Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta Lynn: Silver Thread and Golden Needles

I didn't know where else to post this. The energy and joy and confidence these three women possess just makes me smile, but I'm afraid if I posted it  on my Facebook page I'd lose even more followers and friends. Progressive Bostonians just can't handle country, in any of its forms, with their smarty pants, button-down shirts, and hipster stance.

But I just had to share this....somewhere.

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams VIDEO

Well, the video is pretty much a seven-minute long commercial to buy the CD, but it's not like it's Netflix trying to screw you. It's not a huge box set with "extras" that so many recording artists are putting out now, either, for a couple of hundred dollars, not understanding or caring that that amount of money for some music lovers now pays for the heat or for food on the table. It doesn't sell for a lot, and it's looks like it's a compilation of a bunch of old songs never recorded by Hank Williams by a bunch of really talented and passionate musicians. I just always grind my teeth, though, when I see the CEO or president of this or that company talking folksy. I don't understand why they just don't stay in their fancy offices and continue to just pull in their overpriced paychecks. Why do they have to get out and mingle with the rest of us? Now that is something Hank would say, so I think it's totally appropriate.


The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams EPK from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

Dublin Blues--Guy Clark

Guy Clark is an old boozer but he sure can write good songs. This is one of them.

 I wish I was in Austin
In the Chili Parlor Bar
Drinkin' Mad Dog Margaritas
And not carin' where you are

But here I sit in Dublin
Just rollin' cigarettes
Holdin' back and chokin' back
The shakes with every breath

Chorus

Forgive me all my anger
Forgive me all my faults
There's no need to forgive me
For thinkin' what I thought
I loved you from the git go
I'll love you till I die
I loved you on the Spanish steps
The day you said goodbye

I am just a poor boy
Work's my middle name
If money was a reason
I would not be the same

I'll stand up and be counted
I'll face up to the truth
I'll walk away from trouble
But I can't walk away from you

I have been to Fort Worth
I have been to Spain
I have been to proud
To come in out of the rain

I have seen the David
I've seen the Mona Lisa too
I have heard Doc Watson
Play Columbus Stockade Blues

Chorus

Repeat 1st half of verse 1

Chris Knight tonight at Club Passim: It ain't easy being me

I'm pretty sure Chris Knight will be the next Ryan Bingham. Ryan just won an Oscar for The Weary Kind the theme song for Crazy Heart. Bingham and Knight are the real deal. Real country singers who don't do the Nashville thing, corporate country, or any of that prefabricated pop crap in a cowboy hat that LiveNation passes off for country. (Think Sugarland.)

Anyway, Chris Knight will be at Club Passim tonight, and if there are any tickets left you should grab one because Knight doesn't often tour very far from his home in Kentucky.

Susan Cattaneo at Sally O'Brien's

Isn't it great when you hear a new musician--well, new to you--and you can't wait to share? Hey, you gotta check this out.

That's what happened to me today when I got this email from someone named Dino C giving me a link to the No Depression site.

Susan Cattaneo is local, as in local to Boston. She teaches songwriting at Berklee, but we won't hold that against her. She doesn't have any videos or other rich media I could steal, so you have to go to her MySpace site to get a good dose of her.

Check out Love Takes What It Takes which starts with a real hard country rock opening and eases into a nice country melody with some pretty standard passages, which all sounds kind of negative the way I just wrote that but her voice and lyrics are sweet and nice and all together it's got the makings of a pop hit. Wrecking Ball is hard and mean and beat up just like the title. Get Back The Longing features Mark Erelli, another local musician who someday, someday, will really get his due. If he's on the disc, it's worth a listen.

She'll be playing at Sally O'Brien's for the next every other Tuesday starting tonight.

Her Band:
Mike Barry: Guitar, vocals
Milt Reder: Guitar
Mark Hickox: Bass
Dave Mattacks: Drums

Her album is Brave and Wild and you can get it here.

