Lester Butler: 13 with a Bullet

(As published in Real Groove, 1997)

Were truth serum forced down the throats of blues aficionados, many of them might confess to admiring or respecting the importance of the blues a lot more than they actually enjoy the music. And who could blame them?  The blues is, after all, the most repetitious music in the Western world, and let him who has never trumpeted music for ulterior motives cast the first rolling stone.

Lester Butler, the thirty-seven-year-old, harp-playing force of nature who first came to notoriety as the front man for the late and much-lamented Red Devils, plays a different kind of blues altogether.  In fact, he and his new band 13 don’t so much play the blues as allow it to inhabit them and throttle them within an inch of their professional viability. (“We broke mics, and it was fun,” laughs Butler in reference to the recording of 13 Featuring Lester Butler, their new Hightone album.  “But we’ll never record in that studio again because they’re totally pissed at how many mics I broke.  That wasn’t ‘respectful.’”) As a result, the thirteen songs on 13 Featuring Lester Butler—especially the homicidally maniacal “Plague of Madness”–don’t sound performed so much as possessed.

Butler, who almost played New Zealand several years ago with the Red Devils, recently talked to Real Groove about his past, his present, the number thirteen, why some of his friends occasionally look at him funny, and why Kenny Wayne Shepherd deserves to be eaten by B.B. King.

REAL GROOVE: At one point the Red Devils were booked to play in New Zealand, but you canceled at the last minute because…
LESTER BUTLER: No, we didn’t.  We never cancel.

RG: What happened?
LB: Whoever was involved in promoting it couldn’t put the money together.  It was going to be the Paladins and us.  I was stoked to go, too.

RG: The cancellation had nothing to do with the Red Devils turning into Bruce Willis’s backing band?
LB: That’s such bullshit.  I played with Willis for a long time because he’s my bud and I ran the Planet Hollywood band, but…

RG: —–
LB: Actually, I saw a movie about it.

RG: —–
LB: I’m being sarcastic.  My girlfriend’s looking at me like, “Gosh, you’re blowing it again!”

RG: The cancellation boiled down to money?
LB: Yeah, but that’s cool.  Business is business.  Somebody couldn’t come up with the dough and gave us an excuse like “Oh, you missed an interview!”  You know how the biz gets sometimes.  But I forgive them all because that’s their job: to bullshit people.

RG: One of the best things about 13 Featuring Lester Butler, by the way, is its punk-dirty sound.
LB: Oh yeah.  I read about that in a book [laughs].

RG: —–
LB: I never lived it.

RG: The album sounds more like a natural extension of Funhouse than of any blues album.  It doesn’t sound like an affectation.
LB: Thank you very much.

RG: It sounds like the next, logical step.
LB: Thank you very much.  As Howlin’ Wolf said, “Make it yaws!  And don’t play with nobody that don’t know their changes!” [laughs], which we thought was really funny considering how much one-chord shit he does.

RG: How did you get the dirty, mic-in-the-mouth sound?
LB: You know the mic they use for the room mic?  I can’t remember what it’s called, but I was singing through that, which you’re not supposed to do, and the guys at the studio were like, “Back in the booth!  What are you doing with the room mic?”

RG: Which songs did they end up letting you sing through the room mic on?
LB: “So Low Down,” “Black Hearted Woman,” “Sweet Tooth,” “Close to You”–Those were the ones that made them go, “There’s the shit! We’re sorry for not letting you sing through the room mic!”

RG: Did they really say, “We’re sorry”?
LB: Of course not.

RG: Perhaps 13 Featuring Lester Butler will become known as the blues album for people whose tolerance for the blues is limited.
LB: My tolerance for the blues is limited, too–except for James Harman.  I love him.  He’s like a father to me.  I saw him at a gig the other night, and I said, “You know, James, I’ve been coming to see you over half my life!”

RG: In what sense is your tolerance for the blues limited?
LB: I hate the homogenized copycats who are replicating Chicago blues instead of doing what Wolf and Sonny Boy did, which was to make it evolve.  And I can’t stand to see kids like–I hate to talk negative.

RG: We don’t mind.
LB: Those people who have no right to be up there singing the blues because they ain’t lived through shit–they’re little kids!  “Oh, Kenny Wayne?  Yeah, he’s a bluesman!”  Please!  I’m not trying to be egotistical, but what’s that about?  Did Albert King play that way?  “I’ll show you how many notes I can hit.”  Oh yeah.  B.B. King, Albert King, Elmore James–they were all about fancy riffs.

RG: In your liner notes, you thank Geza X, the Dead Kennedys’ producer.
LB: Oh yeah.  When Geza became involved, magic started to happen.

