February 2005

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Message from the sports desk...

Filed under: Imported

Dear Bill,

As my manservant Phineas retrieved me in the minivan Friday evening, I thought back to warm nights on the peninsula, seeking out truth near the nuts of a stuffed gorilla in a room that smelled like a 2nd year reunion of the 82nd Airborne in Decatur, Illinois, circa June 7th, 1946. When flak dances near your ear at top volume with maximum impact, you tend to not worry about the alleged effects that scotch and tobacco might have on your 8th decade in a town, county, and state you would have never predicted. The world really is a simple place Friedman, and if you need spiritual reassurance, pay close attention to the desperation of Larry Gatlin's voice on his opening stanzas of "Help Me," from Kristofferson's seminal work, Jesus Was a Capricorn.

The thing is Bill, when your editor has a vicious Pall Mall rasp from cursing the television during one too many St. Louis Baseball Cardinals games, you have to produce. You have to hold forth on music, sports, and politics all at once, preferrably in one thematic premise, preferrably without "iffy" punctuation or vulgarities.

To pull this off, you need a loyal butler, a minivan, and tickets to both a sporting contest and musical event. This may seem a daunting recipe, but a man of means with a hearty appetite for the possibilities of life never shirks his responsibilities.

Many overweight men of slightly muttish Norwegian descent are gnashing their teeth over the plight of the University of Minnesota (Men's) Hockey Team right now. More than one Sports Wizard has held forth on their offensive difficulties, and the measurable dropoff between the early season and what we are seeing now. Naturally, this is all the worst kind of rubbish and masturbatory self-delusion that has produced about 15 cable sports channels when three (3) would have been more than sufficient. This squirrely band of bastards wearing maroon and gold has ample potential to reach the Frozen Four this year, but their Achilles' Heal is so achingly obvious and simple that it's a mortal lock that they probably aren't going to get that far, and, if they do, they'll get stomped by a muscle team. For the past 7 or 8 seasons, the Gophers have had at least one, if not two, NHL caliber defensemen. And by that I mean, one, a guy who can score from back there, but two, someone who moves the other team's stud off the puck; for the past few years, Keith Ballard, an absolute nightmare in the number 13 sweater let everyone on both teams know that the pond was his, and anyone who didn't like it was going to get dropped. There simply isn't someone like this on THIS Gopher's squad; NOT an enforcer so much as a "presence" on the ice. And, without that presence, everyone, forwards and defensemen, are constantly back on their heals, trying to keep the puck out of the home zone. It's much easier to skate forward than backward.

But this is gibberish Bill.

An hour and a half of Split Lip Rayfield is a lot of hard miles. It seems like there's a different crowd at their gigs every time I see them. They howl and violently bang on their instruments and cause beer sales to multiply exponentially. Guitar and banjo provide two devilish bookend grins for the complete mania of Country Jeff on his bass and the carnival sideshow hypnotist calm of Wayne on his mandolin. Throw this stew of humanity into the filthy little shit hole that is the 400 Bar and you have a recipe for Friday night disaster. A night filled with the speed and violence of WCHA Hockey followed by the speed and violence of a psychotic hillbilly band from Kansas is too much for the brain to handle, Bill. It separates itself from your skull, and you find yourself staring in horror at your rolling eyes and clinched teeth. "Who is this gross hayseed, and what would bring him out on a cold night in a state like this, well into his 30's, to put up with these strangers in a place so foul that the unshowered and tattooed help all quit?" But that's the beauty of Split Lip Rayfield, it's "let go" music. The uninitiated in this state don't know to relax and pump their brakes when they hit a skid; they tense up and dive into the first retaining wall or median. But this is wrong Bill. The duality of the universe has taught us that speed saves as much as it kills, and sometimes a little careening is good for the body and the soul.

Country Jeff is from Wichita Bill. And, as the weekend taught us, it's the crazies who are normal and the normals who are crazy. President of his church indeed.

But the big news in Minnesota this weekend was the pending purchase of Marshall Fields by Federated Department Stores, or Macy's for short. Having been a full-time, daytime employee for Fingerhut once, all I can say to the poor bastards working for Marshall Fields right now is dust off your resumés. Don't believe a word anyone is telling you, do the math instead. What is the cash position of Marshall Fields in comparison and contrast to its receivables in the form of credit card debt? If it is weak, you will be filing for unemployment within 18 months because Federated will close you down and liquidate you. It's a dog eat dog world, Friedman, and this is another purchase/takeover to energize the gamblers and thieves on Wall Street; it has nothing to do with presenting and preserving a viable retail concern to and for the shopping public.

I don't have time to edit this anymore Bill. Besides, you're busy with that hairy little vomit factory in your house. Buy him a banjo now for your retirement. Think of it as a $300 investment.

Sincerely,
El Platano-Blanco

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 28, 2005 10:35 AM

 

Weekends were made for picking black buggars out of your nose...

Filed under: Imported

From the StarTribune:

Minnesota pollution control authorities have issued an air pollution advisory for the southern half of Minnesota for today and Saturday.

High humidity, heavy clouds and relatively light winds are expected to allow fine particles such as soot to accumulate, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency warned. The fine particles can enter the lungs and cause breathing difficulties.

Air quality is expected to reach the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" status, but not the "unhealthy for all" condition that Minnesota experienced the first few days of February.

Some close friends of mine have been telling me for years that it's never too late to start smoking. The only scene from the movie "Backdraft" that made my father--who was a firefighter for 35 years--react in any way, was when they all lit up after putting out that fire at the textile warehouse early in the flick. He audibly chuckled, which in my father's case is similar to a four day lecture on metaphysics.

Air quality is a relative thing, really. We've spent the last 15 years gunning our SUV's to the convenience store, so now we all have asthma. But the chameleons of us out there know that if you can't breathe what God's givin' ya, you make your own air. Just sit at your dining table smoking a cigar, gassing onions in your food processor while feeding your dog corned beef hash. Now THAT'S some air quality.

If you have to stay inside this weekend because your inhaler ran out, turn on your radio, OR, BETTER YET, TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER, and go to:

Click on Listen Live Now

There, on Saturday at 2pm, you'll find me, fouling the air even more with whatever leftovers are in my windpipe from the hard living I do on Friday nights. You might hear the finest alt country show in Minnesota. Then again, you might hear me holding back acidic vomit burps too. Whatever you do, make sure you put your gas mask on correctly so that the dulcet tones of the bands we feature reach your ears, which get a free pass when the air is bad. Just remember, don't stick anything smaller than your elbow in them, especially not the toothpick gadget from your Swiss Army knife, it might get stuck. Did I say that out loud?

Hell, if your eyes, nose and windpipe are going to get soiled by the air, you might as well take your ears down too, now that I think about it. Tonight (tonight = Friday, February 25th), you should be stumbling into the 400Bar to hear a little band called Split Lip Rayfield from the Great State of Kansas. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtains, and yes, his bass IS made out of a gas tank. If you blink, you'll miss the fact that this band's goal every night is to play somewhere along the lines of 70 songs in 90 minutes. This band is probably number one on the list of gigs where you hear people wondering out loud, "why aren't these guys really popular?" My old friend, confidant, and conscience, JB Doubtless said it best, "women don't want to listen to that shit." Or something like that. Anyway, what he means by that is that 15 year old "women," named Rebecca, from Eden Prairie, who drive an SUV to the convenience store, don't want to listen to it. If you go down to the 400 tonight, you'll see plenty of women there; they'll probably be smoking and have at least one tattoo, most likely somewhere near their necks.

Saturday night, you'll probably want to hit that Trampled By Turtles gig at The Cabooze with Charlie Parr. I always think I know exactly what kind of crowd is going to be at the Cabooze and I'm always wrong. There will be at least one businessman who got off the light rail in a suit and tie at about 5pm, started drinking Maker's Mark at The Joint, and is trying not to fallover and/or vomit, somewhere down in front of the stage. "My flight leaves tomorrow morning," he said, "I need to get out of this hotel room."

