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August 29, 2007

The unfairness of things (8): The Salty Dogs

Dave Hoffpauir called from Little Rock yesterday, and it had been long enough since we met back in 1996 that I'd forgotten he grew up down in Louisiana with Kevin Gordon and was good buddies with Paul Griffith, the Nashville-based drummer and divinity student who very occasionally writes for ND. Dave used to play drums in the Boondogs, and then in Ho-Hum with the Bryan brothers (one of whom apparently got 27,000 write-in votes for governor) and Kevin Kerby, the mad genius behind the late and lamented Magic Cropdusters. (Sorry: Mulehead, per the note below. And I knew that the Bryans are in the Cropdusters. Memory fails again.)

Back in 1996 Universal Records flew me from Los Angeles to Little Rock and put me up in a nice hotel so I could write a one-page interview with Ho-Hum for the late and largely unlamented huH magazine. To be fair and honest, I didn't love Ho-Hum's music, but they were nice guys and an interesting story and good enough to have turned into something bigger, though they didn't. And I hated living in Los Angeles. Frankly, I'd take a trip anywhere to get out, and did. (Incidentally, we don't take free trips here at No Depression. We did, occasionally, early on, but have found the ethical challenges to be more troubling than finding the money to pay for the odd plane ticket.)

So I spent 23 hours coming to and going from and being in Little Rock, Arkansas, and felt so welcomed that I went back to Los Angeles and decided to move to Nashville. A leap of faith for a kid from the Northwest. A happy leap of faith. Nashville was good to me.

The phone was busy yesterday, and so I kept hitting play on the same CD over and over again even though I was pretty sure there was no chance of writing about it or assigning anything about it for the print version of the magazine.

Let me pause here: This is a weird thing. I hear music -- very occasionally -- that I know I can't write about or cause to be written about in a magazine I co-edit and co-own but which, nevertheless, gets played for a day or two at a time and then shelved. Had the Salty Dogs' Autoharpoon arrived on my desk in 1996 they'd have almost certainly gotten a small local band feature in our Town & Country section. Eleven years later I've heard a lot more country music than I had in 1996, our scope has broadened, and I think my standards and frame of reference have gotten...more sophisticated. I started to type "better," but I'm not sure that's right. (This is an observation, not a complaint. Something I will think about a bit.)

Early on I was a pretty big fan of the Minneapolis band, the Carpetbaggers (I got them a mention in Spin during the grunge era, and they actually sent me a note of thanks; one remembers such things, and I hope they're doing well at whatever they're doing now). The Salty Dogs who, yes, are from Little Rock, but who were not the artist Dave called to talk about as we discussed the modest musical renaissance he hears in his adopted hometown, remind me a bit of the Carpetbaggers. Except that, being native southerners, country music is more their native tongue. Autoharpoon is their second outing, and if they sent me the first I doubtless tossed it. (Or haven't filed it yet.)

They play easily, comfortably. At moments I'm reminded of Mike Ireland (please, somebody, get Mike back in the studio), or of Buddy Miller, though neither lead vocalist sings with Buddy's soul. (Nobody does, really, do they?) Or of Two Dollar Pistols, though Brad Williams -- who writes and sings most of the songs -- doesn't have John Howie's distinctive baritone.

Williams, in any event, writes and chooses songs well. Online I've run onto several reviews who hear Bakersfield in Autoharpoon, and I suppose it's there. But I am more struck by the easy country-soul running through this, even the Johnny Cash knock-off "When My Blood Runs Cold" -- which is a darn good Cash knock-off, by the way.

As sometimes happens, one song kept surfacing, tickling. I knew "Take Time To Know Her" was a cover, but it took another internet search (allmusic.com isn't perfect, but it's helpful) to discover that it was a Percy Sledge standard, except that's not where I knew the song. Ah. There it was: O.C. Smith's Hickory Holler, that's where I'd heard it. Country soul, indeed.

The songwriter is a fellow name of Stephen Allen Davis, and if he's a poor man it's because he's invested unwisely. He's had hit cuts with Reba McEntire ("Just A Little Love") and Jo De Messina ("Stand Beside Me") and Charlie Rich ("Beautiful Woman"). And Frank Sinatra ("Penny"), and five Joe Cocker tracks, and Meatlof's "When Angels Sing" and a bunch of others.

