How The Grinch Got Scrooged in Asheville

At some point in my life, the magic of Christmas vanished and was replaced by a cynical outlook that manifested itself most overtly through my use of the "Xmas" abbreviation.

Not even 30 years old, I was the kind of curmudgeonly, Scrooge-like grump who stole money from the Salvation Army bucket, cursed the little children gazing at the window displays, and, on one memorable occasion, actually brained a sidewalk Santa Claus with his own bronze bell because he was too damn jolly.

I especially loathed the way the U.S. economy depended upon millions of Americans spending their hard-earned cash on pointless gifts as the countdown of shopping days left until Christmas scrolled by in the month of December, all to the tune of another melody-less remake of an old holiday classic pimped to sell Old Navy sweaters. Christmas, in my mind, had been twisted into a sad advertisement for poor-quality garments made in China and faux sentimentality. Friends would drop by just to laugh as I railed against the blatant prostitution of the Christmas spirit. I was a soul tormented by the commercialism I perceived being foisted upon the American public.

A few days before Xmas, I would journey home to the place of my youth - Richmond, Virginia - and attempt to ignore the ebullient display of holiday cheer by my tradition-oriented mother. In fact, the only time I was smart enough to keep my big, fat mouth shut was in the presence of my friends' young children. I could see in their eyes that this holiday was still magical and perhaps even holy, despite the mountains of poorly rendered plastic toys over which they claimed dominion.

Nonetheless, something wonderful would happen every Xmas Eve once everyone had nestled into their homes all cozy and warm: quietude. Blissful, sweet silence pervaded my soul, and it was in this silence, as the street sounds faded and the night descended, that I discovered the real joy that is Christmas: a time of reflection and appreciation of family and friends, sharing old memories and making new ones.

Eight years ago, my entire perspective on Xmas changed. In August 2000, my close friend Allen Woody, bassist for Gov't Mule, suddenly passed away. Woody had a great sense of humor and was truly a caring person and a good friend. His death tormented me at a time in my life when I really didn't need any reminders of mortality, and I know I needn't mention how this affected the people that loved and worked with Woody.

Shortly after Woody's passing, Warren Haynes called me and asked if I would participate in a tribute to Woody at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. Nervously, I accepted the invitation and soon found myself whisked away to a night of good friends and great music. My performance of Woody's bass lines that night, while not perfect, seemed to provide some solace for those in attendance. I had so much fun that I offered to fill in for Woody anytime the Mule needed me. While everyone in the Mule camp was awash with grief and not sure of what the future might hold, Warren graciously thanked me for my offer.

As Thanksgiving approached and the holiday commercials began to flood the airwaves, the call came again: Warren wanted me to come to Asheville, North Carolina to play with the Mule for his annual "Xmas Jam" to benefit the local chapter of Habitat For Humanity. I agreed, thinking it would be a fun time and also help to break up my drive from Athens to my parents' home in Richmond.

Xmas Jam 2000 turned out to be a great time, the biggest in the event's history up until that point as the show had moved from the small clubs of Asheville to the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium. The Allman Brothers Band performed that night as well as the reunited Aquarium Rescue Unit (featuring Col. Bruce Hampton, no less). I took the stage with Gov't Mule, and we played a few more songs than we had at the One for Woody benefit earlier that fall. The Christmas spirit seemed to flow all around us, and much to my surprise, I discovered that the old Scrooge mood in me had lifted. In fact, I felt downright Christmas-y. I don't know if it was something in the eggnog backstage, but I found myself imbued with the spirit of giving and it painted a magical glow on everything around me. There was something truly wonderful about coming together with friends both onstage and off to change the lives of some folks that really needed some help. It seemed like a no-brainer: play some music, catch up with some friends, and help build a house.

Over the seven years or so I've played the Xmas Jam, I've had the great fortune to play with Gregg Allman, Bob Weir, Marty Stuart, Jorma Kaukonen, Bruce Hampton, Stockholm Syndrome and a host of others. And believe me, it has NEVER been work regardless of the amount of rehearsal time required for the gig. Beyond the musicians, it takes a whole lot of work to put this celebration on year after year. Despite the long hours and toil required of those who make this event happen, you will see nothing but smiles on their faces, and it's because they're getting something intangible in return for their labor. I believe it's the true spirit of giving.

Friends of Bill W. have a saying, "You keep what you have only by giving it away." I can personally amend that to say, "You can regain what you have lost only by giving it away."

Playing Xmas Jam gave Christmas back to me. Ask anyone who has seen me in Asheville at the Xmas Jam and they'll tell you that I always say, "My Christmas begins HERE." It feels great to do something positive for so many by doing something that I love so much. I can only imagine how Warren and his wife and manager Stefani Scamardo must feel.