Check out that House of Mercy Gig on Sunday over at The Turf. When you get there, everyone will know everyone already and will be deep in conversation. Introduce yourself, but don't have loud discussions about your idea for your novel within 20 feet of the stage. This is distracting to the patrons and performers alike.

P.S.--A little bird told me that the Tift Merritt gig down at the Fine Line on March 12th is probably going to get cancelled.  Stay tuned.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 25, 2005 10:21 AM

 

Finally, some perspective...

Filed under: Imported

I pulled in to Nazareth, I was feeling about half past dead.
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, Mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned, shook my hand, " No" was all he said.
Take a load off, Fanny.
Take a load for free.
Take a load off, Fanny.
And
and
and
you put the load
you put the load right on me.

Dear Bill,

It's a guaranteed certainty that only you know the heaviness in my heart right now. It was you who introduced me to the arbiter of truth back in the fall of 1988. We were living in a trailer then; we ate bagel dogs and threw rocks at the trailers around us, seemingly the only ones who truly grasped the absurdity of our existence. There was no good or bad, wrong or right, rich or poor...only today. And the only way to deal with a bastard like today is to give it the gas and see who gets out of the way.

Now, 17 years later, you're a father of a human tripod, a young man in waiting, born in the 21st Century to a culture so seemingly dumb that men like us shudder at what will be left when we give up the ghost some 4 or 5 decades from now. Meaningless hippie slogans like "think globally, act locally" take on new meaning for a man like you; young Zero needs to understand that although mom and dad and grandma(s) and grandpa(s) all love him dearly, everyone else has a number pinned on their tank top and is willing to endure shin splints and amenorrheic bulemia to beat him to the finish line. Sure, we had it tough at times, but his generation is truly doomed, and you need to prepare him properly.

Bill, I spent the whole day in a suburban shit box surrounded by people who had no idea who Hunter S. Thompson was. Ever since sophomore year when Professor Ken Fields acused us all of being so absolutist that we'd take our own lives over a B in chemistry, I've been diligent about getting too absolutist over anything. It just seems that one or two people might have heard of him in my workplace, no matter how many rings outside the "main city" they were.

But that's the price you pay, huh Bill? It's all People® Magazine, McDonald's®, and Wal-Mart® from here on out. If you shake your fist at the Majority, you're branded as a kook. Thomas Jefferson once wrote:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Some 150 years later or more, Harry S. Truman said something along the lines of, "how long do you have to let something hit you in the head before you ask, 'what's hitting me in the goddamned head?'" Bill, you and I had the great misfortune to belong to a time when people rode their skateboards into the break room to grab their coffee before retiring to their cubicles--a.k.a soul coffins--to create something that undoubtedly made life easier for modern man, yet infinitely more sterile, and dangerously close to comatose. There's such a great premium on bend and spin that our generation will never know the truth about anything.

But you can save that little peckerhead in your arms right now. You can make the little bastard vigilant from the get-go about anyone trying to sell him a bill of goods. I'm all about free enterprise, killing those who want to kill me first, and passing out to the soaring rockets' red glare of Jimi Hendrix on July 5th every year, about 1am. But I am tired Bill of this impression I get that the truth has been lost; and I am scared Bill, every time someone who had a very callous disregard for the "quotable truth" goes to the great beyond. It's like there's one fewer person to keep the squares honest. And make no mistake Friedman, the squares are winning right now. God knows why, but they are.

Bill, from now on, just think of me as Crazy Chester following you and catching you in the bar. We can learn from the self-absorbed baby boomers and their swollen prostates. There is time to right the ship. But it starts with sneaking paperback copies of "Hell's Angels" and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" into the school libraries and public restroom stalls in towns like Camdenton, Missouri and Albany, New York. These people need to understand that 55 million to 54 million is close, not a mandate; and, that it's okay to fuck who you want, as long as they're an adult and consented; that the Yankees, Cowboys, Lakers, and Notre Dame University aren't necessarily everyone's favorite teams;  that the dogfish is a sublime and ancient submariner, deserving of a higher spot in American sportfishing and literature; that Jesus was a Capricorn; and, that Kenny Chesney didn't write "Free Bird."

We've got a LOT of work ahead of us Bill, but there's still time.

Sincerely,
Captain Horatio Platano-Blanco

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 22, 2005 1:32 AM

 

Hank III at First Avenue

Filed under: Imported

I make no bones about my literary heroes being Hunter S. Thompson, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut. These are men who witnessed the absurd in everyday existence and had the guts and common sense to report it faithfully. It's really all about truth, at the end of the day. Life, for the most part, is boring, with much of the monotony disrupted by things so out of whack, they seem like lies to those you don't know.

The humor in these works was a zinger because of the little truth pyramids behind them. Characters and scenarios, plausible by themselves, were constructed into absolutely dysfunctional car wrecks of humanity, bordering on the psychotic. Today, it gets cute labels like "conspiratorial" and "paranoid," but the truth about a lot of things is that small groups of greedy scumbags are acing a lot of us out of the good life, and it's not treasonous or un-patriotic to call them on it. America was founded on the principal of allowing people to speak their minds, and that my friends, is still ten times more dangerous than any dirty bomb delivered to our shores in the middle of the night.

For instance...

Hank Williams was the greatest performer of country music in the History of the genre. If you don't agree with that statement, then don't read further.

He was a musical conduit for the hillbillies of his time. Raised in a brothel, taught to play guitar by an old African American blues musician, hooked on pain pills and booze because of a degenerative back condition, everything that bothered and/or enraptured him came out in his songs. He was the voice of rural people moving to the cities to work in factories during and after World War II. He made people go insane at his gigs, afixing his dark, piercing eyes on the prettiest girl in the audience and working her like a snake charmer in a Khyber Pass bazaar.

Criticizing him would mean something, because he was a cultural moment, a bookmark in the Great Big Book of American Art. Saying he was bad at something, or a song of his was shallow and not indicative of some slice of humanity would truly be like saying, "those people don't exist," or "the grass is not green." Hank Williams, and even the persona he built into his performance presence, were real and true. He could change his clothes, but he was still Hank.

Which brings me to my favorite foil and his partners in crime. I pick on Kenny Chesney because it's easy...his phoniness is legendary, just go grab a beer in a Nashville bar. But what gets lost is that what I'm really railing against is the SYSTEM of Nashville, and the PROCESS, and, if I say that Chesney is less than a Hank Williams bootprint in a steaming pile of shit, I'm not personally attacking the man, as much as I am attacking the absurd architecture that built him.

Chesney doesn't represent anything really. People react to and buy his music but you need to understand it's not HIS music in the classical sense. There are a thousand Kenny Chesney's in Nashville, he's just the turd who floated to the top, and he's part of a system that's designed to sell a very structured product and keep it profitable. That's why his and many others'--Big & Rich, "Save A Horse," Toby Keith, "Who's Your Daddy,"--songs are filled with bumper sticker slogans and movie one-liners rather than catchy phrases built on the reflections of personal experience. The bumper stickers and movies used to steal from Nashville, now it's the other way around. People bought into Williams' music because it tapped into the primordial ooze of who they were; people buy what comes out of Nashville now because the ad campaign used for the flatware section in Target is no different from that used in the CD/DVD section. This music isn't a part of your life, it's a part of your furniture.

But that's not what I come here to talk to you about...

Is Hank Williams, III a moment in time? Does he represent something?

I decided that was the question I wanted to answer for myself Saturday night down at First Avenue. I can remember seeing his father a few times as a dumb kid in Kansas City at the Starlight and Sandstone Amphitheatres. Hank Jr. was a pretty solid entertainer; someone who could play just about every instrument, and ended every show I saw exhausted, drunk and shirtless. Was he a real outlaw? Maybe, maybe not. The point was, he took the time to learn where he came from, and, when given the opportunity to perform in his own way, he created a blistering act that showcased the fact that he wasn't just going through the motions and collecting paychecks.