RG: Like what?
LB: I re-sang a lot of stuff up at his house after Jeffrey Lee Pierce died.  You know Jeffrey Lee Pierce?

RG: The Gun Club guy.
LB: Jeffrey Lee, my buddy, had just died.  I’d been listening to his music just the night before, and I said, “Let’s go there, and let’s be like a vanload of punks slamming into Howlin’ Wolf.”

RG: What vocals did you re-record?
LB: We did “HNC,” “Smoke Stack Lightning,” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” up there.  It got more and more punk rock as the days went on.

RG: What made you want to do such war-horses as “Smoke Stack Lightning” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go”?
LB: My “Smoke Stack Lightning” is not about Wolf’s “Smoke Stack Lightning.”  His is about a train.  My “Smoke Stack Lightning” is about guys with crack–bums–and they’re drinking poison wine and shit, and they know it, yet they’re still drinking it.  It’s a very desperate time, one that–thank God–I got through.

RG: You’re through it?
LB: Thank the Lord, I got through it.  That’s what my “Smoke Stack Lightning”’s about, and that’s the thing about the whole thirteen thing.

RG: By the way, should people look for the album under B for Butler, T for Thirteen, or wherever stores stock albums by bands with numerals for names?
LB: I’ve got friends calling me from all over the world, saying, “We can’t find your record. Is it 13?  Is it Lester Butler and 13?”  My intentions were the best–to not be “Joe Blow and the Alligators” or whatever.  It was going to be “13,” and then we were going to sticker it: “New Music from Lester Butler!”  But it got out of my hands.

RG: What’s special about the number thirteen, by the way?
LB: Besides being my lucky number?

RG: Yeah.
LB: Well, do you know any bikers?

RG: Dozens.
LB: You’ll have to ask them what thirteen stands for.

RG: May we say Lester Butler sent us?
LB: Well, I’ll tell you.  It’s a code for, like, weed and mushrooms and–you know, it’s underground.

RG: We dig.
LB: I also have this belief that all the trouble and shit you go through can carry the seeds of strength and benefit.  My whole life’s been like that.  I know guys who are kazillionaires, but they’re not as hard as people I know who’ve fought for the last cheeseburger in the dumpster.  That’s the whole thirteen thing: Bad luck is good luck because it’s going to make you stronger if it doesn’t kill you.  The whole album’s about being through the shit, and it’s to heal my brothers who’ve gone through the same shit.  My brand-new stuff is the same.  I have one called “Post-Binge Depression Blues” that’s for everybody who gets up in the morning and says, “Aw, Jesus!  I can’t be alone in this!”

RG: You even have thirteen songs on the album.
LB: When you come see us, you’ll be lucky to hear maybe half the album.  Or maybe you’ll get the whole thing, depending on how I feel.  But it’s all about spirit and emotion, about what’s going on right now.  That’s the whole thirteen thing.  The worst shit I’ve been through–losing my best friend, “Black Hearted Woman,” all that shit–the worst shit I’ve been through is going into the best songs I’ve ever made.

RG: Do you ever worry that, now that your gutter days have passed, you might run out of material?
LB: Oh, don’t worry about that [laughs]!  I’ll fuck ‘em up [laughs]!  But, you know, once I was playing tennis with some rich cat I know, and all of a sudden I said to myself, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ!  You’re playing tennis?  You have tennis shorts on!  Go to the liquor store now, get fired, get penniless, and get real with yourself, then go write some real songs, man!  How are you going to write about playing tennis?”

RG: Did you go “get real with yourself”?
LB: As sad as it sounds, I did once intentionally fuck my life up.  I said, “What the hell?  You got money, you’re a yuppie, you got a nice car–what are you gonna say to people?  ‘Hi! My life’s perfect, and it’s all good’?  Now, I’m not a fan of Iggy Pop or Jim Morrison or any other sweat-drippin’ maniac.  I’m not akin to them.  But I spent every penny I had to straighten myself out without going to rehab.

RG: Rehab is a rich man’s prerogative?
LB: Oh, it’s pathetic.  I love my brothers in NA, but I’ve lost more friends coming out of rehab because of its spring effect.  Rehab crushes that spring down, and then they get out, and booiinngg!  It’s really sad.  I mean, I can laugh about it now, but…

RG: How did you pull through the last time?
LB: You wanna know the truth?  (My personal manager’s looking at me like “What are you doing?  You’re ruining your career!”)  I died legally.  I was lying on the table, cold blue, out–“Oh, he’s gone, we electroshocked him, we have adrenaline, he’s gone, he’s dead”–and I saw God.

RG: —–
LB: He appeared as an apparition to me, and he said, “Go back.  You’ve got work to do, man.  You’ve got healing to do.  You’re not ready to come here yet.”

