April 2003

Watching Old Westerns, the most believable guy

Filed under: Imported

After the Wild game last night, I was flipping channels and got stuck on "Shane" on American Movie Classics. Like a lot of people, this is one of my favorite old westerns, because the heroes are trying to do everything they can NOT to fight until pressed. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" strikes me as another.

It was probably the one millionth time I've seen "Shane," and something really struck me this time: Ben Johnson's believability. A lot of folks will probably say, "Ben who?" But, if you've watched a lot of Westerns, or more modern movies with western, rural, or cowboy themes, you'll know Ben Johnson as the guy who DOESN'T stick out, like a lot of other actors, as some guy who grew up on a paved street trying to act like a cowboy.

Peter Bogdanovich once said, "Getting Ben Johnson is getting the real thing." John Ford made a series of movies in Monument Valley with John Wayne as a Cavalry heavy. Ben Johnson played the most able-bodied soldier in all of those, and, the one who seemed most comfortable on a horse. He won the Best Supporting Oscar as Sam the Lion in Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show," based on the Larry McMurtry novel. He was in a number of Sam Peckinpah movies including the great anti-hero Western, "The Wild Bunch," in "Junior Bonner" with Steve McQueen, and he played the man who tracked and killed Dillinger in the movie of that name.

There's a lot of cultural metaphorical crap that gets frontloaded into these kinds of movies, and often what prevents them from being smothering and heavy handed is one believable character. Ben Johnson often supplied that character by just being himself. As he was fond of saying, "There are a lot of better actors in Hollywood, but none of them can play Ben Johnson better than me."

Those old John Ford movies often feature the best recordings of The Sons of the Pioneers, featuring Ken Curtis on lead vocals. For you really obscure music trivia buffs, Ken Curtis would later become Festus on the TV show, "Gunsmoke."

Go see some live music tonight!

Posted by Jack Sparks at April 30, 2003 9:50 AM

Bring in the Trash

Filed under: Imported

This Friday at Lee's Liquor Lounge is being billed as a 10th Anniversary show for local band Trailer Trash. If it is indeed the boys' 10th Anniversary, it is cause for great celebration.

You don't even have to go back 5 years to find that there were exactly...what, maybe five bands?...playing authentic country music of any type in this town, and the members of Trailer Trash were probably responsible for 3 of them.

Of the 30 or so bands in this town performing Twang right now, I'm willing to bet that 20 of them got some form of a leg up from one of the members of the Trash. Secondly, most of them have probably been to a Trash show just as a learning experience. Very few bands play a crowd like these boys, and you only have to go to 50 or so gigs by "edgy" bands where the lead singer is either staring at his mic or his amplifier all night to understand the importance of that talent. Lastly, the Trash has ALWAYS been here in the last 10 years. They had fewer gigs some years than others, but they always did just enough to remind people that Country music doesn't have to suck, doesn't have to be lip-synched and crammed through harmonizer boards, and doesn't have to cost $65 to sit down front and listen to songs that went through 4 lyrical revisions in the marketing department before being recorded.

And that's the key: persistence. Musical innovation occurs through the persistence of those few talented individuals who constantly have their fingers in the air at the big money establishment. The Trash may be redoing done-did songs on those smoke filled nights, but there's heart, feeling, and the individual touches of men who are genuinely trying to put the roots back into roots music.

Plus, it's a great way to meet girls, dance with girls, be around a lot of girls, watch girls dance with girls, dance one too many times with another guy's girl, buy a girl a drink, let a girl buy you a drink, and split a cab home with a girl...if you're lucky.

There's a purity of process in those hot devillish nights when the Trash takes the stage at Lee's, and in the end my friends, that's all that matters.

"And, yes, for the record, our first gig at Lee�s was Friday, 5/7/93. We started the regular Wednesday night gig after playing a bunch of weekends for Louie." --Nate Dungan

Posted by Jack Sparks at April 28, 2003 11:03 PM

Silly Rabbit, Chix are for Demos

Filed under: Imported

I thought long and hard about my first Blog. To quote Admiral Stockdale, "Who am I? Why am I here?"

And then I got this idea to finally weigh in on what I thought of the Dixie Chicks controversy. It's got Country music, politics, radio, labels, concerts...the whole she-bang. So, here goes:

About a million years ago, in England, Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks told a buncha Brits at a Dixie Chicks concert that the group was embarrassed that the guy sleeping in the White House was from Texas. They were immediately labeled unpatriotic, Saddam-sympathizing, troop hating harlots, who probably beat their kids and also cussed around their mothers.

There was much spilling of ink and gnashing of teeth about how this was a black eye for their careers, record sales, and country music in general. There was also a lot of chest thumping about how they shouldn't talk bad about the guy sleeping in the White House while there are troops in the field.

Now that the storm has passed a little and the girls have realized that the best way to overcome controversy is to take your clothes off for a major U.S. publication, I thought I could add my two cents worth on the whole thing, and maybe add a little perspective and levity to the situation.

First off, all that political, martial, patriotic mumbo-jumbo was completely meaningless. Blah blah blah. Nobody was worried about the guy who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he can take care of himself; and he should be given a lot of credit for never really jumping into the "controversy" while it was happening. Also, the troops probably could give a rip what the Dixie Chicks thought of Bush. From everything I was watching on CNN, they were a little too busy.

The real problem was whether this was going to damage mainstream country radio/music's hottest commodity: the image of the Dixie Chicks as 3 self-sufficient women who have overcome immense odds to do things their way and find success in the land of opportunity. Mainstream country radio and the 4 big labels in Nashville are focused on one thing and one thing only: catering the music to women between 25 and 45 so that they don't change the channel during the commercials aimed at women between 25 and 45. This collusion fills the airwaves daily with plenty of heartbroken cowboys in black hats begging for forgiveness, and singing of the joy their woman brings them with a shiny sunbeam on their shoulder and a tear in their eye.

The Dixie Chicks were a freight train for that image and demo. They delivered, "I am woman, hear me roar" in spades, and they delivered the sympathy/empathy song about a woman in trouble in the one way syrupy losers like Tim McGraw, Aaron Hill, Lonestar, Blake Shelton, and all the other ass clowns that are ruining the art form couldn't: in a female voice. Like the main concern in "The Godfather," their on-stage blunder was just bad for business. And while radio and label execs were dancing like puppets on strings around the issue of banning them, dropping them, supporting them, and calling them traitors, their true concern was that the flagship of the fleet had been sunk at a stadium across the Big Pond.

The reason Country does so well as a format in city after city is because the collusion of the stations and labels has produced a well-researched death grip on this demographic. If the Dixie Chicks start disappearing from playlists and Top Ten charts, it won't be because they're getting censored, or because it was ordered by the administration, or because men in black suits dropped from black helicopters at midnight are storming radio stations and stealing their disks away in the night. It will be because what they said causes women between 25 and 45 not to listen to commercials about iced coffee and how a husband who really loves his wife and family would buy them satellite TV. All that matters to Country Radio and the big 4 Labels in Nashville is the demo, their buying habits, and the power switch on their radios.

Addendum--Thank you from The Onion's website:
The Dixie Chicks Controversy: What do you think?

Posted by Jack Sparks at April 25, 2003 6:59 PM

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