At the end of the 80's though, I think he went to the overtly literal autobiographical well too often; there were too many references to how hard it was to be Hank Williams' son. The albums he did for Elektra in the late 70's and early 80's were probably his best work, and the stuff he did after that really rehashed that material over and over again.

So where does his son, Shelton, fit? At the end of the day, there are those who say his punk band, AssJack, means more to him than the Country Music he does. And he's admitted in some articles that they've driven some dump trucks full of money up to his house to convince him how popular this stuff is and to get him to trot it back out there. So it would be very easy to be suspicious, jaded and distrustful of "the act."

But here's something different: Hank III records this stuff for Curb Records. At the show there were several people walking around with Tshirts that said "Fuck Curb Records" on the front, and, "We're Putting the Dick back in Dixie and the Cunt Back in Country," on the back, official Hank III merchandise. Manufactured rebellion, to be sure, but doesn't it get an "A" for effort? Tim McGraw records for Curb Records, do any of his tshirts say something like that? Are they playing yet another audience for suckers? Have the squares infiltrated us?

The crowd at a Hank III show is always interesting. First, Demko's there, he hates everything, and has a very low tolerance for anything that even smells fake. He walks in with his bullshit gun set to "kill," and keeps it trained on the stage until after the final encore, waiting for any hint of something metaphorically similar to Styx doing "Mr. Roboto" with a straight face and expecting people not to riot in disgust. But in addition to the critical intelligensia lying in the corners for this young man like starving spiders, there's a real hodge podge of mullets in signed cowboy hats, green haired punks whose faces couldn't get through metal detectors, and suburban mothers in homemade knitted sweaters. It's been a good five years since everyone first heard him belt out, "I might get drunk and rob a bank..." Wouldn't the word have gotten around had he been so phoney that he couldn't pass the muster? (And it would have been word of mouth, too, because the crap Country Radio stations still aren't playing him, but we'll lay off of that tangent for a minute.)

Call me gullible, but there's just something different about several thousand 17 year old girls in braces screaming in tears to some pumped up Ken Doll howling, "you had at me at hello..." and several hundred people of all walks of life losing their minds when a guy who looks like a tattooed Luke the Drifter, whose eyes are about to explode out of his head, unintelligibly growling something along the lines of "fuck the fuckin' fuckers," in the middle of a song while playing instruments you can actually see plugged into the amps. Is he drafting along on his grandfather's legacy? Probably. Is he adding to it though? Possibly! THAT is the meat of the moment. He's being himself, you're sure of it, as you walk out of the club. He isn't hiding his bald head under a thousand dollar cowboy hat, and you could probably bump into this clown in any bar in your town and he'd be just another smelly punk who doesn't shower...that just happens to be Hank Williams' grandson. And his dark, dilated eyes are like mirrors on the shorted-out, fucked up people who file into these clubs to recapture a little bit of that authenticity and desperation that has been drained out of what once was a music of hope and fear.

There probably aren't many meth addicts who haven't bathed in a month standing next to grandmothers from Wayzata at a Kenny ChesMcBrooksTwain concert, sharing a smoke and a light, and THAT is the difference my friends. There is possibility for cultural breakthrough in this young man if he chooses the path. Sure he has a genetic leg up, and a lot of hired bullshit behind what he does. But he cuts through that with a shiv in a jailhouse bathroom, and at the end of a show, he stumbles backstage and looks Shelton Williams in the mirror before ambling off into the black-hearted night.

You can now listen to my show, The Other Side of Country, live, every Saturday from 2 to 4pm, streaming on the internet from The Mighty 1220.com. Just click on the link that says, "Listen Live Now," and join in the silliness.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 21, 2005 4:30 PM

 

A Monday morning 500 pound meat hammer...

Filed under: Imported

Hunter S. Thompson - 7/18/1937 - 2/20/2005

From the AP:

Writing in The New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt worried Thompson might someday "lapse into good taste."

"That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity," he wrote. "And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."

I cannot bring myself to read anymore than the wire story published online at StarTribune.com this morning. In recent years, I knew the day would come when my favorite author either had an accident or was found hopelessly lifeless somewhere on his fortified compound just outside Aspen, Colorado.

Since enrolling in Stanford in the fall of 1987 and first reading Thompson's work, I've voraciously sought out and devoured his words on the printed page. But let me qualify why that was so.

I'm not sure anyone really knows what Gonzo Journalism is anymore, but that's not what made the Doc special. He had a lot of half-baked opinions on politics, sports, arts and literature, but there was always just one sentence, one phrase, in everything he wrote that was like a laser on the back of my skull. The man used language like a string of firecrackers, and, he was probably the best observer of the "human condition" in things; he reminded everyone through his words that our leaders and heroes were still human beings, and as such had their moments of weakness and doubt like the rest of us.

We all grew up in neighborhoods where there was that one kid who was always outside, running around, and always dirty. You never knew what to think of that kid, because he didn't seem to have an off switch. And, his peculiarly feral habits served as a good reinforcement of your parents' own wishes that you grow up with at least an ounce of civility.

Rest in peace Doc.

In my own opinion, this is the best set of paragraphs Hunter Thompson ever wrote:

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos...but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego...so your down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-pained Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine's neck...both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down towards the crap tables--but they bounce off the net; they separate and spring back up towards the roof in three different directions, and just as they're about to fall again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean Kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies.

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled b y every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. "Say whatever you want, fella. They'll hear you, don't worry about that. Remember, you'll be two hundred feet tall."

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out of the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: "Woodstock Über Alles!"

We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But nobody can handle that other trip--the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

--From Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 21, 2005 9:16 AM

 

I want my Tift TV...

Filed under: Imported

The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily; then he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again; but he could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, "It was the best butter, you know."

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. "What a funny watch!" she remarked. "It tells the day of the month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is!"

"Why should it?" mutterd the Hatter. "Does your watch tell you what year it is?"

"Of course not," Alice replied very readily; "but that's because it stays the same year for such a long time together."

"Which is just the case with mine." said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. "I don't quite understand you," she said, as politely as she could.

"The Dormouse is asleep again," said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, "Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself."

--From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

My old pal Baby Z brought the following to my attention from CMT:

CMT Exclusive World Premiere Videos by Steve Earle, Minnie Driver, Old Crow Medicine Show, and The Duhks on New Series Debut

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Feb. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Featuring music from a wide array of alt country, bluegrass, and Americana artists along with performers from the heart of country music, CMT premieres WIDE OPEN COUNTRY on Sunday, Feb. 20 at 9:00-11:00 AM, ET/PT.* In its debut episode, WIDE OPEN COUNTRY will feature world premiere videos by Steve Earle, actress/singer Minnie Driver, Old Crow Medicine Show, and The Duhks.

WIDE OPEN COUNTRY will world premiere Grammy winner Steve Earle's "Rich Man's War." The video is directed by famed film director Jonathan Demme ("The Manchurian Candidate," "The Silence of the Lambs").

In addition, WIDE OPEN COUNTRY will world premiere "Invisible Girl" by Minnie Driver ("Elle Enchanted," "Good Will Hunting"), who made her first CMT appearance last year as a presenter on the 2004 CMT FLAME WORTHY VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS. "Invisible Girl" is from the veteran actress' debut album, "Everything I've Got In My Pocket."

Old Crow Medicine Show, a punkified old-time acoustic band, will world premiere its new video "Tell It To Me." The group is known for playing songs from some of the earliest traditions of American music -- tunes from jug bands and traveling shows, back porches and dance halls, southern Appalachian string music and Memphis blues.