RG: —–
LB: I don’t know.  It might’ve been delirium or whatever, but I have certain beliefs.  People look at me and say, “Yeah, sure you’ve got the ten-thousand-year-old spirit of a shaman in you [laughs].”

RG: People have believed weirder stuff.
LB: I mean, I feel it.  And the more tattoos I get, the more I feel this spirit.  My tattoos are like a spiritual thing to me.

RG: How many do you have?
LB: Right now I’m sleeved on both arms.

RG: “Sleeved”?
LB: Completely covered.  It’s like ritual mutilation.  “Hey!  Guess what I feel, my close friends?  Please don’t tell anyone, but I think I have the ten-thousand-year-old spirit of a shaman in me.”  I don’t know its name or anything, and I don’t mean to sound egotistical, but I know I have that essence.  I’ve got healing powers.

RG: Do elaborate.
LB: Before there were words, before there was anything, there was a drum, and there was a guy who, if the tribe needed food, would dance around and symbolically kill whatever the ills of the tribe were.  And everybody would dance in unison, and there’d be a cathartic release.

RG: People find this weird?
LB: Not my friends, but people who aren’t hip to that kind of thing just look at you and go, “Uh-huh.  And I caught you reading the Bible last night.  What’s that about?  We caught you with the Koran in your bedroom!”  I have this friend–he’s a preacher–and right now he’s on skid row.  I go down and try and give him some money and buy him food and shit, and I mean he was the most benevolent cat there ever was when I first met him.  And I’m not a Christian, but because he has faith in this, I’m down there reading chapters of Matthew to him, saying, “Tell me if you don’t have faith anymore.  That’s cool.  But if you still claim to, here we go.  You’re being persecuted by hypocrites? Here’s Matthew 11: ‘Blessed are they who are persecuted because….’”  I’m reading this shit to him, and some of my really cool death-rocker friends who have cool leather jackets and stuff–and I love them, too–they look at me like, “You’re a pussy.  You’re no longer cool.  This preacher guy is weird!  Don’t bring him around here anymore.”

RG: Nice guys.
LB: I tell my life to people, and they go, “Yeah, that’s gotta be made up!”  “Why’d you start playing harmonica, Lester?”  “Well, it was the only instrument I could steal out of the music shop.”  “Oh yeah, that’s a good line.  Which publicist made that up [laughs]?”

______________________

From Wikipedia: "[Lester] Butler died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine on May 9, 1998, in Los Angeles at the age of thirty-eight." 

Charlie Daniels: The Long-Haired Country Boy Comes Home (1997)

(As published in WORLD ... )

The time when shaggy-dog stories could translate into hit records has probably passed for good, but many people who remember the good ol' days agree that two of the best shaggy-dog hits ever--"Uneasy Rider" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"--belong to a genuine good ol' boy: Charlie Daniels.

And since many Christians are good ol' boys (and girls) themselves, they were more than happy to extend an open-arms welcome to Daniels when, in 1994, he released The Door (Sparrow), an album so full of gospel witness that the Gospel Music Association gave it a Dove Award for "Country Album of the Year."

He followed it in 1996 with Steel Witness (Sparrow), an album that recently received a Grammy nomination and that spawned the Christian-radio chart-topper "Somebody Was Prayin' for Me." Until recently, in fact, "Somebody Was Prayin' for Me" occupied a high-profile position in the Charlie Daniels Band's typical concert set, right between "The Orange Blossom Special" and "Long-Haired Country Boy."

Such a juxtaposition, however, has caused some of Daniels' fans to wonder whether, instead of a gospel message, he may not actually be sending a mixed one. "Long-Haired Country Boy," after all, although a signature Charlie Daniels tune from way back, falls considerably short of endorsing family values: "People say I'm no good and crazy as a loon / 'cause I get stoned in the mornin', get drunk in the afternoon."

"Well, I'm not proud of songs like that," the former long-haired country boy told WORLD, "and some of those songs I don't do any more. But with some I've simply changed the lyrics.

“We recorded 'Long-Haired Country Boy' back when I was a much younger man, and although it had some alcohol and marijuana mentions in it, it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing to me at the time. It was not taken all that seriously. But nowadays everything is taken very seriously, and I did quit doing the song. But I kept getting requests for it, so I modified the lyric to 'I get up in the morning, I get down in the afternoon,' and I'm fixin' to record it again."

In response to questions about what caused him to begin making gospel music after more than twenty albums and twenty years as a high-profile country-rocker, Daniels tells a low-profile story. "I've been a believer all my life. I was raised in a believing family. There was a time when I didn't know anybody who didn't believe in God. But for many years I did get away from walking the walk."