A couple other nods to quality emerge from the liner notes. Guitarist Nick Devlin takes lead vocals on Mickey Newberry's "Why You Been Gone So Long?", D.J. Fontana plays drums on "Starting Now" and there's a testimonial from Jason Ringenberg.

That said, Williams' originals often hold up in that company. "Water To Wine", for example, could be absolutely ruined by Brooks & Dunn, but everybody'd make money doing it. "Holding To My Lord" (a Williams co-write with, if I read the liners right, the late Roy "Papaw" Wagner) is first-rate southern gospel. And I think Buddy Miller could slay "Take Time To Know Her," not that he needs me to tell him what to do.

Now, because Autoharpoon came out in late June, and we're now working on the November-December issue of ND, it's probably too late to crowbar more than this mention of the Salty Dogs into our real and virtual pages. That, at least, is the usual logic.

I may need to reflect upon that some.

Perhaps there is some critical distance between what I like and what I know to be good. Perhaps, though I wonder how and when that happened.

Regardless, this is why I make an attempt to listen to every single CD which comes my way, and fail miserably. And run months behind.

Posted by Grant at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 24, 2007

This morning's peak

We are, of course, losing our sense of place -- our individuality -- overwhelmed by global media and mass commerce and the economies of scale which now determine what is and is not available.

We are also losing our places.

It is impossible to talk usefully about the music of Robert Johnson without having some awareness of the Mississippi Delta where he lived, and when he lived there. That art, much less lasting art, was fashioned in such a time and place seems more and more astonishing the further we move from that time. But the music he and his peers made, it sounds like that place, it resonates with that time. The same is true for the blues Muddy Waters and his peers made in Chicago after World War II.

And for the fiddle musics of Texas and Kentucky and elsewhere. For folk traditions everywhere. For regional music, for local art forms. There is power in seclusion and isolation.

I have written before of the horrors of mountaintop removal. Somebody more eloquent than I, perhaps our friend Silas House, has written that the Appalachian mountains (and people) appear to be a sacrificial zone, with too little money and too few votes to fight back. These mountains, and the people who live in them, are now a kind of canary in the coal mine for how we will respond to the coming energy crises.

The headline on the front page of yesterday's Lexington Herald nearly brought me to tears, and to the conviction that George Bush may truly manifest evil, and not simply callous stupidity: "New mountaintop mine rule will validate practice." The story below indicates that the Bush administration's Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department...headed by Elaine Cho, who is married to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell...now wishes to formalize its failure to enforce environmental regulations by changing the rules so as to permit streams and waterways to be compromised by this enormously destructive mining practice.

The present disaster in Utah makes clear the risks involved in mining, and makes the kind of wholesale destruction of mountaintop removal seem somehow kinder and gentler, at least to the workers. (It also employs fewer workers, but...)

Approval of these new regulations will make the remote hills and hollers of Appalachia increasingly less fit for human and animal habitation. It attacks the very homes and people responsible for creating mountain music. It destroys an entire ecosystem.

Earlier this week the Kentucky State Legislature met in special session to pass legislation giving millions of dollars in tax gifts to Mr. Peabody's coal company so this state could play host to a liquid coal plant. One of the key legislators, who happens to represent this district, is employed by day as a publicist for a coal company.

We are going to come to the end of cheap and easy energy sources. And we are going to be obliged to make increasingly difficult decisions along the way.

I understand that coal has to be part of the equation, but coal company operators have increasingly wretched safety records, and have successfully lobbied to have oversight dimmed or removed at every turn these last years. They are in the business of making cold economic calculations. We, as a society, need to be in the business of making certain that cold economics do not overwhelm our more pressing national and human interests. That we do not sacrifice entire regions for one more season's air conditioning.

We need a national energy policy that focuses billions of dollars on research into renewable energy sources. It must be a national priority. So, too, must conservation and fuel economy be a national priority. Now, before things get worse. Otherwise we will remain prisoners of Middle East politics, hostages to big energy's pressures to destroy the environment, and losers in the global economics of the second half of this century.

This is all badly written. I am rushing. But I would rather write badly than not at all today.

Posted by Grant at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 22, 2007

This morning's pique

Technology, as regular readers will have noticed by now, is not necessarily my friend. And, as previously noted, I am perhaps overly fond of my modest component stereo. I do not like to be tethered to headphones, and I do not believe -- still -- that it is the job of my computer to play music.

