Hadley Castille: Hanging with Hadley

(Originally published in the June 20 and the June 27, 2001, issue of the Times of Acadiana) 

Hadley Castille vividly remembers the day in 1992 that he found himself in a New Orleans recording studio, preparing to add his distinctive Cajun fiddling to “Big Fran’s Baby,” a song composed by Clint Eastwood for the soundtrack of his film A Perfect World.  “We were about to record,” Castille recalls, “and the producer said, ‘Mr. Castille, Mr. Eastwood wants to add a bagpipe to this song.’  Well, I was feeling a little ornery that day, so I said, ‘A bagpipe?  Not in my music.’”

Castille stood and turned to leave, only to find himself face-to-face with the New Orleans saxophonist James Rivers, a large, imposing man made larger and more imposing on this day by the bagpipe that he was wearing.  “I turned back around,” he remembers, “and said, ‘Well, maybe just this once.’”

Castille laughs heartily but still maintains that the Scottish instrument was an odd choice for what was supposed to be a Cajun song heard on Texas radio in 1963.  To set the record straight, he re-recorded the song—sans bagpipe—on his 1995 album, La Musique de les Castilles: The Third Generation (Swallow). 

His latest album, Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés/Forty Acres and Two Mules (Master-Trak) is likewise 100% bagpipe free.  It’s also as excellent an hour of music as Castille has ever fit on one album.  Subtitled Cajun Swing, Two-Steps, Waltzes, Blues and Ballads, it distinguishes itself from the majority of Cajun discs, contemporary and otherwise, in both its stylistic variety and its quotient of original material.  Of the 15 songs, 11 were composed or co-composed by Castille and his son Blake, and the four that weren’t range imaginatively from golden-age classics (Harry Choates’ “La Popuet Elastique” and “La Valse du Port Arthur,” Iry LeJeune’s “Grand Nuit”) to modern-day zydeco (Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas’ “Everything on a Hog Is Good”).

Engineered by Castille’s longtime technician of choice Mark Miller and embellished with contributions from David Egan, Sam Broussard, Pee Wee Whitewing, and Lee Benoit, the Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés swings with an ease, elegance, grace, and beauty that justify the high esteem with which Castille and his Sharecroppers Cajun Band have been held both locally and abroad for more than 20 years.  Furthermore, originals such as “Radio à Batterie” (which goes “The Western Swing Bob Wills would play / That is why…my Cajun fiddle / swings that way”) and “Helaire Carrier” (about the notorious real-life “bandit of St. Landry Parish”) suggest that, his fiddling skills notwithstanding, Castille’s true gift might be his translation of Cajun history into that most durable of folklore: the story-song—or ballad.

“When I went to Canada in the late ’70s,” Castille says, “it just awakened me to the idea that this was something special.  I thought, ‘If it means that much to them, there’s something about this music and culture that we need to preserve.’”

Born in Leonville in 1933, Castille had been performing Cajun music since his Army days during the Korean war.  But he didn’t fully grasp the importance of being musically earnest until 1979, when the warm reception that greeted him and his fiddle at a Canadian music festival convinced him that there was an audience for his unique blend of Cajun music and Western swing.

To those who’ve followed Castille since, the excellence of Quarante Acres et Deux Mulés will come as no surprise.  But amid the highly accomplished playing, arranging, and storytelling, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Castille is also one of Cajun music’s finest singers: He’s as unlikely to strain after high notes or to sing through his nose as he is to accept too much credit for his vocal prowess.  “In the old days,” he explains, “when there was no amplification, Cajun singers would sing in high G to project, to get through the noise.  Today you can sing where you feel good and work on your tone rather than try to reach high notes and stay on pitch.”

You can also, it seems, broaden your audience that way.  “When I first started playing Canada,” Castille recalls, “people would tell me—in French!—‘We like your music, but we don’t understand what you’re singing about.’  So I began to speak more distinctly to them, and I got to thinking that maybe I should do the same thing as a singer, to try to be clearer with the pronunciation.  Now even the locals tell me, ‘We understand what you’re saying.’”