On the record:
Lorne Entress: Drums
Duke Levine: Guitar
Kevin Barry: Guitar
Richard Gates: Bass
Dave Limina: Piano and organ
Dave Sholl: Saxophone
Mark Erelli: Lead and background vocals, mandolin on "Get Back The Longing"

Jamey Johnson: The HIgh Cost of Living

Now here's a great country song. Great country licks. Real personal lyrics that mention drinkin' and a pickup truck and Jesus. But this is the real deal, not some fabricated same old same old story.

And three days straight was no big feat
Could get by with no food or sleep
And crazy was becoming my new norm




I was just a normal guy
Life was just a nine to five
With bills and pressure
Piled up to the sky
She never asked
She knew I’d be
Hangin’ with my wilder friends
Looking for some other way to fly

And three days straight was no big feat
Could get by with no food or sleep
And crazy was becoming my new norm

I’d pass out on the bedroom floor
And sleep right through the calm before the storm

My life was just an old routine
Every day the same damn thing
I couldn’t even tell I was alive

I tell you
The high cost of livin’
Ain’t nothing like the cost of livin’ high

That southern Baptist parking lot
Is where I’d go to smoke my pot
Sit there in my pickup truck and pray
Staring at that giant cross
Just reminded me that I was lost
And it just never seemed to point the way

As soon as Jesus turned his back
I find my way across the track
Lookin’ just to score . . . another deal
With my back against that damn eight ball
I didn’t have to think or talk . . . or feel

My life was just an old routine
Every day the same damn thing
I couldn’t even tell I was alive

I tell you
The high cost of livin’
Ain’t nothing like the cost of livin’ high

My whole life went through my head
Layin’ in that motel bed
Watchin’ as the cops kicked in the door

I had a job and a piece of land
My sweet wife was my best friend
But I traded that for cocaine and a whore

With my new found sobriety
I’ve got the time to sit and think
Of all the things I had . . . and threw away

This prison is much colder than
That one that I was locked up in just yesterday

My life is just an old routine
Every day the same damn thing
Hell I can’t even tell if I’m alive

I tell you
The high cost of livin’
Ain’t nothing like the cost of livin’ high

I tell you
The high cost of livin’
Ain’t nothing like the cost of livin’ high

Lori Mckenna and Stephanie Chapman at Club Passim

Never let a little rain or snow stop you.

Friday night's performance of The Halfway House Club was canceled because of the snow. Sue and Lee had tickets to see Lori McKenna's solo set at Club Passim, so as soon as I got the email that I had the night off, I called Sue and asked her if I could horn in on the two of them. The show was still on--probably the only thing in Boston/Cambridge that wasn't canceled that night. I knew the show had sold out a long while back, but figuring there would be a bunch of no-shows I banked on getting a ticket at the door.

Yeah, it was blowing pretty hard, but...In Arizona there had been a few days of what I like to call weather. There was one day that everyone stayed hunkered in the hostel, even those like Sue and me who had cars. Sue and I think alike though. We can sleep when we're dead, and we're not going to let anything get in the way of us seeing something. We're both always wondering what's around the next corner. And if we're uncomfortable or cold, well, at least we're uncomfortable or cold in Arizona, or France, or Thailand or name your spot on the earth.

That day, Sue, Tetsuya, a traveler from Japan, and I jumped in the red hot Mustang and in the rain saw a volcano and a lava field. I touched and held cinders in my hand that had spewed out of the cone a thousand years ago. I saw pueblo ruins tucked on tiny ledges in Walnut Canyon. I walked on the Painted Desert, and smelled it and the mixture of sage and chaparral smelled like walking in the apartment on a cold rainy day with a pot of soup simmering on the stove. I visited a Wuptaki, a settlement that was quite the cosmopolitan setting 900 years ago. I felt the earth breath there. I did. I felt wind rush out of a crack in the earth, a sensation that I can best describe as having your head out the window of your car at 69 mph.

If we had let a little rain stop us, Sue, Tessuya and I never would have these experiences, these memories that hopefully forged us just a bit more into better people.