In these ways, and others, I reveal myself to be old-fashioned.

Forward-thinking though I imagine myself to be, I can live with that. Ideas still count more than lines of code, right?

Waiting in the mail was a particular CD I really have to listen to first thing off, one of a handful of releases from an artist who might well be our next cover, or not. And the bloody thing won't play in my CD player, only on this wretched computer. Which I know to try only because it happened with Mary Gauthier's newest album. I complained to Lost Highway, who graciously overnighted a second advance copy of the album, coded with the same limiting attributes.

With the result being that I've spent almost no time with Gauthier's album, and I wrote a rather long piece about her last one.

Doubtless there is some technical reason these two advance CDs (from different labels, both vaguely within the Universal system, as it happens) won't play in an actual CD player, and hopefully it will plague nobody save this middle aged editor. Perhaps even somebody can tell me what to do about it (and, no, buying an iPod is not the answer, at least not for me; and it does seem absurd to copy this to iTunes or whatever is making it play and then burn a CD which my CD player might read). Maybe somebody can recommend quality speakers that I should attach to this poor over-worked computer.

But we appear to be moving more and more toward a technological elite -- this after a long day in airports -- attached in all sorts of ways to gadgets that become landfill and require expensive upgrades every 18 months or so. And, of course, if you don't jump into that stream (really, I don't need a Blackberry, and surely I shouldn't feel inadequate traveling without a laptop, or should I?), the logic will at some point become impenetrable and you will be all but permanently disenfranchised. None of which seems, from this messy desk, on which there is simply no room for speakers (my coffee cup is in the way, and that's far more vital to the creative process!), to aid in the art and science of communication.

To which end, something like 400 e-mails await my return. Ah, well. 500 e-mails. Whatever.

Posted by Grant at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

August 13, 2007

A few stray thoughts

It has not escaped my limited powers of reason that I have taken to writing about my father-in-law's garden with an enthusiasm and naivete typically reserved for first-time parents.

But there is, I hope, a larger point at work here: It is good to know where food comes from, and even better to have the smell of ripe tomatoes on your hands. I picked seven or eight gallons of the juicy devils yesterday morning, and didn't find too many claimed by the marauding turtle we still haven't seen.

But we will be gone soon, and not near that patch of earth nor this computer for better than a week. Next summer we will plan our travels better around planting and harvest, but one learns. Slowly.

I take the quaintly antique position that being gone means I'm not here, and so I do not carry a computer with me, nor borrow anybody else's to check e-mail. It'll be here when I get back, and I'll be where I am whilst I'm there.

Meanwhile, a couple shards:

A prediction, first. Hillary Clinton will win the Democrat's nomination to be President of the United States. (Not a surprise, nor a great leap of faith, that.) Bill Richardson will be nominated as the party's vice presidential candidate. I am not a huge supporter of Mrs. Clinton, nor a detractor. It seems to me particularly important that the Democrats win in 2008, but it has been important each election since 1980, and they often disappoint. Obama is not ready, and has already been attacked too viciously for Clinton to plausibly make him her running mate. And that's too obvious a play to specific interest groups. Richardson gives some experience and heft to the ticket, and makes inroads into the Hispanic community (which is not the monolithic entity the Republicans sometimes pretend it to be).

Four days after the Democrat's National Convention, the Republicans meet. Which will be interesting timing. My hunch is that Mitt Romney wins the nomination, largely because I cannot imagine the Republicans moving toward the center, particularly if Hillary is their opponent. No idea who might serve as his vice president, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were a woman. Which would be good, all around, for then it could perhaps cease to be an issue. And I wonder if Ms. Rice might not serve?

If there are no women on the Republican ticket, I have a hunch that a number of women will quietly vote for Mrs. Clinton, regardless their party affiliation. Older women, mostly, who remember how difficult it was for them to succeed.

I realize those are both front-runners, and that I shall inevitably be as wrong about this as I was about the Super Bowl. Ah, well. I am still looking for a leader in all this mess, somebody with ideas and vision, and not simply fund-raising and polling data. Perhaps I expect too much.