Castille’s desire to make himself understood abroad was also behind his decision to begin playing blue, Louisiana-shaped violins.  “We were playing at a fiddle convention in St. Boniface, and after we got through, we went and met some of the folk.  A little lady came up to me and said, in French, ‘Mr. Castille, this Cajun country of Louisiana, where is that?  Is that close to Nova Scotia?’”

Castille decided that playing a violin in the shape of his home state was preferable to lugging around an atlas and eventually had two such instruments made—the “backwards” one that he’s shown playing on the cover of his 1985 album Going Back to Louisiana/Je suis retourné à la Louisiane (“I thought that the toe of the state would get in my way,” he says, “but it didn’t”) and the “correct” one that he’s holding on the back cover of 1989’s Along the Bayou Teche.

Today, due in large part to Castille’s efforts and those of other gifted Acadiana musicians who think globally while acting locally, the location of “this Cajun country of Louisiana” is less of a mystery than ever.  “I realized a long time ago,” Castille reflects, “that there was something about the Cajun fiddle that catches people’s ears, that makes them feel good.

“And the more I studied it,” he says, “the more I came to understand what it takes to get that sound.”

Buckwheat Zydeco: Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Of all the mementos in the Carencro, Louisiana, office of Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural, Jr., none testify to his success as the leader and personification of Buckwheat Zydeco more eloquently than the wall he’s covered with photos of himself and the famous people he’s met and performed with: Eric Clapton, Fats Domino, Albert Collins, Ed Bradley--“The 60-Minute man,” cracks Dural--and Stevie Wonder.

On this afternoon in late March, however, one photo in particular grabs Dural’s attention. “You know who that is?” he asks pointing at a photo of himself and a dapperly attired gentleman. “That’s Roger Troutman.” Troutman--a.k.a., Roger-- was the pioneering funk musician-composer-producer best known for his hits with the group Zapp and for making the vocoder an integral part of contemporary black music.

He was also shot to death by his brother and former band member Larry Troutman on April 25, 1999, not long after the photo of him and Dural was taken. “By his brother,” muses Dural. “Can you believe that?”

The Troutman affair has special meaning for Dural, who later this evening will listen for the first time to what he hopes will be the next release on his own Tomorrow Recordings, an as-yet-untitled solo album by Chris Ardoin’s former Double Clutchin’ drummer, creative foil, and older brother, Sean. “Sean’s a good musician,” says Dural, “and Chris is real good too. They’re good together or by themselves.”

Dural admits, however, that the splitting of the brothers as a creative and performing duo is a shame, the zydeco equivalent of such notoriously counterproductive rock and roll sibling rivalries as Phil and Don Everly’s and Ray and Dave Davies’. “It’s so nice,” he adds wistfully, “when you can work together.”

At fifty-three, Dural knows a lot about working together--so much, in fact, that if universities gave credit for coalition building and teamwork, he’d probably have a Ph.D. Ask him, for instance, to explain his rapid rise to the top of the post-Clifton Chenier zydeco heap and how he’s maintained that success for so long, and he’ll cite the time in the mid-’80’s when he convinced a New York-based author named Ted Fox to put his writing aside and to take up managing Buckwheat Zydeco full time.

Ask him how he has managed to keep Tomorrow Recordings going in an age of indie-record-company attrition, and he’ll cite the interrelated contributions of his label’s various publicists (only one of which lives in Louisiana). True, nothing gets done without his approval, but he gives his approval to quite a bit because he has surrounded himself with people he trusts, people who understand that Tomorrow represents a roots-conscious, artist-friendly alternative to the major labels--and that its ultimate success will be determined by the degree to which it stays true to its ideals.

“Island Records was great,” says Dural of the label for which he recorded intermittently between 1987 and 1994. “All those companies were great, but those were giants, man. I was like a needle in a haystack.” And the worst consequence of being a needle, Dural discovered, was that his albums were often invisible in cities where his live act was doing some serious throwing down.