So, Friday night, even when Lee waffled a bit because of the dangers of the roads, I said to hell with it. Just that day I had finally had my snow tires put on the truck and loaded twelve hundred pounds of sand in the bed for ballast. I had put it off, I guess hoping against hope that bad weather never would hit, or at least I wouldn't have to deal with it. A human trait, isn't it, to try to wish away the bad, the inevitable?

So Sue and I saddled up and drove over to Lee's in second gear, and then drove to Braintree and parked the truck and hopped on the T, and there were more than enough tickets left.

Stephanie Chapman, opened, accompanied by husband Nathan Chapman, a very accomplished musician with a very mellow buttery voice. Sweet and personable with a friendly stage presence (she and Nathan are related, first brothers and sister then by marriage; see what I mean?) she's from northern Virginia and he's from Nashville. Her songs are steeped in the Nashville sound, and the album she was selling that night, This Song Is To You, is pretty much pure Nashville sound, a fine selection of happy, kind of rip-roaring songs with the expected topics about love with a hint of bittersweetness, the cute little turn of phrase (I put you on a pedestal but it's time you got down) that you could dance up a storm to in a country bar.

The weather was the hot topic for both performers. Chapman kept telling the audience how great they were for braving the storm to see them, but when you think they came all the way from Nashville to play that one little club in Cambridge, they were the ones who should have been thanked.

McKenna then came on stage and played a lot of her hits and favorites off Glamorous and Bittertown. I've never seen her solo before, and it was a pleasure. The next night she was backed by a band, and unfortunately I missed that night, but just her alone with that huge voice of hers is worth seeing. She's tiny, tiny. You look at her and wonder how the heck she squeezed out those five kids she's always talking about. And you wonder where the heck that huge voice resides in that little body. It's actually better, because by herself you can see just what an amazing talent she is. Her songs are so tight, although sometimes her lyrics about clotheslines in the backyard and how great her husband is can get just a bit tiresome, for me at least. But that's her; that's her life and that's what she writes about.

She is an absolute great lady, too. After the show I had a chance to talk to her a bit about what's up next for her. I'm one of those fans who thinks Glamorous is just okay. Warner Brothers and Nashville have been very good to her. Warner got her name out there, and Nashville introduced her to a bunch of like-minded artists who she can work with. You get the sense talking to her that she's a very smart and shrewd person, and knows what she need to do to further her artistic career. She said she and Warner would be parting ways, but that they are parting with no animosity. It would be nice to see her with a smaller, independent label that will really work with her and invest in helping her grow her career and help her where she wants to go artistically.

Malcolm Holcombe

It's always a good day when I find a new musician, and I mean one that blows my socks off.

Malcolm Holcombe is written up in the March/April issue of American Songwriter, and as I started reading the reviewer, Steven Rosen, used all the right words to get me interested.

An Appalachian Townes Van Zandt. (In my mind one of the greatest American songwriters ever.)

A 52-year-old western North Carolinian (which means he's got some experience and from the hills.)

His new album is produced by the same guy, Ray Kennedy, who has produced for Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle. (The old birds of a feather idea.)

Not pop. (Jackpot! You can keep your CMT Awards.)

A voice that's raw and groaning. (Denotes character.)

And Rolling Stone said:
"Not quite country, somewhere beyond folk, Holcombe's music is a kind of blues in motion,
mapping backwoods corners of the heart." ~David Fricke

There's a wonderful video of him at Studio Southtv, where he recorded. You get a real good idea of who he is, and what his music is like. He's real country, and by that I mean real like the people who live in the country.

Here's Mama Told Me So



Tell me this guy ain't the real deal.

More on the state of the music business

Shit comes in threes.

Harp magazine quit publishing. Then No Depression.

Today Folio reported that Resonance, what Folio called a "small, well-regarded independent music magazine," called it quits.

I didn't read Harp or Resonance, but the other day I blogged about No Depression, a magazine I found about a year ago; I would devour the each issue of the magazine cover to cover a couple of times. And I pretty much said the music industry has to figure out how to market, but that mags (or is the hip terminology, 'zines??) are still valuable to the industry.