Second, a guess. The first year Matt Stadler and I were debate partners, we toured the Northwest arguing for a system of regional primaries. And did all right with it, and read a lot of books on the subject of delegate selection and apportionment. That was 1974-75. We appear, willy nilly, to be moving in that direction. It would be nice to see the arrangement formalized. Of course we also argued for the dissolution of political parties as a pernicious influence on our democracy...

Third, the NFL should let suspended players, like Nashville's Pacman Jones, practice with their teams, but not play on Sunday. Jones needs structure, needs not to have time and energy on his hands, and needs to feel the moral suasion of teammates who, on a daily basis, remind him of what he misses. What he needs.

One of the problems with instant wealth is that it becomes difficult to trust the motives of new friends. This, I suspect, is why Pacman and others stick to their old friends, despite their faults and flaws and foibles. Why Michael Vick is alleged to have found it necessary to engage in the foul business of dog fighting is simply beyond me.

Fourth...surely we aren't meant to believe Karl Rove, too, resigned from the White House to spend more time with his family. Sufficient investigations are under way for it to seem far more likely that he is to be indicted for something, at some point politely down the road. And so it was time for him to leave. He has been an enormously influential figure, but it is difficult to argue, from this desk, that he has been good for his country, nor for its political processes. The irony of the party of the religious right presiding over the vicious coarsening of our political discourse is just...sad. They have been used.

And Rove seems to have misunderstood FDR's legacy. The point in politics is not to make it impossible for the other side to win. The point is to govern, and to govern well, and to serve the people. The Republican Party fell to the sidelines for a generation because it failed at those tasks and because FDR carefully built coalition and consensus for his policies. And because, in the main, they worked. The Democrats did not rule because (or, at least, simply because) they figured out how to manipulate the levers of electoral power better than the Republicans did. It's a game, but it's not just a game.

Finally...an exit strategy for Iraq should not mean simply leaving, and a race to the exits with fig leafs. We have a moral and international responsibility to keep that country from disintegrating into civil war. We started this; we were wrong, but having been wrong does not relieve us of the obligation of leaving the place better than we found it.

Posted by Grant at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

August 12, 2007

In through the Back Door

One of the hazards of this peculiar line of work is that I rarely have occasion actually to buy an album, to thrill at and anticipate the removal of cellophane, as once I did. So many litter the floor now, begging attention, that it seems an extravagance, and unfair to all concerned.

Occasionally one succumbs, and since conventional wisdom demands we shed our compact discs and vinyl in favor of the intangible MP3, it is, perhaps, a good time to spend a few dollars here and there. And so the mail brought my favorite of the four Back Door albums, 8th Street Nites -- an import -- and I took on a series of errands so as to have time alone with my old friend in the solitude of my little red truck. One seeks privacy, for much of the attraction is about memory, and one faces, too, the shame of discovering too many imperfections in old friends. (Of course, had I wished, I could have walked into the back room and pulled out all four Back Door albums, and spun them on the turntable. But I am inconsistent in my admiration for old technologies.)

They were an odd band, even in their time: bass, tenor sax, drums. An English power trio, one final refraction of the Blues Reinvasion filtered through Bitches Brew and Chick Corea and whatever else. Felix Pappalardi produced this one; Greg Lake (yes, from EL&P, and, yes, I have their entire catalog here, too, though I shame to listen now) produced at least one other and championed them for a time.

And brilliant. Led by bass player Colin Hodgkinson, who later played with Neal Schon and Jan Hammer, which makes a kind of sense, and on Whitesnake's Slide It In, which doesn't, but has mostly hung with Alexis Korner and Spencer Davis (post-Winwood), they took blues for the basis of jazz (and rock) without the cant that sometimes goes with that. 8th Street Nites includes a far-flung array of originals, a couple Lead Belly songs, and a pair from Robert Johnson. Including a chorded solo bass workout on Johnson's "32-20 Blues" that is spectacular, even today. Especially today. Ron Aspery's sax...oh, dear. AllMusic.com says he died December 10, 2003...is both sweet and lyrical and just a step outside, and that's all the jazz language I have available. He, too, worked with Whitesnake (though on their self-titled album), and with Meatloaf, but is mostly a part of the Alexis Korner orbit. Hmm...Korner is a name one used to read all the time, a formative, formidable and important figure in English blues, and, apparently, largely forgotten.