It’s a situation he chalks up to the promotional laziness inevitable in labels that have the sales of an act like U2 to fall back upon.

“You’ve got twenty other artists with income galore coming in already, and then you’ve got to stop and worry about me that ain’t started with the income yet? That’s what I mean when by ‘lost in the shuffle,’ man, and that’s no good for me, because my music’s too important for me to settle for that. I’d prefer to be heard and not make a dime than not being heard and still not making nothing.”

To keep from perpetuating the cycle of negligence himself, Dural has kept Tomorrow’s commitments to a minimum. To date, the only non-Buckwheat Zydeco album to bear the label’s imprint has been Lil’ Brian and the Zydeco Travelers’ extremely well-received Funky Nation. But Dural intends to unearth more music--he has a drawer full of demo tapes from up-and-comers hoping to catch his ear--and not just zydeco either.

“I’m ready to work with people that can invent, that have talent, talent that’s not heard yet and that don’t know how far that talent can go. That’s what’s fun about this company. You’ve got people out there that no one’s never heard of, people who are good musicians. They’re just not discovered. It’s not always artists that have to go looking for a company. Companies have to look for artists too.

“When we started this company,” says Dural, “I had a meeting for southwest Louisiana musicians, and I said, ‘This is what’s getting ready to happen. This is the invite. If you have anything to offer, give me a ring here in Louisiana or call Ted Fox in New York, and we’ll see if there’s something appropriate to work with.’ Everything started coming in.”

Talent scout, producer, and entrepreneur--Dural clearly relishes the new hats his Tomorrow duties require him to wear.

But even though those duties haven’t cut into his touring schedule (he still averages over two hundred shows a year), some of his fans have begun to wonder whether they’ve cut into his songwriting. As of the end of last year, there’d been three Buckwheat Zydeco albums since the release of Trouble, his last studio album, in 1997. But two were compilations (The Buckwheat Zydeco Story: A 20-Year Party [Tomorrow], Ultimate Collection [Hip-O]) and another was Trouble again, albeit re-released, this time with the Tomorrow logo where the Mesa/Atlantic logo used to be.

Dural, on the other hand, who has often spoken of his songs as coming to instead of from him, considers his present fallow period just one more fringe benefit of being his own boss. There is, in other words, no pressure to meet deadlines or deliver product, and as a result he’s free to concentrate on projects like the just-released Down Home Live! album (about which more in a moment) and “All the King’s Men,” the Clifton Chenier tribute that will take place under Dural’s direction later this month at Lafayette, Louisiana's Festival International. The seventy-five-minute set will unite such former Clifton Chenier band members as Dural, John Hart, and Robert Alexander on-stage for the first time in years.

But as excited as Dural is about the reunion angle of the set, he’s also acutely aware of the “King’s Men” who’ll be conspicuous by their absence: Cleveland Chenier (“He’s deceased too”), Joseph Morris (“Joe’s in a home”), and, of course, the King himself. “I wish he was here to see these good things happening, you know? He’s no different than the football players that came out a long time ago and opened the gates for football players today who make seventeen million dollars a year. You talk about seventeen million dollars--they won’t even accept it! ‘Seventeen-million dollars a year? I don’t want that!’”

They don’t want it, says Dural, because their motivation isn’t the love of money but the love of music--just like the motivation of the guys in his band. “They take the music very seriously,” Dural explains. “You’ve got to understand, that’s what these cats do all their lives.”

Anyone who doesn’t understand should check out Down Home Live!, a seventy-two-minute document of Buckwheat Zydeco’s performance last Thanksgiving at El Sid O’s, the Lafayette zydeco-and-blues club run by Nathan Williams’ brother Sid.

Although a glance at the song list might cause those familiar with Dural’s songbook to wonder whether they really need another version of “What You Gonna Do?,” “Beast of Burden,” “Hard to Stop,” or “Make a Change,” a glance at the song lengths, which average eight minutes and change, should erase their doubts: Seldom have extended workouts revealed so much about the depths of what’s allegedly a simple, blues-based, rural folk music.