I've seen the mayor of Asheville present Warren and Stefani with the key to the city more times than I can imagine. They must have a special shelf in their place just for those things! The city elders need to go ahead and just build a statue of Warren somewhere in Asheville. Just make sure it's made out of solid milk chocolate. Warren would like that.

Happy Holidays!

DAS

Artwork by Marq Spusta (www.marqspusta.com)

2 feet of fluffy snow here in upstate New York this week and we are freezing our bums off. But I don't think that's what this week's guest post-er, Greg MacAteer, means. To take a page from Lefsetz, what would Christmas be without a holiday rant? Not to worry, Greg's a softy in the end: [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

This list shouldn't surprise you much, for those of you who've been keeping up. In no particular order (isn't that annoying), my favorite 10 albums of 2008. The main criteria being how long they spent in the car. Scientific. One quick diversion though, here's what I did Monday morning on the road in North Hampton (that's me filming) [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Naturally, it's been mostly Christmas music this time of year. Unavoidable. Although I used to try. Now, I'm more of the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" type. All-in. In very much a Griswold kind of way [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Chuck Eddy dusts off his old vinyl and scratches his head. We all win.

Greetings, BLURT readers. This column's theme is fairly simple: Basically, I sort alphabetic ally through my shelves for dusty old 7-inch vinyl indie singles from acts that aren't household names, and try to figure out why I wound up keeping them in the first place. This is the 9^th installment (first two appeared at Idolator.)

***

JEFFREY LEWIS "The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song" (Rough Trade, 2001)

Basically, a Craig's List Missed Connection ad as a shaggy dog story: Slacker nebbish with ponytail and backpack (you can tell from the comic strip tucked inside the record sleeve), born of the same East Village "anti-folk" scene that coughed up Kimya Dawson, walks along Manhattan's West 23^rd Street towards the Chelsea Hotel, "where Nancy and Sid and my friend Dave once dwelled." He overhears a cute tattooed girl with glasses behind him walking with a couple gay male friends and remembering some song where somebody got a blowjob there. He gets "uncharacteristically courageous," and turns around and tells her "Leonard Cohen." They wind up having a five-minute conversation in which she confesses that Leonard's song inspires naughty thoughts, but timid little twerp that he is (a fact he's going to passive-aggressively pound into our heads with every last little self-aggrandizing bone in his undernourished body if it's the last thing he does), he never gets her phone number. "I'm a schmuck, don't you doubt it/All I did was write this stupid song about it," when they could have been giving each other head in the bed that Leonard Cohen once used. "You may think it's sad, you may think it's pathetic/that I'll sing this song and she'll never hear it." He's telling us all this, of course, in the most monotonous sing-song diction, accompanied by only an acoustic guitar which he barely strums, and his voice cracks like zits popping all the way through. The girl probably thought it was adorable; we're sure supposed to. Personally, it makes me want to wring his pencil neck. Have to admit, though, I kind of like the song anyway. The actual physical object - music on only one side of the single, "33rpm" and song info rubber-stamped on its plain white label - is almost as unadorned. And the enclosed miniature graphic-novel is about how Rough Trade heard the song, which becomes "the top-selling single in the entire world," and 50 years later poor Jeffrey plays it on stage and the girl is in the audience, and they live happily ever after, except she tosses out all his music and comic books. For now, though, he's apparently half-moved to Portland, in order to badly cover Crass songs. (www.myspace.com/jefflewisband)

THE LIVE ONES "Dirtweed"/"Don't Look Down" (Slow Gold Zebra, 2008)

Muffled hard rock from a totally anachronistic - heck, already totally anachronistic if this was ten or even 20 years ago - NYC sleaze-punk trio, led by two scraggly Connecticut-born Czekaj brothers. Yeah, dirtweeds for sure. They're trying to sound like Detroit in the late ‘60s, or maybe Seattle in the late ‘80s, and they know how to look the part. Singer-who-drums Mike Czekaj slimes high and threatening through his bloody adenoids about how you're gonna get beat when you walk down the street. The beat, naturally, sounds like walking down the street. Toward the end, he starts "woooo!"-ing and "waaagh!"-ing. In "Don't Look Down" the band slows down, shooting for a black hole of Funhouse emotion, and Mike's voice gets deeper and more self-destructive: "Please take me home/I can't stay here feeling this way." He starts howling more, quoting BÖC's "This Ain't The Summer of Love," and the sound builds to a decently noisy spurt of a drone, and there's an actual guitar solo. Almost four decades after the first Stooges album, this particular brand of rock yields constantly diminishing returns. But there's something still left in it. (www.myspace.com/theliveones)