In college I wrote a snarky column on the joys of cut-outs, in which bins I found all sorts of detritus, including The Legendary Christine Perfect (McVie) album, recorded between Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac and still oddly obscure. As I remember I came up with nine tolerable titles I'd found digging in the cut-outs, and tossed in 8th Street Nites just to be a jerk about things, since it was long gone by then. (Now, in fairness, I only knew about and hunted Back Door albums because one of my brother's college roommates, a blue collar autodidact who still takes my phone calls when the computer breaks, played them for me. And Julie London.)

A day after the Daily came out there was a note in the newssroom from some guy named Mike whose last name was unpronounceable. Where could he find 8th Street Nites and would I, at least, make him a cassette of it? And so I did, and he came by my office at Western Ski Promotions (conveniently, just next to Peaches Records & Tapes) to pick it up. We chatted for a few moments, but he was shy and shaggy (so was I) and I was at work, and that was it, near as I recall.

A couple years later my high school debate partner drifted back to Seattle and formed a Jonathan Richman-esque punk band called Food. I went to a gig (which may have been their only gig) and a rehearsal out of friendship, jealousy, and curiosity -- Mathew P. Stadler is now an acclaimed novelist -- and ended up talking to this bass player who was, by day, an engineer at the shipyards in Bremerton. Having nothing else to say, I mentioned Back Door, and then realized it was that guy Mike again. Stumbled off, shamed.

I am not sure that we met again (it seems like we must have, because at some point we chanced to debrief about his time around Blue Cheer), but he went on to become better known by the way he taught people to pronounce his last name: Jack Endino, the most essential producer of grunge, and bass player in Skin Yard.

Squeeze have a line I have used for years: "Singles remind me of kisses/albums remind me of plans." And, in fact, it was Matt who convinced me to go see Squeeze, opening, I think, for Elvis Costello, the one time I saw Elvis (and he was in such a mood that night at the Paramount that it's taken almost twenty years for me really to listen to him).

A lot of records remind me of my twenties, and most of the memories aren't all that good, nor interesting. But 8th Street Nites, I'm here to say, reminds me not only of good people, but of the spirit of curiosity which still makes music such an enjoyable distraction. Such an essential component. They made this record at Electric Ladyland in 1973, where more recently Ryan Adams and Steve Earle have worked. It holds up quite well, thank you. Quite well.

Perhaps one day I'll read Matt's novels, but I knew him too well, long ago. And, in any event, they are not for me.

Back Door, on the other hand...

Posted by Grant at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

August 10, 2007

Smoke On The Water

The following is a true story. (Well, they all are.) Once upon a time I spent $5.25 at Cellophane Square in Seattle to purchase the double-album, Made In Japan by the band Deep Purple. "Smoke On The Water" was an important song in junior high; I seem to remember that people slow-danced to it, but I wouldn't know about that, having managed never to attend a dance, nor to perpetrate that particular kind of physical crime, save for brief moments of jumping up and down at early punk/new wave shows.

I had also purchased my older brother's Radio Shack component stereo, and a pair of what I remember as Koss electrostatic headphones which offered much better sound quality than did the Radio Shack speakers, and privacy. I spent a lot of hours in the bilious green beanbag chair mom made in a nook behind the door to my room and next to the chest of drawers on which the stereo sat.

For reasons too sad to explain I can remember most of the first records I bought with my own money, which include The Best Of The Guess Who, the first Bachman Turner Overdrive album, Yellow Brick Road, Sgt. Pepper's and the white album, and this Deep Purple thing. Oh, and there were a couple Alice Cooper albums, including the one with "School's Out" on it, which I came home and played at excruciating volume at the end of ninth grade, and found to be extraordinarily anticlimactic.

Anyhow, mom was home this day, and I'd taken the precaution of closing the hall door which connected the bedrooms to the living room where she was sitting, and I'd closed my door, and I'd put the headphones on, and I was listening raptly to Deep Purple. Now, these headphones had a red light that went on when the volume neared ear-damaging levels, and I was (then and now) chary about my hearing; and I liked things loud, so I rode the edge of that light, but never over it, at least not for very long.

And, yes, I even listened to the side-long drum solo on "Space Trucking" -- I type from memory, which is in itself frightening -- though I cannot even now guess why. I guess I figured if it was on the record it was important to listen to. Later (much later) I saw Ginger Baker play a solo almost that long that was actually both entertaining and musical, up to the last two or three minutes, and the man didn't sweat. But that's not the point.