“That’s how come I like to play everything,” says Dural. “People say, ‘Buckwheat, where are you going with this music?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, man. I just take it as far as I can, with no limits except keeping it home, keeping it to the roots, and keeping it to the culture.’

“El Sid O says, ‘You wonder where you’re going, just don’t forget where you come from.’

“That," says Dural, "is reality.”

The Lemon Pipers: Green Tambourine: The Best of the Lemon Pipers (2001)

(As published in Blender ... )

The Lemon Pipers
Green Tambourine: The Best of the Lemon Pipers
(Buddha)
***

What besides its quintessential ’60s AM title hit makes this admittedly frothy collection more than mere meringue? A dozen trippy baroque sing-alongs that make both “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “MacArthur Park” sound like stripped-down garage anthems by comparison. Yet the “best” label is misleading: Two songs described in the liner notes as being among the band’s shining moments—“Turn Around Take a Look” and “Through With You”—are missing, even though this forty-six-minute disc has room enough for both. Partial consolation comes with the inclusion of both “Shoeshine Boy” and “The Shoemaker,” proof that the Pipers sang about subjects other than rice, blueberries, tangerines and wine.

Joe Henry: Scar (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

JOE HENRY
Scar
(Mammoth)

Hats off to Joe Henry. Instead of cynically treating jazz as a chic résumé-enhancer or as camouflage behind which to putter aimlessly, he's gone and hired genuine jazz musicians and written a set of lyrics that sound like Zen wisdom knowingly muttered by real gone daddies in opium dens ’round midnight.

The problem is, with a band that includes Brian Blade (drums), Brad Mehldau (piano), and Marc Ribot (guitar), lyrics can be a distraction even when they’re attached to evocative titles (“Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”) and they go “God and His ghost / And His roadhouse crew / Ran me out of town on a silver rail” (“Lock and Key”). In other words, one finds himself listening past or through Henry’s words and the way he sings them to concentrate on the interplay of his combo. When Ornette Coleman comes in on “Richard Pryor,” you forget Scar is a Joe Henry record altogether.

Compounding the problem of focus is that the two most fascinating tracks are instrumentals. With Ribot doing Pete Cosey impersonations and Henry doing nothing audibly, “Nico Lost One Small Buddha” recreates the sound of On The Corner-era Miles Davis skronk for skronk. Then there’s “Pryor Reprise,” seven more minutes of solo Coleman hidden at disc’s end. What can a critic do but give the jazz guys an eight, Henry a six, and call the rating an average? 7

Electric Light Orchestra: Zoom (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Electric Light Orchestra
Zoom
(Epic)

The good news is that after more than a decade of producing the likes of Roy Orbison, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney with an ear toward helping them recapture past glories, Jeff Lynne has taken on his biggest challenge yet--recapturing the glories of his own once much-beloved group, ELO. The bad news is that his reach may finally have begun to exceed his grasp.

Anyone familiar with Lynne’s pet sounds will note on Zoom the continued presence of the ELO formula: instantly hummable British-Invasion hooks, strings both real and synthesized, ornately overdubbed vocals, and lyrics abounding in references to twilight, floating, water crossings, and that which comes from “out of the blue.” Several songs (most notably “Moment in Paradise” and “Melting in the Sun”) could hold up quite well on the next ELO best-of, and none of them are in need of shooting.

Alas, none of them are actual ELO performances either. Except for a big-name cameo here (George Harrison, Ringo Starr) and a no-name cameo there (the cellists), Lynne plays and sings everything himself, with no one along from the old days but Richard Tandy (playing inaudibly on “Alright”) to help shift the burden. I mean, a one-man band is one thing, but a one-man orchestra? The result: a sound that’s too hermetic by half for rock-and-roll.