LOOKER "After My Divorce"/"Master's Gone Away" (Serious Business, 2007)

Yet another young urban bohemian snapshot that already seems somewhat dated, given the bedbug plague and all: Newly unmarried woman moves to the Big Apple from Paris (or Venice, or Pittsburgh - depends which verse you're hearing, kind of like "Gone Country" by Alan Jackson backwards), digs a chair and table out of the trash and sweater out of the hallway to make it through the autumn. Well okay, that plot conflates both songs, but they do seem related. Looker are three pretty gals and a guy drummer, and in mid-decade they put a small, steady pile of good EPs, CD-Rs, and one album along with this 7-inch, and were one of my favorite local live bands in New York. "Master's Gone Away" has a rhythm that flirts with ska, and lyrics that quote the old blackface minstrel tune "Jimmy Crack Corn," which is also where the title (and the song's last line) comes from. "After My Divorce," post-Byrds Anglophile jangle with sweet triple-girl harmonies and a taut beat turning martial, references Morrissey and Poe in consecutive lines; this charming man reads the divorcée's tell-tale heart. Toward the end, the Lookers repeat "Shangri-La, Shangri-La, Shangri-La" - the Shangri-Las being one influence they list on MySpace, along with the Clash, Adverts, Talking Heads, Shirelles, Blondie, Pretenders, and Kinks. Though not the Primitives or Waitresses or Jam, all of whom probably belong there too. (www.myspace.com/looker)

LOS ABANDONED "Office Xmas Party"/"Electric Dad" (Vapor, 2006) More friendly female vocals, this time from the opposite coast - Van Nuys, L.A., Cali.  In the seasonal though not especially seasonal-sounding A-side, a working woman (like the one in, say, Martha and the Muffins' "Echo Beach" maybe) ill-advisedly hooks up with a co-worker at the annual holiday bash, beneath decorations while other attendees fall face-first into the spiked fruit punch, and as you'd expect things get awkward when the pair confront each other again in the coffee room Monday morning. The beat is skiffly with a slight lilt, though probably not quite enough of one to justify the middle part of Los Abandoned's "new wave/Latin/indie" designation on MySpace. Eventually, horns take over. "Electric Dad" does in fact seem to be recited in Spanish, but its music is just an emaciated indie-pop approximation of synth-pop: which is to say, the synth seems lazily stuck on just one setting, too unambitious and not half funky enough to have passed for synth-pop on ‘80s MTV.  Though the band does appear to dress colorfully enough to pass for new wave. (www.myspace.com/losabandoned)

Chuck Eddy is the former music editor of the Village Voice and the author of several books, including the greatest book on heavy metal ever written, Stairway To Hell. He won't admit it, but he knows more about rock ‘n' roll than the entire accumulated BLURT brain trust.

Every now and then a record comes along that rises above everything around it and hits the sweet spot that separates the sublime from the mediocre, good, or even great. It doesn't necessarily have to break any new ground, but it does inhabit it's particular space as perfectly as possible.  

Let us, then, take a breather from everything else and pay tribute to a sublime piece of honky tonk heaven, Ray Price's 1963 classic Night Life album.
First, a bit of back-story. Night Life first crossed my turntable as a gift from Dave Gonzalez, prime-mover of The Paladins and The Hacienda Brothers, who were  untouchable purveyors of modern day honky tonk and western soul until the untimely death earlier this year of Brothers co-founder Chris Gaffney. While hanging out with Dave, Gaff and Hacienda Brothers manager Jeb Schoonover, it became obvious that, in their estimation, honky tonk country in it's purest form was and is the qualitative equal of anything ever recorded--classical, jazz, whatever. This is not something they generally teach you in the College of Musical Knowledge. 

This is a belief, not a thesis, but if you needed to make that argument Ray Price's Night Life could certainly be Exhibit A. Moving directly off the honky tonk blue-print perfected by Hank Williams, Price and his Cherokee Cowboys deliver 12 tracks of straight-up, hard country that differs from 100s or 1000s of other similar albums only in that it's just a little bit to a lot better than most of the others. It's a pure distillation.  

Night Life is something of a concept album, or a song-cycle, revolving around the title cut; a series of songs exploring the night life and all the vagaries of the night lifestyle. Which includes plenty of opportunities for drinking, dancing, playing music, infidelity, heartbreak, remorse; the stuff of country & western music from time immemorial. Many of these are  classics, recorded before and since then by numerous artists. But seriously; show me a better version of "Night Life" and I'll eat Ray's black hat. 