Rounding out WIDE OPEN COUNTRY's world premiere videos this week will be The Duhks' "Mists of Down Below." The band creates a new sound with traditional roots, incorporating influences from blues, salsa, and Celtic music. The group released its self-titled album this year, with Bela Fleck producing.

WIDE OPEN COUNTRY will mix it up with videos by Ryan Adams, Willie Nelson and Norah Jones, Cross Canadian Ragweed, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Buddy Miller, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Reckless Kelly, Johnny Cash, Kasey Chambers, Charlie Robison, Dolly Parton, Dwight Yoakam, Mindy Smith, Lyle Lovett, Pat Green, Nickel Creek, Rodney Crowell, and Tift Merritt, all on the series' first episode Sunday, Feb. 20 at 9:00-11:00 AM, ET/PT.

A new episode of WIDE OPEN COUNTRY will premiere each Sunday at 10:30-11:00 AM, ET/PT in the series' regular timeslot. For more information, visit CMT.com.

CMT, America's No. 1 country music network, carries original programming, specials, and live concerts and events, as well as a mix of videos by established country music artists and new cutting-edge acts, including world premiere exclusive videos. Founded March 6, 1983, CMT, owned and operated by MTV Networks, reaches more than 77.1 million households in the United States. Go to country music's biggest web site at http://www.CMT.com.

*EDITORS: WIDE OPEN COUNTRY premieres Sunday, Feb. 20, at 9:00 AM, Eastern; 8:00 AM, Central; 10:00 AM, Mountain; 9:00 AM, Pacific. The series begins in its regular weekly timeslot on Sunday, Feb. 27 at 10:30-11:00 AM, ET/PT.

Contacts: Pamela Adamson
Jama Bowen

So, naturally, I'm optimistic about the idea, but curious about one aspect of it, so I fire off an email:

From: Jack Sparks
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 8:42 AM
To: Pamela Adamson; Jama Bowen
Subject: Wide Open Country

Howdy,

I just don't get it. The core audience for a show like this will still be in bed on Sunday morning at that time because they will have been at a club watching acts like this until 2 or 3am the night before. Why bury it early on Sunday morning? The 2 or 6 Mainstream Country radio stations who have the brains to at least run a show like this do the same thing: bury the show in a time slot where the people who patronize the music won't be listening.

Thoughts?

--JKS
The Other Side of Country
Saturdays, 2 to 4pm
c/o WMGT, The Mighty 1220
104 N Main Street
Stillwater, MN 55082
http://www.othersideofcountry.com
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/jsparks
Minnesota's Finest Source for Alt Country, Salt Truck Twang, Americana, Roots Rock, Insurgent, whatever the hell you wanna call it...

The funny thing is, when you ask for "thoughts," you figure you might get a little discussion, an opinion, or even our latest personal favorite, "you should get hired on to watch live monkey fuckings at the zoo." But, at first blush, "thoughts" apparently means:

From : Bowen, Jama L
Sent : Wednesday, February 16, 2005 8:52 AM
To : 'Jack Sparks', "Adamson, Pamela", "Bowen, Jama L"
Subject : RE: Wide Open Country

As with any show, our schedulers will track success and adjust timing if needed.

So I gave her a second chance. It's the new, nicer me. I mean, jeez, they're making an attempt with the show, right? Well, she didn't respond right away, so I sent her another email, more businesslike. After all, I am a professional:

From : Jack Sparks <othersideofcountry@hotmail.com>
Sent : Thursday, February 17, 2005 1:16 PM
To : Jama Bowen, Pamela Adamson
CC : othersideofcountry@hotmail.com
Subject : RE: Wide Open Country

The core audience for a program like this visits my sites anywhere from 500 to 1,000 times per day. They come from all parts of the country. They're going to be interested in my take on this program and its content. I'm cautiously optimistic. But I'm confused by the timeslot. I'd like to know more about why it was put in a Sunday morning timeslot, which in my experience is antithetical to this genre's sleeping habits. Could you give me a little more detail about what went into that decision? Thanks.

--JKS
The Other Side of Country
Saturdays, 2 to 4pm
c/o WMGT, The Mighty 1220
104 N Main Street
Stillwater, MN 55082
http://www.othersideofcountry.com
http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/jsparks
Minnesota's Finest Source for Alt Country, Salt Truck Twang, Americana, Roots Rock, Insurgent, whatever the hell you wanna call it...

As my mama, Marnell, always said, you can draw more flies with honey...

From : Bowen, Jama L
Sent : Thursday, February 17, 2005 3:06 PM
To : 'Jack Sparks'
CC : "Adamson, Pamela"
Subject : RE: Wide Open Country

CMT has strong viewership numbers on Sunday mornings. Also, each weekly episode will be repeated throughout the week as follows, so it will hit multiple dayparts:

Sunday 10:30-11:00 AM, ET/PT
Monday 11:00-11:30 AM, ET/PT
Tuesday 5:00-5:30 PM, ET/PT
Wednesday 2:00-2:30 PM, ET/PT
Thursday 1:00-1:30 AM, ET/PT

Attagirl, Jama! (just as a side note, does anybody else wish they knew a gal named Jama? Is it just me? Did I say that out loud?)

Americana's original core demographic has reached its mid-30's to mid-40's. It has disposable income. It voted with its pocket books on the "O' Brother..." soundtrack and the follow-up live album, and a bunch of other stuff that has followed. There was backlash for the Mainstream Country media outlets not playing Johnny Cash's recent work, and then Loretta Lynn's recent Grammy Winning Album. I'd like to believe this show was researched and developed over the past couple of years and brought to the network when it was ready to roll; but, if it was slapped together on February 13th around midnight after Loretta won, that wouldn't surprise me either, we ARE talking about Nashville after all.

Even though Nashville is full of people who'd like to catch me in a bear trap and saw my head off with a butter knife, Jama's a good sport, and according to her, we alt country hipster doofuses have an opportunity to affect some real life TV programming. I'll TiVo the damned thing and give it a shot. I mean, I have to stop bitching at some point, right?

Ed Benson still sucks.

Jack's Top Ten Alt Country Songs He Wishes There Was a Video For
Of course, WIDE OPEN COUNTRY would have to be on HOME BOX OFFICE if these were videos in its repertoire.

1. "My Girlfriend Ran Off With a Girl," Truckadelic
This song title and the accompanying video are pretty self explanatory. It probably should have been part of the "Chasing Amy" soundtrack, but there weren't any real hillbillies in that movie, and nobody got drunk on shine and ran his car into a ditch.

2. "Tijuana Cat Toss," Flametrick Subs
This video would probably be pretty similar to the party that was thrown after the Wild Bunch delivered the guns to the General in Peckinpah's movie.

3. "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town," or "Zoloft," Drive By Truckers
The "G.G. Allin" video would probably be a montage of his finest moments with the music in the background (therefore, Rated X); Zoloft would be one of American cinema's finest moments. It should be made by the guy who made "The Mask," and they should use the same facial special effects for every person who begins their prescription as the video progresses (...even my ol' pit bull, don't growl anymore...)

4. "Scrapple Song," Robbie Fulks
Porcine porn with people wearing overalls sporting C. Everett Koop beards.

5. "Dead Flowers," Rolling Stones
Fade in...Marianne Faithful sitting there, in a silk upholstered chair, talking to some rich folks that she knows...I should get paid to write this stuff.

6. "Gin and Juice," The Gourds
This video should be a shot-for-shot copy of Dokken's video for "It's Not Love," only substitute Austin, Texas' finest band (and don't forget the G&J)

7. "Me and Opie," BR5-49
Could they Forrest Gump-etize old scenes from the Andy Griffith Show and make this video work? The world may never know.

8. "Contrails," Richmond Fontaine

Maybe you're dressed
in yer blue oyster cult tshirt
maybe yer crumblin' somewhere
with a beer in yer hand
or maybe yer
sittin' back
on a lawnchair somewhere
watchin' contrails disappear from the sky
whiskey....pain-KILL-ers...and speed....