Leroy (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Leroy
Leroy
(Hollywood)

Leroy is pretty fly for a white guy. Not only does he sing like Lenny Kravitz, but he uses what sounds like a gospel choir at the end of the slyly (and the family stonefully) funky “Good Time,” the title of which gives props both to Chic and that ’70’s ghetto-com starring Jimmy Walker. Dyn-o-mite!

Actually, with lyrics like “I got shot down in southern California / All along you never loved me / ’til the day that you shot me,” “Good Time” might be the story of Robert Blake and Bonnie Lee, two old lovers with nothing better to be, a saga that seems rather un-African-American until you recall that no less a soul bro’ than O.J. has been advising Blake and that in his Little Rascal days Blake himself was once tight with Buckwheat.

But back to His Leroyal Badness: in “Devil’s Daughter” he sings in a fake-soul falsetto; in “Be My Lover” he follows more falsetto with a Sly Stone riff. In “New World” he raps; in “Trans Am” he raps and gets approached by a “hoochie woman.” In “The Way We Carry On” he raps and mentions racism. In “Don’t Look Back” he mentions Superfly. Through it all runs an Isley-Hendrix-Stax-Volt fuzztone courtesy of Leroy’s own bad axe. Lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die!

Tim McGraw: Set This Circus Down (2001)

(As published in Blender ... )

Tim McGraw
Set This Circus Down
(Curb)
***

Tim McGraw has never decided what he likes about women more—their power to civilize men or their power to drive men wild. On his first release since being named Father of the Year last summer, Mr. Faith Hill declares foursquare for civilization, either by celebrating domesticity or by lamenting its passing; only on the yearningly nostalgic “Telluride” do his desires stray beyond the home. Elsewhere, the material ranges from predictably pleasant to pleasantly predictable. The exception: “Angry All the Time,” in which McGraw embodies a quietly devastated husband so movingly that one gladly overlooks “Things Change,” his rather glib attempt to nominate himself the successor of Hank Sr., Elvis, Waylon, and Willie.

Buddy & Julie Miller (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

BUDDY & JULIE MILLER
Buddy & Julie Miller
(Hightone)

Buddy and Julie Miller are to mystical Christianity and American folk-rock what Richard and Linda Thompson used to be to Sufi Islam and British folk-rock--a living embodiment of much that’s desirable and most of what’s possible in the bringing together of opposites.

The similarities don’t end there. Like Richard, Buddy is an ace guitarist with deep roots in various folk idioms and an O.K. voice; like Linda, Julie has a voice that can move mountains, break hearts, and tear down walls. Unlike the Thompsons, however, who made their best albums together, the Millers’ best work is still to be found on their solo albums (and, in the case of Buddy, on Emmylou Harris’s), wherein they tend to write the stand-out tracks themselves. Here the stand-out tracks come courtesy of Bob Dylan (“Wallflower”), Utah Phillips (“Rock Salt and Nails”), and--surprise--Richard Thompson (“Keep Your Distance”).

Which isn’t to say that “Rachel” shouldn’t garner special attention, especially in light of recent national catastrophes. Written by Julie about a spiritually sensitive victim of the Columbine shootings, its sympathies, compassion, and insistence on finding meaning in even apparently senseless violence will no doubt resonate with anyone in search of big answers.

No One: Today Chicago, Tomorrow the World (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

It’s a pleasant afternoon in early May, and from a location somewhere between two East Coast stops on his band’s tour with Slaves on Dope and Hinge A.D., Murk--the lead vocalist of the Chicago-based metal band No One--is musing into about the competitive nature of the Windy City music scene.

“There’s, like, a hundred bands in Chicago trying to get noticed,” he says in a calm voice that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the hysterical, jugular-shredding one he uses to perform. “But I think the competition is healthy, definitely. A lot of the bands share the same following, there’s a lot of good local support, and everyone’s working hard to get a record deal or whatever.”