The music industry has to come to terms with the new business model that includes the digital world. So do magazines like No Depression, and all the rest. Low advertising, paper and printing costs, postage, and a few other reasons are all the standard reasons why magazines are going out of business. The Web seems to be the answer, but Resonance was finally putting its edition online, and that didn't work. I'm not sure why, except a quick glance at their site showed that they basically took their magazine, turned it into a giant pdf, and made that the content. The online world won't have none of that.

First and foremost publishers have to prove to the labels that they are needed, but that's not easy. What they need are hard numbers. I can't give hard numbers off the top of my head, but because of magazines like No Depression (and Performing Songwriter and American Songwriter) I actually went out and bought CDs of artists I read about in their pages. And I will continue to buy more CDs because I like the quality I get, but I'm never paying full retail price because they're way overpriced and I'm too smart of shopper to pay that. I'll buy on sale or used. CDs are not going to go away anytime, soon. Times are still in a transitional phase, so there are still uses for CDs as revenue generators--even in ways not yet thought of, but the labels have to figure this out, too. How about this, A&R head of your major label:

CDS ARE OVERPRICED, YOU'RE JUST RIPPING OF THE PUBLIC, WE KNOW IT, AND THE TRUE LOW COST OF A CD MAKES IT IDEAL FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES.

There, do you think they'll get that? No, they won't. Blind, deaf, and dumb. And richer beyond belief. You actually can have too much money. It changes you. But that's a topic for a different blog. No wonder people steal music.


My Tour Filter is packed with bands I'm tracking. I'm a huge Lucinda Williams, Cowboy Junkies, and Steve Earle fan, just for starters, all of whom I've seen in concert a couple of times. There's where you're money is, or good chunk of it. I keep saying it, too: ticket sales, t-shirts, beer. There's where you're money is going to come from. (Of course, when I write that, I think, the labels and promoters will jack up the price of admission to the point where Major League Baseball has gotten, where you can't afford to go. Greed, greed, greed.)

But I'd drive a hundred miles to see Chris Knight, who I first heard about in No Depression. You can't tell me there aren't others like me. Maybe not huge numbers to fill a stadium like, oh, say Faith Hill and her Hollywood hillbilly husband, Tim McGraw, but that's the size of your market. Too effing bad if you don't like it. The world is changing, and you got to get creative. Labels and magazines both....

Secret to a Long Life

Simple--but not as simple as it first appears; look at that rhyming pattern if you don't believe me--and just a fun song to hear and play.

I heart country music. Now I'll kill myself.

From C and the Columbia School of Journalism, there is a direct correlation between country music and people who commit suicide. Actually, Columbia just reported on the study, which actually was published in 1992 by the University of North Carolina Press and written by Steven Stack at Wayne State University (Motown!) and Jim Gundlach at Auburn University.

Common themes like marital discord and disharmony among the sexes, lyrics that promote drinking as a normal and necessary method for dealing with life's problems, and a sense of bitterness and hopelessness pervade country music.

Holy crap...and here I thought I was just tapping into the soul of america...

but i was just playing with fire.
just me and my old six-string, throwing myself on the funeral pyre
not knowing which way to turn
while the fires just burn, burn, burn...

Hmmm...yeah...that's true. Sort of. But I've always liked the way country music addresses the common experiences of American life. Like the blues and the Corvette, country music is uniquely American. It's something we all invented coming out of the American experience. And good country music, like all good music, can take you away from all the suffering that the authors seem to think puts us on the ledge or our heads in the oven.

But it's gotta be good. I've always said that a lot of country music just picks at the sore. A lot of it is really good at nailing an emotion, but then it just wallows in it. Sometimes that's good. When you're broke, either in the heart or the wallet, country music can let you know you're not alone. But good country, like good blues, nails the emotion then takes you somewhere else.

But a lot of the stuff people call country I wouldn't be caught dead listening to. I was just reading a reviewer the other day (shoot, can't remember where) who said that the big names out of Nashville are talented indeed; it takes a real talent to make something shallow sound deep. That's a lot of the crap that coming out of Nashville. Corporate-sponsored music. The Faith Hills and Toby Keiths of the world are manufactured products made and branded to appeal to a common denominator and fill large stadiums with expensive seats, eight-dollar beers, and forty-dollar t-shirts.