Remember about 1987, when MTV did the most requested video show every day around 5pm and "Home Sweet Home," by Motley Crue was number 1 for about 500 consecutive days?

9. "Pay No Attention to Alice," Tom T. Hall
This video would be just as powerful as Johnny Cash's for "Hurt," without all the morbidity. There would be sadness, but there'd be a little humor too. Plus, Tom T. Hall oughta have a video before he dies, huh?

10. "Alive at the Well," The Gleam OR "Mexican Jail," The White Iron Band
All I'm saying is that Patrick Swayze should be in either or both. I knew a guy once who had a few too many and had a single car accident. He actually ran down to a filling station and had it towed and disposed of before any authorities could get there and give him a ticket, etc. Swayze tried to do that with an airplane. That's all I'm saying.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 17, 2005 7:17 PM

 

The next one is about baseball...

Filed under: Imported

From CNN.com:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A pair of paintings from the famed series depicting dogs playing poker fetched nearly $600,000 at auction Tuesday.

The two works -- "A Bold Bluff" and "Waterloo" -- were among 16 paintings that artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge was commissioned to create for a Minnesota-based advertising company in 1903. Of the 16, nine are of dogs playing poker.

And:

"Honey, I dont believe this,"
the old man at Ferguson's Cafe kept saying to his wife.
As he read aloud The Memphis Star and their account of what went down that night
"It says He took a shit on the stage and started throwing it into the crowd.
But He was gone before the cops could come and shut him down."
Gone before the shit came down.

--From "The Night G.G. Allin Came to Town," by the Drive By Truckers

A respected writer here in town gave me a pat on the back and told me not to worry about the fact that nationally respected music critic, Jim Walsh, wrote a glowing review of local darlings, The Gleam. "Don't worry about fucking Walsh," he said, "he fucking likes everybody."

Sound advice indeed. You don't have to stumble into your basement, loaded on a Tuesday night, wondering if your whole schtick is tired and abused, to start posting lists on your blog. I mean, sure, you bowled a 608 series, and you think your left wing is a gilded rod of justice...but, does that really mean you have the juice to hold forth yet again on what is and what isn't TRUE AMERICAN MUSIC?

Like any blogger, I indulge in fancies of paranoia and psychosis and read some of my own ink. One of the best, yet least warranted, criticisms of what I write is that I never say what "I like." That is to say, I spend a lot of time talking about how Kenny Chesney is the 666 of Country music, a talentless fool, whose entire career is predicated on the fact that a bunch of brainwashed women want to fuck him, sight unseen, for reproducing almost word for word and note for note, the entire relevant body of work of Jimmy Buffet, between the years 1971 and 1978. But, the question is, can I say that enough? It really is a softball within the topic. Kenny Chesney sucks. Anybody who props him up and especially writes with, records with, or produces him especially sucks; because, in the true measure of the thing, you're the talented ones, and you cram your hands up his arse so he speaks to all the little kiddies...shame on you.

Anyway, back to the point.

I spend a lot of time on-air espousing the virtues of "Alternative Country." And by that I mean anything not produced by a major label in Nashville, Tennessee, aimed solely at delivering a solid block demographic of women between the ages of 25 and 45 to shit awful radio stations like KEEY, K102 in Minneapolis to pencil pushers like Greg Swedberg and Mick Anselmo.

So, on that note, if you've read this far, and are wondering to yourself where the children of Johnny, June, Willie, Waylon, Merle, Loretta, Hank, and Woodie are, here goes.

Bloodshot Records  Home of Neko Case, Rex Hobart & The Misery Boys, Wayne "The Train" Hancock, Split Lip Rayfield, and many others.

New West Records  Home of The Drive By Truckers, The Old 97's, The Flatlanders, and many others.

Yep Roc Records  Home of The Two Dollar Pistols, Reverend Horton Heat, The Legendary Shack Shakers, Chatham County Line, and many others.

Palo Duro Records  Home of Eleven Hundred Springs, Ed Burleson, and many others.

Rounder Records  Home of Alison Krauss + Union Station, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and many others.

Sugar Hill Records  Home of Reckless Kelly, Allison Moorer, The Duhks, and many others.

The JOKE is...here are just six (6) labels, all disparate in their makeup and oeuvre, spreading themselves thinly across the American landscape, but tenaciously preserving what you, your brother Bob, and grandma Ethel think of as American Country Music. GO TO THE CLUBS IN YOUR TOWN, SEEK OUT THIS MUSIC AND THOSE WHO PLAY IT. Towns like Portland, Oregon, Kansas City, Missouri, and Bozeman, Montana have their own scenes, built up around the belief that you don't have to wear some bullshit silk shirt and a black hat and sing about some kid with cancer who turns into an angel after the car wreck to be COUNTRY.

And finally, while you're at it, go visit, email, and worship Cindy Chaffin:

Affectionately known as "Herself," or, "The Dutchess," Cindy tirelessly details the ins and outs of Texas alt odd hillbilly downhome weird creepy twang. I don't know sheep shit from cotton seed compared to her, and I merely draft along, sending emails to bands she frequents, begging them for CD's and press kits so I appear "more hip."

Oh, and, LOVE THE GODDAMNED GLEAM.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 16, 2005 12:56 AM

 

Folks up there know what they've got...

Filed under: Imported

Jack White said it best during the Grammy's last night when prodded to speak by Best Country Album winner Loretta Lynn: "When we were sitting out on the porch making this album, Loretta said to me, 'Jack I've had 14 records banned by Country radio and every one of them went to number 1." Well, Country radio wouldn't play this record either and now look who's Number 1!" You'd think that Travis Moon, Chris Shaffer, Chris Carr, Adam West and Mary J. McKay might take a hint and throw the CD into heavy rotation immediately; but as I've pointed out before, Mainstream Country Radio isn't about country music at all. It's about delivering a female adult with household purchasing power demographic to pencil pushers like Gregg Swedberg and Mick Anselmo, so expect more Kenny Fucking Chesney from now until Doomsday. I wish I was smart enough to come up with a Get Trashed With Your Chesney Ticket promo for March 12th. Maybe we get a 55 gallon barrel and stand out in front of the Xcel Energy Center. For everyone who throws their Chesney ticket into the trash, we could hand out a ticket for a free drink at one of the local bars on Seventh Street there. We could take the trashed tickets, sell them on the spot to some broker or get refunds at the Xcel Ticket Window (which would be great revenge on the owner of the Wild for dragging out this lockout), and use that money for a local charity. Oh well, God bless Country Music.

FYI...Grammy co-nominee Tift Merritt will be playing the Fine Line on the March 12th, the same night as Chesney, so go watch some real Country music instead of "ol' flex and pout" and his "Wasted Away Again in Plagiarismville" Tour. If Tift isn't your cup of tea, Delbert McClinton will be destroying eardrums and guitar strings out at the Medina Entertainment Center that night, too. You see? If you look hard enough, it's easy to find talented musicians making talented music on any given night, rather than forcing yourself to be beholden to some goofball peacock and his "oeuvre," which is more marketing than Mozart.

I'm not going to say how I got in, but rest assured, I got in, to see Todd Snider at the sold out Cedar Cultural Centre on Friday night. Snider had me laughing to the point of tears a few times in between songs, and his rambling, bi-polar persona is just the kind of curveball that makes shows at this house of pretention bearable. The Cedar always seems to be a fight between a whole-earth crystal worshipping crowd that shows up early, saving seats for their friends, and expecting complete silence while the performer's on stage, and the fashionably distracted crowd, who shows up late, talking on their cell phones, buying their tickets at the door. I can't really stand either one, and would prefer that everyone just get along, because I have yet to see a performer there who gave two shits whether people were talking, drinking, smoking, or shooting heroine in the aisles. They are professionals after all.