The title cut incapsulates what is so right about this record. After a mood-setting spoken intro by Ray ("Well Hi neighbors!...We want to thank you for being so nice on our last record...we've chosen...songs of happiness, sadness, heartbreak, songs of the night life..."), the band kicks in with a pedal steel guitar swell that just takes your breath away. Ray steps up to the mic with his velvet voice, the band falls in behind him at a stately pace and it all just comes together. And therein lies the magic: Price's genuinely emotive voice embedded in arrangements that are absolutely not in a hurry to get anywhere. The pacing is everything, the key to the mansion, where macaroni becomes Mozart. It's subtle, methodical and sensual; this is music that really, genuinely swings. The band is so precise, so perfectly in synch that it's actually hard to imagine it getting any better. Ray and his voice, of course, are worthy of being on the Mt. Rushmore of honky tonk. Willie Nelson does a lovely version of "Night Life," but Ray Price owns it.

Ray's version of "Sittin' and Thinkin'" beats writer Charlie Rich's by a country mile, and Rich was an absolute master. I've listened to it a hundred times, and I'm sure I'll listen another hundred. Again, perfection: the steel guitar swoons, the lower register guitar (or perhaps a 6 string bass) picks out a walking groove, the supple rhythm section swings and Ray delivers the goods. "I got loaded last night/on a bottle of gin/and I had a fight/with my best girlfriend/When I'm drinking/I am nobody's friend/Baby please wait for me/until they let me out again." The band sounds both hard and soft, the pace is a leisurely amble, the destination the truth. The song-titles tell the whole story: "Lonely Street," "The Wild Side of Life," "If She Could See Me Now," "Bright Lights and Blonde Haired Women." No crap strings, no corny choruses mucking everything up. The fact that Ray only wrote one track doesn't raise any heat here. Even the cover is cool, as much cocktail lounge as road-house, with Ray looking slightly amused while a couple (illicit, no doubt) nuzzle and sip cocktails. He doesn't even wear a hat in the front cover; what confidence.

It's no secret that much (most) contemporary, Nashville-based country music sounds manufactured, calculated and insincere. There are legions of rebels, eccentrics and iconoclasts in the Americana camp, of course, turning out new twists on the twang and keeping it real. But in 1963 Ray Price was before the fall, when Nashville could still be fresh, competition was more genial, gigs were plentiful and the music hadn't yet been relegated to Squaresville by the coming tide of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, electric Miles Davis and all that came after them. Ray Price has made many more fine records over several decades, maybe some of them as good as this one. But Night Life, with it undercurrent of sensuality and blue collart dissipation, remains a high-water mark and a good primer for any songwriter and picker with a cowboy hat who wants to get really, really real and get it right.    

 "Dude, have you been to Berlin yet?!"
 Episode Vier
 
You know the bonus disk on the KISS Vol. 1 DVD boxset? The one tucked in the sleeve as if it is of least importance in the pack? Well, somewhere towards the end of that disk, there's Ace on his knees, swaying back and forth, undulating rock style to whatever he's unleashing on the strings. It's a moment, I tell you. Then fast forward to Black Diamond, the last song on the disk, and you see Peter Criss take over the mic and push out so much natural soul it kind of staggers you for a minute, because you really didn't expect it.
 
 You should check it out.
 
 The Hellacopters out of Stockholm, Sweden, have been a band for more than a dozen years, coming up in the garage, jetting on to larger labels and even a major, then rolling back down to where their feet touched the ground again. This year they decided to break up, and in great group spirit and with respect to their legacy and their fans, the band played a soldout farewell tour through Europe.
 
 For more information, see www.hellacopters.com <http://www.hellacopters.com> .
 

Guest post this week from yet another one of my favorites (can’t help it), Australian singer-songwriter Shane Nicholson. Buy his records. All of them.

Dear Pluto,

I’ve been thinking for a while now, that possibly you are finding it extremely cold and lonely out there at the edge of the solar system. Not to mention, with the time it takes you to orbit the sun, the years must surely feel to be moving very slowly [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.

Dear Friends-

One hot topic in your responses to my last post was my new kitten Castro, so I decided to put together a short video of him and I.  These clips were filmed by webcam while working on responses to some of your comments.  IÂ’ll finish typing my responses and post them asap.  In the mean time let me introduce you to Castro.

All The Best- Justin XOXOXO  

This month’s brief compendium of music/music-lifestyle related whatnot --- as it pertains to our tribal interests: a tribal shortlist. First things first [...]

A Triple-A radio programming veteran, Kate has served as Music Director of the Loft at XM, Midday Host at WYEP, Evening Host at both WNCS and WUIN, as well as Content Supervisor for Pump Audio. Currently, she's the CEO of Outlandos Music, a new-music discovery service for grown-ups. Kate has been nationally recognized for her ardent presentati on of music and her ability to champion talented, compelling artists.