The really good stuff is happening where country, rock, the blues, and punk are all merging with truthful lyrics (not cliche-ridden crap about pickup trucks, drinkin', the bills not getting paid, and my broken heart) and musical passages that knock on the soul whispering to let me in.

Just the other day our paths crossed with a guy who went to school in Austin, and SXSW came up, and he confirmed my worst fears, that SXSW is really nothing more than a big corporate trade show. So where's the next SXSW? I asked. I dunno, he answered, Boulder, maybe. I can't even believe that. Where's there's money, you can't be birthing good music. It has to happen far, far on the edges of the solar system, like where comets and asteroids are born.

But, as far as suicide, I'm not so sure. Yeah, I've wallowed in it in my time, but I also think to some degree, in some weird way, that it also saved my life. It was always comforting to know that there was someone out there who had experienced the same suffering that I had. I think it kept me off the ledge as much as anything.

What was I thinking when I bought that music?

We all have clothes in our closets that we ask ourselves, What was I thinking when I bought that?

Since all I wear are jeans, basic button shirts, and boots I don't have that problem. But I have music I feel the same way about. What was going through my head when I bought that No Doubt CD? This morning I put on Sugarland. The first cut is Something More. Just country pop, like so much of it nowadays (Faith Hill, Martina McBride), nice catchy lyrics, music you can dance to, easy to sing along to, inspirational, and so, so boring. Written for chicks who complain about how awful their lives are here in the U.S. where we don't have roadside bombs going off everyday, and that's about it.

Monday, hard to wake up
Fill my coffee cup, I'm out the door
Yeah, the freeway standing still today
It's gonna make me late, and that's for sure
I'm running out of gas and out of time
Never gonna make it there by 9

[Chorus:]
There's gotta be something more
Gotta be more than this
I need a little less hard time
I need a little more bliss
I'm gonna take my chances
Taking a chance I might
Find what I'm looking for
There's gotta be something more

So much of popular country is written for women. Or let's put it this way, the hits are manufactured for women. Some bean counter somewhere in Nashville or Austin figured this out. And all they do is pick the sore, but they don't tell you how to heal it. They don't take you anywhere. You just wallow.

Like so much popular culture, with country music we identify. It justifies our existence, but it doesn't take us anywhere else. It doesn't teach us; we don't grow.

Give me some good, old-fashioned hillbilly music any day.

Vicky McGehee: a writer's a writer

Behind every successful person, there's a good chance there's a writer.

Speechwriters. Ghost writers. Songwriters.

First, writers are the same, no matter what business they're in. I've found this out from hanging around more copywriters than I care to count, and novelists, short story writers, travel writers, reporters...God, the list goes on.

Then this a.m. I was reading this story about Vicky McGehee in the current issue of American Songwriter.



She wrote the lyrics behind a lot of Gretchen Wilson's hits, including Pocahontas Proud, Not Bad for a Bartender, One Bud Wiser, All Jacked Up, Skoal Ring and When I Think About Cheatin'. I Googled "lyrics, Gretchen Wilson" and on most sites I visited there is no attribution to McGehee, even in Wilson's entry on Wikipedia, not that that's any standard. McGehee is listed as one of the composers on Answer.com.

McGehee also wrote for Reba McEntire (Room to Breathe)" and Big & Rich (Holy Water).

But like I said, she's a writer. And being a writer, being who and what they are, I'm sure she's fine with it all as long as the checks don't bounce and there's a bottle around.

The State of Music

O.A.R. tix at UMass supposedly went on sale today at 10:00. I say supposedly because the links at the UMass and O.A.R. sites seem to be dead. My youngest is a huge O.A.R. fan, and wants to go. She asked me last night if I thought they’d sell out, mentioning a Justin Timberlake concert that sold out in some ridiculous amount of time of fifteen minutes or so. I first assured her that I don’t think O.A.R. would sell out like JT II. Then I mentioned that the good seats are probably grabbed anyway by radio stations and corporations and all that. You know how it works: the concert’s sold out, and the day before a radio station gives out tickets in the first row to the nth caller.