That being said, Snider helped me realize that my childhood hero, Evel Knievel was probably more frustrated suicide than daredevil. His latest CD, and indeed a good deal of his body of work, contains a lot of self-deprecating bleeding into self-destructive lyrics, and he plays it all for laughs. But I had a tinge of sadness in my heart as I left the gig because this all kind of came rushing down on me at the end. If one gets big response and applause from songs based on this kind of high wire lifestyle, it's like we as an audience are ghoulishly goading him into doing more of it. It's a Charlie Brown leaning on the low brick wall moment for me, and it makes me want to say, "I just don't know Linus..."

Self-destructive doesn't even begin to describe The White Iron Band, though. Calling them self-destructive is like calling Mt. Everest "big." I like to think of myself as a relatively temperate guy, even though I go out more than your average brain-dead surburban father of two. But, the White Iron Band always makes me feel like a desperate junky, clinging to the slime of the stage, hoping for a magical musical moment that I can relive in my fried out brain months from now while staring catatonically at a busted lava lamp. And I mean that in a good way. Their music embodies the out-state hillbilly lifestyle of Minnesota, where, when something dies or breaks down, you take a chainsaw to it and make it into something else, eat it, or use it for spare parts. An even better way to describe what happened at the Cabooze Saturday night is to contrast it to all the long faces who were coming into this scene from First Avenue, and the shoe-gazing skinny boy rock of Low. Yeah, we understand she dumped you, but staring at your multi-colored Chuck Taylors and wailing over distorted chords isn't going to make any of us feel any better.

No, the true measure of club music is whether it seems like the band is having more fun than its audience. The White Iron Band, quite simply, delivers that feeling in spades, nobody in this group stares at their shoes while on stage. In fact, they crank the knob a few notches past ten as their audience gets wilder. I just can't explain it fully, but watching them makes me want to run barefoot through a meadow, jumpin' stumps, wielding an axe, singing "Clementine." Did I say that out loud?

Anyway, they have this new CD out, "Take It Off the Top." There's nothing earth shattering on it, but it's a massively well-crafted wild ass Country record. There's booze, jail, airplanes, dope, and more booze on this album, and I like it just a little more each time I listen to it. Last week, I was asked for some thoughts on Big & Rich for an article in a Nashville magazine. The overall thrust of my comments was that because they're on a big label and they're from Nashville, I doubt very seriously that they're as groundbreaking and rebellious as they try to portray themselves. On the other hand, groups like the White Iron Band are exactly what they portray themselves as, a buncha drunks from Ely who like to pick and sing about being drunks from Ely. In this day and age of manufactured twang bullshit, which do YOU think is more groundbreaking and rebellious?

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 14, 2005 3:49 PM

 

The agony and the ecstasy...

Filed under: Imported

From 360 Degrees, with Anderson Cooper:

JACK WHITE, PRODUCER, "VAN LEAR ROSE": I wanted to get away from the modern country type of production, because it's gotten to the point of it being -- a lot of stuff is being really heartless and very unemotional. And she's so emotional and real in her songwriting.

COOPER: Despite acclaim from critics, Lynn's peers didn't give her a single nomination for a Country Music Association Award back in November.

CHRIS WILLMAN, MUSIC WRITER, "ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY": I confronted somebody who's on the CMA board and I said, You realize this is a scandal, right?

COOPER: Was it backlash for working with a Nashville outsider like White? Whatever the case, Grammy voters made up for the snub by giving her five nominations, including best country album.

From CBS' 60 Minutes Wednesday, Edition:

The fact is, many of Lynn's most powerful songs were inspired by turbulent times with her husband, which is also reflected in her new song, "Portland, Oregon," about a time when Lynn tried to make her womanizing husband jealous by pretending to have an affair with her guitarist, Cal Smith.

"I got Cal and I said, 'Let�s go down to the bar and act like we�re getting drunk, and act like we�re lovers,'" says Lynn. "Boy, I�ve hated that ever since."

The song remembers that traumatic night on the road when Lynn's husband pointed his gun at her.

"After the show, I went in to go to the bathroom and I seen that shower curtain move a little bit. Scared me to death! So I opened the shower curtain," recalls Lynn. "There, Doo stood with a quart of whiskey in one hand and a gun pointed right at me. A loaded pistol! And if I�d had been in there with Cal Smith, he�d a killed us both. I said, 'That�s too close for comfort, Doo. Don�t you ever do this again.'"

The old joke goes something like this...Justice Powell made the famous point that he couldn't clearly define pornography, but, "I know it when I see it." So, one time, behind closed doors, The Court had to watch some porn films to gather information for a case before them; the lights were turned off, the projector flipped on, and, as the action began, Justice Marshall bellowed out, "that's it! I see it!"

Authenticity is always a slippery slope in the music business, but when you stumble into the hotel bathroom and your husband's crouched behind the shower curtain with a bottle of whiskey and a pistol, it's really not a hell of a lot different than Julius II screaming at Michelangelo to finish the fucking ceiling. For good or ill, the art we hold in the highest esteem most often in our society is born from torture and conflict. The King kept his jesters around for dinner and jokes around the picnic spread while on the hunt, but he kept his thumb on the court painter and poet, making sure they were always tempted back into poverty, and in love with the biggest shrews of the shire.

The Country Music Association (CMA) reinforced itself as a small car full of clowns just pulled up in the center ring, forgettably entertaining a few thousand children on the verge of vomiting their cotton candy when it snubbed Loretta Lynn at this year's awards for 2004's Best Country Album, Van Lear Rose. Dare I say it twice in one week, if the categories were populated with someone like Garth Brooks, Guy Clark, Dolly Parton, or Emmylou Harris, you could understand the competitive edge of the thing. But they crossed themselves and continued their treacherous betrayal of the art form by not only leaving her out for best album, but also giving the award to Kenny Fucking Chesney for Where The Sun Don't Shine, or whatever it was called. Just explain to me how something could be Best Album and not have any songs up for best song? Seems kind of counter-intuitive doesn't it? The simple answer is cash money; he had the biggest selling album and the biggest selling tour because women between the ages of 25 and 45 want to fuck him, not because he can sing or write songs. For his sins, he was rewarded with Album and Entertainer of the Year. It's like watching Peyton Manning march the Colts up and down 16 football fields for thousands of yards and about a hundred touchdowns, and then giving the League MVP award to the last place team's kicker because he's cute and sold a lot of posters.

But none of this is new. Johnny Cash's American Recordings with Rick Rubin are seldom discussed in Nashville because the people in power at labels like Sony, BMG, Warner Brothers, and Universal (which I think is all one big label now, and a division of the Ramjac Corporation), are ashamed that these four plus albums were pumped out under their noses and--even though Johnny was frail and in failing health--were infinitely better than anything that has come out of that town as a major release in two decades. Recording processes and thoughtful packaging like that have to be discouraged, lest artists start thinking that music is about something other than acquiring sponsors and signage for a tour and air-time on radio stations formatted to sell tampons. THAT'S why the snub. Loretta Lynn had the gaul to think that her gifts and talents might supersede the runaway machine that is the Nashville "process," driven by people like Ed Benson.

I spend a lot of time laughing about the absurdity of all of this. Loretta Lynn put out an album in 2004 that was smoking hot and edgy, and above all else, COUNTRY, and her own people gave her the cold shoulder AND the shaft. For the sake of argument, say they had actually given her multiple spins and the record never got traction; is the answer then, "Loretta made a bad record?" OR, is it, "What the hell are we doing wrong that this fabulous Loretta Lynn record isn't resonating with our audience?" People like Ed Benson, Buddy Canon, Greg Swedberg and Travis Moon have been saying for years that you simply cannot make a record a hit that isn't inherently one in the first place. But that's a simplistic argument and a cop out. The fact is, they're all guilty of poisoning the pool to the point, and restricting access to it that only the most neutral garbage survives. And, if there's any justice in the world, God will have given St. Peter his gold watch and let him cash out his heavenly 401K, then handed the keys to Johnny Cash.