The point is that there I was safe in my beanbag chair, straight-arrow as they come, headphones tight, probably reading Tolkien or some such nerd trash, and mom knocks on the door.

"TURN IT DOWN!" she insists.

"But, mom, I'm wearing headphones!"

"TURN IT DOWN!"

I inherited my love of music from both parents. My father tends toward somewhat less polite sounds, and the caterwauling of bluegrass (we had great fun going through old bluegrass driving across the country a couple summers back); mom likes Gilbert & Sullivan-style vocals, which she believed to be the apex of popular singing. (Because she likes folk music, of a certain kind, I once played her a bit of Nebraska.So my taste is more like my father. But I got mom's ears.

And, yes, I turned it down.

Posted by Grant at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

August 9, 2007

Seldom Scene in the shade

The phone quit ringing just as I got the door of the truck open to drink more ice water and contemplate, from a seated position, my inadequate knowledge of the tomato in its natural environment. "Get out of the garden," my father-in-law said. "It's too hot." So I went back and did a quick survey of the cucumbers, for whom I hold no fondness, and the squash, who have about used up my limited curiosity and are now mostly fated to become compost. I grabbed a five-gallon bucket not hardly full of okra and jalapeños and another bucket of tomatoes, and left.

It's a long enough drive from home to the garden that I tend to grab a couple CDs, one for each way, or a back-up in case the first one isn't so good. I select things less randomly than when I'm here at work, according to what I feel like listening to, what I've put aside or missed, whatever. Mood, mostly.

So I climbed in the cab and turned the AC back on and somewhat reluctantly pushed the latest Seldom Scene offering, Scenechronized, into the CD player. Up until I fell onto the Del McCoury Band, the Seldom Scene were my favorite bluegrass outfit, though, in truth, they and New Grass Revival (who I tried to like, because they read well) were the only two contemporary bluegrass outfits I could have named in the 1980s. Anyway, I found the Scene quite by accident, spinning the dial one day during my new wave years when some specialty DJ played the one-time hit "Sunshine," as recast by the Seldom Scene with its author, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards' self-titled album was once the staple of high school newspaper late nights, and the bluegrass setting was glorious. Still is. And that's still one of my favorite Seldom Scene albums, called Blue Ridge. (Only recently, playing a Country Gentlemen reissue, did I realize how many of the songs on that album had long been a part of their repertoire.)

Somewhat later, the Scene also provided me with a rare opportunity to show my father the benefits of this line of work. I was actually on the guest list (a less certain thing than one might imagine from the civilian side of things) at the Backstage in Seattle one night when they played, and they made at least two new fans that night.

And then, many years later, John Duffy, whose voice seemed inextricably the sound of the Seldom Scene, passed. I tend to be uncomfortable when bands soldier on, carrying the brand name forward, in such circumstances, and have not spent much time with the Scene's post-Duffy recordings.

But my father-in-law was right, I needed to get out of the sun, and as the Scene did more than justice to Steve Earle's "Hometown Blues" I realized the sun had taken more than simple water could replenish, that I was just a wee bit shaky driving down the winding road toward where they've torn down a mountain to put up a Super WalMart, and that nothing would do for the problem but a chocolate milkshake. But, first, there was this wonderful and unexpected moment when the Seldom Scene took John Fogerty's "A Hundred And Ten In The Shade" for a nifty ride. It's one of my favorite Fogerty songs, and, since he has a new album coming, I've been thinking some about Fogerty. And since it is nearly 110 in the shade just now...

There were two bills in my wallet, and not until I got to the ordering counter did I find that one wasn't a single. I figured, see, that if the football players jump in ice baths to drop their core temperature after practice, a little cold administered orally would do the trick for me, since my exertions had been comparably minor. And it did.

But the Seldom Scene, despite an awkward title and a kind of new age cover design for this latest album, have made me rethink my reservations. Something important about the essence of the band does remain: Their sweet and powerful approach to widely varied songs, their soaring vocals, their effortless fearlessness. Dudley Connell and Lou Reid are great vocalists, but they're not going to be John Duffey. Well. I probably need to get over that. The Scene were once, for me, the best bluegrass band going. And if they've slipped two or three points in two decades, that's not half bad (Doyle Lawson, up until his last shuffle of personnel, had eclipsed the McCourys, and this might put the Scene in third place, not that I have such organized rankings except for the curiosity of the moment).