Power to the people, I say.

Spin has a decent special issue on the State of Music. Well, Spin has maybe three good pages laying out what’s been going on in the music world, and frankly, anyone with half a brain can sum it up in one word: digital. And it’s not just in music it’s in film, software, news outlets, everything. In music, though, the rich guys in suits were so busy counting their money they never saw it coming. Proves you don’t have to be smart to be rich. Now they’re screaming foul but the world changed underneath them. The old business model is long gone. Long…gone. The money’s not in selling CDs or even digital downloads. I don’t even want to say the money’s in concerts, although right now it is, but even that’s gonna change. Let’s say the money is going towards events. Wanna make your mark and your cash, get your song played on Grey’s Anatomy.

Anyway, what got me on this tear is my daughter wanting to go to a concert, and you got to figure the next step music execs will take is to recoup their losses in concert tickets. That’s how they think. Again, that’s the old business model. When one revenue channel dries up, try to get it back through another existing one. But they’ll do what Major League Baseball is in the middle of doing, namely, pricing themselves right out of the market and losing their base forever.

They gotta make music cheap and accessible, if they want to keep the young fan base.

When I was even younger than my daughter this was the state of the music industry: I was growing up poor in working-class Cincinnati. (I could never understand people who said when they were young they were poor but didn’t know it. What? Were you stupid? How could you not know? Didn’t you see the beat-to-s**t car your family drove, then look at your friends’ cars and see the difference?) We’d hitchhike to Cincinnati Gardens, a brick box that, when it wasn’t hosting concerts, was the home to Oscar Robertson and the Royals basketball team, some hockey farm team of the Buffalo Sabres, and the circus when it came to town. We’d panhandle for ticket money (spare change, man, got any spare change?) Can you imagine having to beg for ticket money today? With the cost of a ticket today you’d have to start months ahead to raise the cash. I don’t remember but I wouldn’t be surprised if tickets cost maybe eight or ten bucks tops. Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt, the Who, Ten Years After, John Mayall, Alice Cooper, Emerson Lake and Palmer left their mark forever.

Wide Open Spaces

Got my daughter’s Valentine today. Opened it up and my heart caught in my throat. I’m not going to reveal what she wrote—that’s personal between her and me—but it sure is nice when your kid doesn’t think you’re a s**t after everything you’ve done to her in your life. (Is there a parent alive who doesn’t think that they’ve failed their children in some way?)

So…as I was driving away I popped in the Dixie Chicks and played Wide Open Spaces in her honor off the CD of the same name. I was playing that CD back in August when her mom and I were dropping her off for her freshman year in college. I turned my daughter on to it on the drive out there, and all of the emotion of day just came out in that song.

That’s the thing about country music: how it can just nail an emotion. It’s also the one criticism I have of popular country music, that a lot of it nails the emotion and then you just wallow in it. I mean, just how long can we pick that sore? The thing that I like about the blues is how it can nail an emotion and then it takes you somewhere else. And then of course, there’s really bad country, songs along the caliber of Kenny Chesney’s She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.

But the Dixie Chicks do have those nice harmonies going.

So, for Allison’s and everyone else who has ever struck out on their own, here are the lyrics to Wide Open Spaces:

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about 

Who's never left home, who's never struck out 

To find a dream and a life of their own 

A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone 



Many precede and many will follow 

A young girl's dream no longer hollow 

It takes the shape of a place out west 

But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed 



[Chorus:] 

She needs wide open spaces 

Room to make her big mistakes 

She needs new faces 

She knows the high stakes 



She traveled this road as a child 

Wide eyed and grinning, she never tired 

But now she won't be coming back with the rest 

If these are life's lessons, she'll take this test 



[Repeat Chorus]


She knows the high stakes 


As her folks drive away, her dad yells, "Check the oil!" 

Mom stares out the window and says, "I'm leaving my girl" 

She said, "It didn't seem like that long ago" 

When she stood there and let her own folks know 



[Repeat Chorus] 


She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes 

She knows the highest stakes