How No One avoided settling for “whatever” and ended up signing with Immortal Records (Korn, Incubus, Too Much Stereo) is a story Murk enjoys telling. “We were actually aiming for February to start shopping for a record deal, but what happened is we recorded a demo in September, sent a bunch of stuff out, and immediately there were three labels that wanted to sign us. We were shocked.”

By the time the shock had worn off, No One was a member of the Immortal Records team. Unfortunately, with fewer than ten compositions to their names, Murk, B-Larz (guitars), Flare (bass), and Billy K (drums) were now faced with the challenge of composing part of their debut album in the studio--either that or else risk being known as No Can Do.

It was a challenge to which they swiftly rose, coming up with not only nourishing filler but also potential hits. “‘Shedding’ was written in the studio,” Murk recalls, “and it will probably be our second single. So was ‘Down on Me,’ and it ended up being the album opener. I guess we came through in the clutch.”

Fans of the band will get to make up their own minds on June 19, the day No One’s eponymously titled disc hits the streets. Meanwhile, they can begin gathering evidence by attending a No One show and grabbing the official three-song teaser the band is giving away to whet the appetites of its audience. Consisting of “Mindless,” “Cut,” and the long-player's first single “Chemical,” the sampler achieves in miniature what the long-player achieves at length, namely the establishment of No One as a “modern metal” monster.

Murk credits the album’s producer Jimmy K (Disturbed, Loudmouth) for a good deal of the album’s razor-sharp sonic definition. When it comes to the bigger picture, though, Murk credits No One’s manager Steve Richards, an industry insider previously best known for managing the nine-piece metal band Slipknot. “He really understood our music,” Murk explains. “The songs, the lyrics and all that, touched him personally.” So much so, in fact, that Richards wouldn’t rest until he’d secured the group a second-stage spot on this summer’s very prestigious Ozzfest tour. “It wasn’t easy getting that,” says Murk. “They worked on that for, like, a solid month.”

There is, however, an even bigger picture, one that becomes fully visible only at those moments when the glow of the fiery blast furnace at the quartet’s core approaches critical mass. In the picture’s background is Chicago itself; in the foreground is the role it has played in making No One the Someone’s they are today. “Chicago’s a blue-collar kind of town, and we all came from blue-collar backgrounds.”

There’s something, he says, in the daily grind--“struggling with life, paying your bills, getting fired from your job, dealing with crap at work”--that can foster in a group of young, aggressive musicians the sort of No-Nonsense approach reflected in No One’s songs. “On the other hand,” he continues, “I also think that what the songs are about is pretty universal. I think someone in Germany could relate to the same exact situations.”

Given No One’s abrasive, pummeling sound, of course, it would help for that German Someone to be a Rammstein fan. “Yeah,” laughs Murk, who in addition to Polish plasma (he was born Mark Murawski) also has German and Irish blood. “Irish, German, Polish--that’s pretty much what everyone in the band is,” he says, adding that its many decades of assimilating Europeans has made Chicago particularly hospitable to those possessed by the Catholic Work Ethic. There are, he notes, “a lot of pubs around.”

“Seriously, though, I know that Chicago is filled with a lot of hard-working musicians, people who will do whatever it takes to be successful. I don’t really know if it has something to do with the area--I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country.

"But in Chicago people take their music very seriously.”

Brooks & Dunn: Steers and Stripes (2001)

(As published in Blender ... )

Brooks and Dunn
Steers and Stripes
(Arista Nashville)

From drawled vocals to working-class concerns, the tenth-anniversary album from Brooks and Dunn is unmistakably country, but its prominent drums and loud southern-rock guitars also mark a break with the duo’s honky-tonk roots. B&D are even singing harder nowadays, as if their prime-time slot at last year’s Republican convention woke them up to the larger sociopolitical ramifications of boot-scootin’ boogie. By framing their expanded country dance vision with testosterone hooks and soft-hearted ballads, they all but guarantee increased enrollment on their bandwagon. For older fans, “Lucky Me, Lonely You” is hard Bakersfield honky-tonk to its core, and “Deny, Deny, Deny” is as hilariously pathetic an excuse as any ne’er-do-well husband (or ex-president) ever tried to foist upon the little woman.