The whole album isn't a triumph. Some of it's a little too sweet, and I'm not sure "Mama Tried" works as a bluegrass song (though it seems like it ought to). But bluegrass bands are interesting things, with curious dynamics. I imagine them to be a little like a friend described the interpersonal dynamics of serious mountaineering expeditions, with slightly better people skills. (And, no, I'm not going to explain that.) Both more and the less than the sum of parts which are and are not interchangeable. I do wonder that sounds are sustained through all these transitions, but they are.

And I am sustained, in the shade, now, both aurally and orally.

Posted by Grant at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

August 7, 2007

Back to the garden

"Grab a hoe and see can you find the sweet potatoes." Those were our instructions. That and: Don't stay too long, it's about a hundred degrees in the shade; and, don't put your hand down there, might be snakes. The family's canned near to a hundred quarts of greasy beans, and we've eaten them pretty steady, the whole time I've been making a magazine. Not to mention a couple evenings just standing around the fryer eating sweet and hot banana peppers, and jalapeños (which seem to lose their hot, some of it, when deep fried).

But nobody's had time to fight the weeds -- too busy harvesting -- and they've been winning so long it's hard to recognize the contours of the battle. Good thing there are two gates in to the garden, because we had to hack a path to the front gate to explore for sweet potatoes. Which we found, more or less.

The refrigerator's full, so I spent the rest of the morning with a knife, chopping okra and putting it on cookie sheets to freeze, and listening to Billy Joe Shaver's 1992 Bluebird Cafe concert, which Sugar Hill is putting out in a month or so. Billy Joe and Eddie, nothing but them and their acoustic guitars and his songs. I'm sure there's a reason this concert is coming out just now, but I don't much care. It's like having an old friend in the kitchen, the smart guy you listen carefully to so as not to miss anything. And it's nice to hear Eddie play so fluidly.

And then putting more banana peppers in the freezer on their own cookie sheet, long as I was at it, trying to stretch the work to finish the album. And then stirring the compost. I may not be able to grow anything, but it's possible I've learned how to make dirt.

See...I take the position that people who like music like to eat, and some of y'all like to cook, and maybe plant one or two things. Maybe I'm wrong.

So if I'm wrong, just go put on your favorite Billy Joe Shaver songs and we'll be fine.

Meanwhile, I think I've come up with a solution to the gold-plated composters they sell in fancy catalogues and such. Buy a couple garbage cans. Take an inch-and-a-half drill bit and put four or five holes in the bottom, and a ring of holes around the top, to let air in and water out. If you've got a couple old washbasins, the things you keep beer and ice in most of the summer when you're single, put a couple bricks in so the water and the nutrients pool there. Fill up each garbage can with a mix of brown and green materials, which means old leaves and new cuttings -- grass, vegetables, the oatmeal nobody finished for breakfast -- and, if Dr. Carolyn offers a load of manure, add some of that in, sparingly. Every day (or so, but, really, every day) pick up the garbage can and roll it. (You'll want to hold the cover down, lest you make a real mess. And you leave it covered, adding a little water every couple days.) This is a manly task and can destroy a back, or undo hernia surgeries, but I'm careful. Your other option is to buy a $25 compost stirrer, which is not the same as a pitchfork. It's got two handles at 45-degree angles from each other, and four prongs which go down into the dirt and spring out to lift and separate the stuff. I do both. Air is good for dirt.

My plan is to turn one garbage can at a time into dirt, and let our kitchen scraps fill the other one, but we've done so much eating and canning that both are filled just now, and a third overflow can is full of corn husks. But it'll all be dirt. Not much dirt. This won't do for our big garden out at my father-in-law's place (we have a more casual compost strategy there, for the moment, which involves the extra-large squash and whatever grows too close to the ground), but it'll make the basil happier next year here. And it beats throwing all that stuff in the garbage that could be turned into good dirt.