This year's Grammy nominee's for Country Album of the Year:

"Van Lear Rose," Loretta Lynn; "Live Like You Were Dying," Tim McGraw; "Tambourine," Tift Merritt; "Be Here," Keith Urban; "Here for the Party," Gretchen Wilson.

Grammy nominee's for Best Country Song:

"It's Hard To Kiss The Lips At Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long," Rodney Crowell & Vince Gill, songwriters (The Notorious Cherry Bombs), Track from: The Notorious Cherry Bombs [Universal South; Publisher: Vinny Mae Music.]; "Live Like You Were Dying," Tim Nichols & Craig Wiseman, songwriters (Tim McGraw), Track from: Live Like You Were Dying, [Curb Records; Publishers: Warner-Tamerlane Publishing/Big Loud Shirt.]; "Miss Being Mrs.," Loretta Lynn, songwriter (Loretta Lynn), Track from: Van Lear Rose [Interscope Records; Publisher: Coal Miners Music.]; "Portland Oregon," Loretta Lynn, songwriter (Loretta Lynn & Jack White), Track from: Van Lear Rose [Interscope Records; Publisher: Coal Miners Music.]; "Redneck Woman," John Rich & Gretchen Wilson, songwriters (Gretchen Wilson), Track from: Here For The Party [Epic Records; Publishers: Sony/ATV Cross Keys Publishing, Hoosiermama Music & WB Music Corp.]

38th Annual CMA Female Vocalist nominees:

Terri Clark, Sara Evans, Alison Krauss, Martina McBride, Reba McEntire; Winner - McBride

38th Annual CMA Album of the Year nominees:

"Here For The Party" � Gretchen Wilson, Produced by Mark Wright/Joe Scaife, Epic Records; "Mud On The Tires" � Brad Paisley, Produced by Frank Rogers, Arista Nashville; "Red Dirt Road" � Brooks & Dunn, Produced by Kix Brooks/Ronnie Dunn/Mark Wright, Arista Nashville; "Shock�N Y�All" � Toby Keith, Produced by Toby Keith/James Stroud, DreamWorks Records Nashville; "When The Sun Goes Down" � Kenny Chesney, Produced by Buddy Cannon/Kenny Chesney, BNA Records; Winner - Fucking Chesney

38th Annual CMA Song of the Year nominees:

"Live Like You Were Dying," Tim Nichols/Craig Wiseman, Warner-Tamerlane/Big Loud Shirt; "Long Black Train," Josh Turner, Sony/ATV Tunes/Drivers Ed Music; "Redneck Woman," Gretchen Wilson/John Rich, Sony/ATV/Cross Keys/Hoosiermama Music/WB Music/Warner-Tamerlane; "Remember When," Alan Jackson, EMI April Music/Tri-Angels Music; "Whiskey Lullaby," Bill Anderson/Jon Randall, Mr. Bubba Music/Reynsong/Sony/ATV Tree/Wha Ya Say; Winner - "Live Like You Were Dying"

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 10, 2005 2:09 AM

 

Country Music, Football, and a brighter tomorrow...

Filed under: Imported

Gambling is a filthy disease, and its victims should be herded into caves like ancient lepers and fed from 30 feet away by giant meat forks. Many Eagles fans are waking up to terrible hangovers and empty pockets as they spent the last two weeks betting with their hearts and not their heads. Sure, the Green and Silver covered, but no one from that area code bet something as chickenshit as the cover. Their team was going to WIN, and seven points was a red herring. Meanwhile, many cool customers have that thousand yard stare that's only going to be erased by a few NCAA basketball tourney upsets and a sucker or two to bet against Illinois between now and then. Many professional gamblers lost their "spring break" money on that squirrely little touchdown in the closing minutes, and thousands of plots to have McNabb menaced and maimed were hatched and abandoned in a very short period of time. Gambling, to the pros, is a marathon, not a sprint, and big scores on the Super Bowl are a fool's errand. There probably wasn't much action at 2 1/2 points, but no one who does this for a living noticed. They covered Christmas in the violence and wild scoring of the playoffs leading up to the half-baked "World Championship."

There is no World Championship of Country Music, but unfortunately, if there were, this week's winner would be Kenny Chesney, author or co-author or co-plagiarizer of the new Number 1 album in America and the worst record of 2005, so far. Last week I detailed how Kenny not only partook of the time-honored tradition of paying homage to your inspirations by copying one of their songs, but also did it to the same song at least four (4) times on one (1) record. Various of my relatives and fishing buddies might quip, "there's no accounting for taste," or "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but those are the wrong responses in this situation.

Country Music is like the NFL before the salary cap and Major League Baseball now. There's a serious imbalance between the haves and have nots, and it's not because of any inherent superior talent level, opportunity, or intelligence. It's all about populations of people. Various corporations, political movements, and roller derby promoters have taken advantage of a collective audience they had at their disposal and whipped them into a direction until the money ran out. Back in my formative years, a crooked little man named Eddie DeBartolo, Jr. ran the San Francisco 49ers like an endless Motley Crue World Tour, and the fallout from the imposition of the salary cap and Federal RICO accusations crippled the franchise so severely that they trotted the team out on the field with Tim Rattay as the starting Quarterback with a straight face.

Unfortunately, with this metaphor, I've cleared out my back ranks and placed my King under the protection of my Rook and a few meaningless pawns. If Kenny Chesney is my Tim Rattay, then Garth Brooks would probably be Joe Montana (somewhere Al Kunz is laughing, driving a 100mph on the lawless highways of Idaho with a loaded gun on his hip). Country Music went nuts over Garth Brooks and he--cough cough vomit choke--probably had the talent to pull off what they needed him to. But, as a result, Bill Walsh is still in charge, they're still running the West Coast offense (pouty, high school sweetheart music) with a no-talent piece of shit calling the signals (Chesney), and they're picking first in the draft this offseason. THAT'S what really scares me. They've lowered the bar so much that they're picking first. What fresh hell will they unleash on us next?

Maybe what heartens me is what many call my misguided belief that things can change. What I do here and on the radio is not so much a crusade as it is a call for an NFL style salary cap on the music I love...a return to sanity if you will. If the New England Patriots have taught us anything, it's that teamwork, dedication, and a respect for the history of your profession can still win out in the end, regardless of what some moon bat owners, coaches, and players are doing to ruin their squads, and plunge the rest of the industry into paranoid and desperate decisions that lead to failure and the inevitable cop out, "it's a business, everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't I?" But to men like Guy Clark and Teddy Bruschi, Country Music and Football aren't business, they're life itself. Sure Randy Moss puts asses in the seats, but Super Bowl Rings put football in the blood of those asses.  There are at least a few hundred bands and performers around this Country who have put together 3 Lombardi Trophy albums in their last 4; the kind of stuff that speaks to the hopes and fears of real people with real life problems, instead of some beachside circle jerk, designed to sell rum and vacation property.

Jack's Top Ten Country Records That Should Be Number One Instead of the God Awful "Be As You Are"

1. The Dirty South, The Drive By Truckers
It's easy to get caught up in the Patterson Hood songs on Truckers records because he's sometimes the de facto face of the band. But reader/listener votes for "Carl Perkins' Cadillac" as one of their favorite songs caused me to revisit the disk recently, and I'm beginning to like the Isbell songs better than all of them. Cooley's tunes are probably the most 3 dimensional and organic, but Jason's just seem sharper at the end of the record. There's a lot of artistic conflict on this album that I missed up until now. I hate to say it, because we "scenesters" are too often accused of sanctimonious navel-gazing, but this disk is very deep.