BOZ SCAGGS: THE REAL SLIMS' SHADY (2001)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer...)

BOZ SCAGGS: THE REAL SLIM’S SHADY

For Boz Scaggs, September 11 was supposed to be a red-letter day. Not only was Dig, his first album of original material in seven years, due to hit the streets, but he was packed and ready to fly to Miami for a music-industry convention at which he would launch the disc with interviews and a performance. Then three hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. “We were at the airport,” Scaggs recalls. “Of course, everything was cancelled.”

One can hardly imagine music less likely to serve as the soundtrack to international cataclysm than Scaggs’. For more than a quarter of a century, his songs have set standards of button-down class and urbane sophistication undreamt of in the philosophies of most other R&B-rooted rockers. Yet in retrospect several lines on Dig do seem prescient. “I rode that beast down into the ground,” Scaggs sings in “King of El Paso.” “That devil carried me. / Watch a few go down / to the fire or the rope. / You leave little to chance / and nothing to hope.” Perhaps even more to the point, and less rhetorically than one would at first suppose, “Payday” finds Scaggs asking the musical question, “Do we really need an apocalypse now?”

Chuckling, he insists that any similarities between himself and Nostradamus are purely coincidental (“You’re so overwhelmed by the real event of that day that, you know, it’s hardly worth considering”), but in a strange way the music he’s created on Dig does suit the current mood. For one thing, it’s all pensive rhythms and after-hours tempos, with singing both soulful and soul-searching. Second, it’s calming, the ideal tonic at the end of a long day crammed with wars and rumors of wars--calming, that is, in a somber sort of way.

“If there is a thread that runs through this album,” says Scaggs in an interview contained in Dig’s enhanced portion, “it’s that pretty much song-for-song you’re talking about a string of losers who’ve lost out in one way or another. From sort of a world-weary attitude of a ‘Thanks To You’ song to maybe a vet who came back from Viet Nam and never could put it together on ‘Payday,’ to ‘Desire’ to ‘I Just Go,’ they’re a series of dead-ends in some way.”

The music itself, on the other hand, feels like a through street, one that forms intersections with jazz, blues, R&B, and gospel (cf. the Staples-like “Call That Love”) and that Scaggs, now fifty-seven, can ride for another quarter of a century should he so choose. Crafted in large part by Scaggs, David Paich, and Danny Kortchmar with state-of-the-art digital technology, it boasts the deepest and warmest bottom of any Boz Scaggs album while also introducing such sparingly and sensitively deployed details as the gossamer trumpet of the up-and-coming jazz star Roy Hargrove, Jr. In short, after listening to Dig, even die-hard fans of Scaggs’ all-time best-selling LP--1976’s Silk Degrees--will have to admit that Scaggs’ current degrees are in many ways silkier.

It’s unlikely that there’s a Silk Degrees fan more die-hard than Craig Kilbourne, the late-night talk-show host on whose CBS show Scaggs appeared in early October. No sooner had Kilbourne announced Scaggs as part of the evening’s entertainment than he held up a copy of Silk Degrees and proceeded to claim that it, not Dig, was and always would be his favorite Boz LP. He had, he said, encountered the album in junior high school, and had loved it ever since. What followed was a not unfunny bit in which Kilbourne played the role of an infomercial pitchman for Silk Degrees, his every rhapsodic reminiscence followed by the uncomprehending comments of one of his youthful assistants, whose job it was to reiterate that, unlike Kilbourne, he was “too young” to know anything about the album.