Anyway, I worry about Billy Joe Shaver, that's what's lingering beneath the words. I don't know anything the Associated Press hasn't reported about his present legal difficulties, and wish neither to ask nor to tell about them. He is a wise and conflicted man. I choose to believe that artists reveal their true selves in the act of creation -- in the performance of their art. If they are not kind and loving and sensitive in their daily lives, that does not diminish the truth of their art, it only reaffirms the frailty of their humanity. Of our humanity.

I think a lot of Billy Joe Shaver's work, of his art. And of him. I hope good people surround him, and that he is kind to himself, and not too much alone. And he ought to get a pretty fair album out of this, anyhow.

Posted by Grant at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 5, 2007

Sunday morning coming up

In just 24 hours, come what may, our next issue will be done, and I will be able to spend some quality time contemplating the inside of my eyelids. Peter and I tend to absent ourselves from these virtual pages during deadline, both because we're absorbed in actually making a magazine and because we tend still to write bits and pieces for each issue, and that obliges a certain concentration of energy.

It all does. We are an unusually small staff, and control freaks. Or at least I am. I mean neither to brag nor to complain when I note that exactly one cover (Lizz Wright, a kindness offered by the legendary Art Chantry, a kind of end point to our first logo whilst I worked on a redesign for the next issue) and one spread (Merle Haggard, offered by my old and true friend Jesse Reyes while I co-wrote the piece with Andy McLenon) were designed outside my office.

In fairness, that may not be a good thing. I'm a better writer, I hope, than I will ever be a designer, but a great deal of the fun of this magazine is pushing myself to be a competent designer. Swiping ideas from Art and Jesse, Saul Bass, the constructivists, Reid Miles (that's it, my whole bag of tricks, counting in all those anonymous designers of punk posters in the bargain). And I'm not nearly good enough to have any idea how to manage an assistant, nor is my office organized in such a way that another human being (larger than our small cat) could comfortably move, much less work here.

But, anyway, I meant to write about music, briefly, this morning. I listen a lot during the two weeks devoted to producing ND, but toward the end I become somewhat fetal and draw not from the stacks of aspirants but from my files of old favorites. This morning I return to Mavis Staples' magnificant We'll Never Turn Back, in part because it's Sunday morning and in part because I need that fervor this morning to make the coffee work. I still can not decide whether she or Patty Griffin have managed the best album of the year. Griffin's I treat like sugar, having played it a lot as I wrote about it, and return to sparingly. Mavis has a more astringent flavor, a moral certainty, a power that I can draw from.

But at times like these I do note the oddness of the music industry, which has been sending me free things since the late 1980s. In all that time I have never received an album by the Rolling Stones, nor the Beatles, nor the Who, and so all mine are still on vinyl, save for the odd title I've rescued at a used record store whilst trading up. (Obviously not artists who needed any more critical admiration in print.) Nor, I found to my dismay, have I been sent anything by Faron Young, nor Ernest Tubb, nor Webb Pierce. Nor do any more than a handful of Louvin Brothers albums seem to cycle through the reissue world. Now, I could go buy all of those things, and will one day. But listening to the Vee-Jay box set coming out reminds me that, first, I need to get on those old Staple Singers stuff. And, anyway, the point I went to make was that those lat are pretty significant musical figures to have enjoyed little or no reissue attention in the 13 years ND has been publishing.

And a couple trace idea which may or may not develop into longer notions later.

First, we take Gurf Morlix far too much for granted. I received his first couple solo offerings with a shrug, not expecting much from a guitarist/producer. And I was wrong. The new Diamonds To Rust is a trifle uneven (and everybody, including Dylan, should cede "With God On Our Side" to Buddy Miller, but I do understand and respect the impulse), but it's a strong and passionate record, and it merits more consideration than it got in our pages. That, alas, is the cruel algebra of space.

Second, Abigail Washburn released an EP with Dirk Powell and some other stalwarts, and because it was an EP I sort of ignored it until I grabbed it one day and tossed it in the truck on my way out to the orchard. She, too, we take too much for granted. Maybe playing a formidable clawhammer and speaking Mandarin makes her seem quirky or something, I don't know. And I'm not convinced hers is the best lead voice in Uncle Earle. But the intelligence and fire behind her work is remarkable. She is part of many bigger things, and they are all larger for her presence.

Third, I could get lost, for a very long time, in the detritus of the golden age of gospel. I won't, just now, for there's work to be done. But the temptation will remain until it is satisfied, one of these days.

Posted by Grant at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)