2. Wicked Twisted Road, Reckless Kelly
A road record that's not another boring road record. It's like Reckless Kelly is finally comfortable in their own skin. Not to say that they weren't good before, but rather, they've pounded out their identity with a slaughterhouse skull hammer, and now we have a very tight disk, both musically and thematically. One-hundred bonus points for the liner notes that fold out into a board game that you play with bottle caps, and the die included in the jewel case spine. Those of you who read this space often know that I look back fondly on things like my copy of Parliament Funkadelic's Gloryhalistoopid, or Pin The Tail on the Funky, complete with multi-page Starchild/Sir Nose Devoidofunk comic book inside.

3. The Chisago County EP, The Gleam
...but critical acclaim caused me to revisit the disk recently, and I'm beginning...aw shit I can't pull that off twice in one Top Ten list. This is raw music, and if you have your bat ears on, you can hear what the hell the fuss is all about, despite the drunken garage firewall. I was telling someone the other day that it has a Sex Pistols of Country feel to it; but then I punched myself in the face for thinking such a thing.

4. The Tigers Have Spoken, Neko Case
I'd be pretty damned nervous if I were Neko right now, because this record has been so well received that there might be a critical backlash against the studio album she's putting together. Of course, Neko cares about critical backlash about as much as Bill Belichek cares about his gameday wardrobe.

5. Sober and Stupid, FortyTwenty
This is a massively dumb record that works on so many levels I'm ashamed to listen to it.

6. Blood of the Ram, The Gourds
With the Gourds, I always come back to hopping around the room like I'm miming a galloping horse, slapping myself on the ass. If you were going to dance like the gang on Charlie Brown, this is a good record for that.

7. Tambourine, Tift Merritt
Yeah, I know it's almost impossible for a 4'10" white woman to channel Barry White, but I'm telling you...

8. Arabella, Laurie & John
This record has a creepy, ancient, incestual, Donny and Marie quality to it. I mean, should brothers and sisters harmonize together about lost love? It's a question for the ages. This is a gun-oil lollipop, so don't pull it out to be the background music for a Coon Rapids swingers party.

9. East Nashville Skyline, Todd Snider
Yeah, I know Demko said he bought it, but that won't make you less cool if you do, too. Snider will be down at The Cedar Cultural Centre on Friday night, so you can go drink thick beer in bio-degradable cups with all the silver ponytails and applaud along with them as he tosses out hippie burnout one-liners, barefoot on stage. I'll probably be there, unless I promise Demko I'm coming, then of course, I'll bail.

10. Oval Room, Blaze Foley
Music for drunk people, about drunk people, by drunk people. I'm going to take a page from Wine Spectator and tell you to enjoy this disk at about 7pm, in a lawn chair, with a cool drink, in the shade, on the 4th of July; maybe with a light, crispy corn chip, with a big dollop of guacamole on it.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 7, 2005 9:07 PM

 

Yes I Am a Pirate...400 years too late....

Filed under: Imported

The next few minutes were tense, and by the end of that time I had two new partners and my own marine salvage business. The terms of the deal were not complex, and the spirit was deeply humane.

The captain refused to cooperate at first, screeching hoarsely from the other end of the wreck that he had silent partners in Tampa who would soon come back and kill all of us...

But you hear a lot of talk like that in The Keys, so we ignored him and drank all the beer and hammered out a three-way agreement that would give the captain until sundown to take anything he wanted, and after that the wreck would be ours.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

The captain seemed to understand, and so did I. He would be lucky to get back to shore with anything at all, and I had come close to getting my throat slit.

It was almost dark when we dropped him off on the dock, where he quickly sold out to a Cuban for $5,000 in cash. Mother ocean had prevailed once again, and I was now in the marine salvage business.

--From Generation of Swine, by Hunter S. Thompson

From CNN.com:

"This ["Be As You Are," Chesney's new album] isn't necessarily a Kenny Chesney country album," said Butch Waugh, executive vice president of RCA Label Group Nashville. "This is a look at Kenny Chesney's life in the islands."

Waugh compares the boldness of the move to "Nebraska," Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album of bleak, demo-quality songs released during one of singer's commercial peaks. At the time, the album puzzled some fans, but today it's regarded as one of Springsteen's finest. In more recent years, Dave Matthews has taken a similar turn.

"You can only do this when you have a fan base that wants to know more about you," Waugh says.

There are many eloquent and sharp words etched into American letters and conscience about the seas South of Florida; but, Chesney's latest effort is more like the chum bucket on the shrimper that is that canon. To equate "Be As You Are" artistically with "Nebraska" is like equating the Mattel company's production of the Barbie Doll with the many castings of the works of Auguste Rodin. If you open the liner notes and begin to count--and believe me, I was conservative about this--by the time you reach the end, you find no less than 8 commercials/product placements in this masterwork of self-discovery and soulsearching. Dont' get me wrong, I'm all for country concept albums, but this disk is neither country, nor a concept album. It's a collection of 13 of the most banal, unoriginal, and slightly plagiarized thoughts on "the Caribbean" that I have ever had the displeasure of subjecting myself to. And make no mistake, after the producer of this steaming turd told me I needed to go watch monkeys fuck in a zoo, I was pretty sure the label wouldn't float me a free copy to review. So I decided to join the human race and PURCHASE a copy. Believe, it's $16 and 3 cents I'll never get back.

If I were Jimmy Buffett, I'd hire an army of lawyers and go after these guys. Don't go buy this record, but, if you have already because some fucking moron named Butch Waugh said it was the equivalent of Springsteen recording "Nebraska," then put yourself through this exercise and load the songs up in your computer's music player like this:

Song List
Old Blue Chair - then - A Pirate Looks at 40, Buffett
Be As You Are - then - A Pirate Looks at 40, Buffett
Guitars and Tiki Bars - then - Changes in Latitudes, Buffett
Island Boy - then - He Went To Paris, Buffett
Somewhere In The Sun
Boston - then - Fins, Buffett
Something Sexy About the Rain - then - Wildfire, Michael Martin Murphy
French Kissing Life - then - Come Monday, Buffett
Key Lime Pie - then - Grapefruit, Juicy Fruit, Buffet
Sherry's Living in Paradise
Magic - then - Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, Crystal Gayle)
Soul of a Sailor - then - A Pirate Looks at 40, Buffett
Old Blue Chair (Ocean Mix)

There's a lot of hints about being an old pirate on this record, but the only thing Chesney and his "writing partners" have pirated is someone else's ideas, if not entire lines, chords, and melodies of music. If this is Chesney letting us know more about him, Buffett ought to get a restraining order, because Chesney obviously thinks he and Mr. Margaritaville are one and the same.

I mean, really, where is the shame? At the end of his liner notes, Chesney offers:

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO IS INVOLVED IN MY CAREER FOR UNDERSTANDING THAT THIS ALBUM WAS SOMETHING I NEEDED TO DO. THANKS TO EVERYONE AT CRUZAN RUM FOR BEING A PART OF THE RIDE.

In case you're wondering, that's product placement number 8 in this brochure that was most likely sponsored and printed by the Virgin Islands Information Society, disguised as liner notes for an album.  Sometimes I have to take a shit, but I don't call all my friends in the bathroom to look at it, and there certainly isn't a sponsor for the viewing.

When Buffett took on his island persona and explored what was "going on" with the whole bit, he wrote about 10 good songs on the topic, 10 fairly original songs that looked into different aspects of "the life," and left it at that. And that's stretching it. To call Chesney's album redundant and repetitive, even within itself, is an insult to the depth, complexity, and beautiful inflection of the words redundant and repetitive. At the end of the day, this record is a self-masturbatory exercise on what it's like to be dumb, but rich enough to have a boat where you can get drunk someplace tropical. Expect this whore to show up at Xcel in a month with banners for Cruzan and Foxy's Firewater Rum all over the arena and Virgin Islands brochures in the lobby, right next to the K102 banners, right next to the cash registers.

Donate $16.03 to Kenny Chesney

Donate $16.03 to the International Red Cross Instead

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 3, 2005 1:45 AM

 

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