The skit points up two bitterweet aspects of the Silk Degrees phenomenon. First, while it’s better to be loved for one album than not to be loved at all, it’s even nicer to be loved for more than one album. “Silk Degrees is an easy thing for people to focus on because it was so visible,” Scaggs concedes, “but it certainly gets old, and I just think it’s kind of lazy sometimes of people to just stick on one thing. Of course, in a situation like ‘The Late, Late Show,’ he genuinely knew, and knew all about, that record. He just was kind of relentless with it. Of course, you can‘t knock that kind of enthusiasm. I have the same sort of feelings myself for certain records that were really pivotal in my experience. So I can understand. But, yeah, I think I’d rather people recognize the body of work rather than one thing.”

The other point that Kilbourne’s skit makes is that there now exists an entire generation of pop-music lovers for whom the name “Boz Scaggs” and songs such as “Lowdown,” “Lido Shuffle,” and “What Can I Say” mean nothing. (Perhaps it was such a young person who so programmed the spell-check functions of Windows 95 word-processing programs to suggest “Booze Scabs” upon encountering the Dallas-bred musician’s moniker. By way of an upgrade, Windows 98 spell-check functions suggest “Bozo Skaggs.”)

One reason for Scaggs’ low name recognition among today’s under-thirties is that since Silk Degrees he has averaged over four years between albums, with no fewer than eight transpiring between Middle Man (1980) and Other Roads (1988) and six between Other Roads and Some Change (1994). In a 1988 interview with Rolling Stone, Scaggs attributed the first of his two hiatuses to a desire to “step outside” the demands created by one who’d had as much “fortune and fame” as he’d had, and, although he avoided specifics, many assumed that between starting and maintaining the San Francisco nightclub Slim’s and fighting his ex-wife for custody of his sons, he’d simply run out of the time and energy to tour, write, and tour.

Unfortunately, the album that was supposed to mark his return--Other Roads--ended up prompting the second hiatus, albeit inadvertently. “I started working on that album in probably ’85 or ’86,” he recalls, “and in that time period a whole new regime had come into my record company, CBS Records at the time. I didn’t know the president or the CEO. Well, I delivered my album as I always had, and then we got a reply saying, ‘There are no singles on this record. Go in and cut five or six more tracks.’ I was dumbfounded.”

Scaggs, who had never had any of his albums rejected before, was at an impasse. “Of course, the choice was either cut some more tracks or let them throw the record away. Literally, they’ll trash it. They’re big enough and powerful enough, and they’ve got other records to work. So we cut some more tracks, wrote some more stuff, and in the end we ended up using some remixes and cutting some new tracks with a new producer. Then I went back to the original producer, and we cut another track. The album ended up being just a sort of hodge-podge, and I left the label.”

Eventually, however, just as it was a record company that convinced him to resume his retirement, it was another record company that wooed him back. Since signing with Virgin Records in ’94, Scaggs has recorded Some Change and Come On Home (’97), the latter primarily a collection of the kind of blues and R&B oldies that made up the bulk of Scaggs’ live repertoire during the ’80’s. Like such pre-Silk Degrees albums as Slow Dancer and My Time, the Virgin albums featured meticulous, top-notch studio work but generated more in the way of positive reviews than they did in the way of revenue.

Still, Scaggs has nothing but praise for Virgin, who in addition to giving him free reign in the studio (“They’re probably the last label left in the world that does that,” he says) have also gotten behind the new album in a big way, releasing both a regular edition and a deluxe cloth-bound edition containing the audio disc and an image-enhanced DVD-friendly version. “To find a label,” says Scaggs, “that genuinely likes a record and believes in it and is willing to put their resources behind it makes a lot of difference.”

So does patience, or so one would think. After all, it’s not every superstar who can wait six-to-eight years between records for the sake of a principle. Surprisingly, Scaggs does not consider patience to be one of his virtues. “Patience was a good part of the process of making Dig,” he admits, “but I wouldn’t call myself a very patient person. It doesn’t come easy, or naturally, to me sometimes. I’m a perfectionist, but I like to work really fast, and I think that’s another thing that has to do with how these things come out.”

As far as Scaggs’ fans are concerned, of course, as long as “these things” keep coming out at all--and as long as they’re as good as Dig--the nomenclature can be settled later.