groove that makes Little Barrie such an immediate grabber might play them out quickly, it’s a tasty, gristly flavor of the month.

In conversation, Marco Benevento and Joe Russo are easygoing guys. They laugh easily, speak easily and politely respond to failed punch lines with encouraging phrases like “that’s classic.” The laidback vibe is a contrast to the way the two rip it up live, using only drums and keyboards.

Benevento and Russo developed the duo concept during a 2002 residency at the Knitting Factory in New York. “The gig only paid $100,” says Russo. “So I figured we could each make $50 a week.”

Benevento remembers the yearlong residency as a time when the two figured out how to sound like a quartet while remaining a duo. “Performing every Thursday,” he says, “not knowing what’s going to happen next, not knowing what songs you’re going to do, not knowing what Joe’s going to do—it was immediate learning.”

Using electronic effects to add colors and whimsy, the Benevento/Russo Duo began by performing instrumental covers by Radiohead, Led Zeppelin and others, achieving a huge sound. As the audiences expanded, and the group started performing nationally, they shifted to original compositions and live experimentation.

The Duo’s improvisational skills have earned it a solid jamband contingency. But Russo rejects the idea that the Duo itself is a jamband. “We’re an instrumental rock band that can improvise,” he declares. The Duo’s affiliation with ex-Phish bassist Mike Gordon might have something to do with the typecasting. Gordon sat in with the band last summer for what was originally intended as a one-off. But the results were immediate and Gordon continues to perform with the Duo (the “Trio?”) on special occasions. “It’s different from what Marco and I normally do,” says Russo, “and it’s different from what Mike normally does.”

Meanwhile, the Duo proper is turning heads with its national debut, Best Reason to Buy The Sun, one of the year’s most exciting breakout discs, and the Duo’s live reputation has guaranteed prime slots at festivals like Bonnaroo. With this kind of success, Benevento and Russo could afford to add guitars, bass, even horns and still make their $50 a week—but haven’t you heard? Less is more. Two is the new four.

Ever since Beck Hansen released his landmark melding of hip-hop, rock and country with 1996’s Odelay, he’s been a man fitted for a narrative in which he’s never been a willing character. But instead of being written into a script designed by marketing teams seeking to make him a household name, he snatched away the pen and changed the story. In the process, he expanded the modern singer/songwriter’s job description more than any artist in the last 20 years.