He describes his return as "a gradual coming back." "It was not a Damascus Road experience by any means. It was more like, 'Charlie, you know you're not doing the right thing here. Start cleaning up your act a little bit'--or a whole lot, actually."

He laughs. "You know, it's not as if one day I just all of a sudden got blinded by the light or something. I knew about the light all the time."

In a refreshing change from the "celebrity-Christian" norm, Daniels takes such "civilian-Christian" duties as considering the effect his music has on others--especially youth--seriously. "I think a lot of young people say that they give their life to Jesus but don't really understand what they're doing. I know I had the misconception that I had to be good enough, that if I committed a sin, my salvation was off ," he laughs. "Sometimes I feel that--especially with very young people, children--we need to explain that we all sin and that forgiveness is there for us, that we serve a forgiving, loving God, not one who's hiding behind a tree with a baseball bat ready to pop us."

He also takes such "civilian-Christian" duties as church attendance seriously (his "home church" is in Nashville) and finds the idea that the commotion caused by fame exempts the famous from fellowship to be "just a lame excuse." "A lot of times, on the road, the real reason that you don't want to go to church is that you stayed up till two and just don't feel like getting up," he chuckles. "There are all kinds of excuses you can come up with, but being too famous is not one of them.

“I'm not Michael Jackson. If I go somewhere and they recognize me, that's fine."

Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro (1997)

(As published in New Zealand's Real Groove ... )

Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro
(Astor Place)

Having never met anyone who owns a Laura Nyro album and having only owned one myself (a promo of 1984's Mother's Spiritual that I traded in after listening to it once), my familiarity with the recently croaked songstress comes courtesy of the hit versions of her best-known compositions: "And When I Die" by Blood, Sweat and Tears, "Eli's Comin'" by Three Dog Night, "Wedding Bell Blues," "Stoned Soul Picnic," and "Save the Country" by the Fifth Dimension, and "Stoney End" by whoever had a hit with that. So I'm always surprised to discover that some people, instead of regarding her as the female Jimmy Webb and letting it go at that, actually worship her. Writes Peter Gallway, this album's producer, in the liner notes: "Her concerts were religious experiences. Laura gowned, surrounded by roses, alone in purple light at the grand piano. Her style, her holiness, her reclusivity, her high standards"--what, she wouldn't date the boys that chew?--"became the stuff of legend"; Roseanne Cash: "Laura Nyro is a part of the template from which my own musical and Feminine [sic] consciousness was printed"; Beth Nielsen Chapman: "Laura Nyro's songs have always touched me deeply" (if it were Madonna talking, I might be jealous of Laura Nyro's songs); Jonatha Brooke: "I wasn't familiar with Laura Nyro's music--I'm not sure how I missed out." Hey! Who invited this heretic? Anyway, the good stuff is Phoebe Snow doing "Time and Love," the Roches doing "Wedding Bell Blues," Beth Nielsen Chapman doing "Stoney End," and Dana Bryant doing a Tricky-like "Woman's Blues." Everything else here is girls being girls, with all the amorphous, Tori Amos-like ooze that girls being girls implies. And Jane Siberry, who couldn't decide which one to do, does a medley of four. Talk about ominous implications for future tribute albums!

Gina G: Fresh! (1997)

(As published in Real Groove ... )

Gina G
Fresh!
(Eternal/Warner Bros.)

Discerning listeners may disagree over how many immaculately conceived disco-tech albums a music-weary world needs, but if they don't agree that the world needs the Clearasil-clean effervescence of Gina G's aptly titled Fresh! at least as much as the pock-marked grittiness of whatever sprouts up in the wake of Alanis Morissette, maybe they aren't so discerning after all. An inspired ripper-offer (of clothes as well as tunes--she wears nothing but chocolate on the front cover), G steals only from the best, i.e., Madonna. "Ti Amo" is to "La Isla Bonita" as "Every Time I Fall" is to "Live to Tell" as "Rhythm of My Life" is to "Where's the Party," and as long as the Real Thing persists in seeing trophy babies and Evita as acceptable substitutes for immaculately conceived disco-tech albums, more power to the Inspired Fake. As for G's weary-world-conquering "Ooh Aah ... Just a Little Bit" (when has a titular ellipsis ever spoken such volumes?) and its likely follow-up "Gimme Some Love" (when has a song beginning with "Gimme" ever not ruled?), their juicy, built-for-strobes synth riffs should delight liberteenyboppers of every significant demographic from now till August at least.

Orbit: Libido Shuffle (1997)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

It's a muggy June evening in Lafayette, LA, and the college kids packing Shanahan's--a rundown college bar known for its dollar pitchers--are aglow with more than cheap beer. Orbit, the loud 'n' proud A&M Records combo that's putting the "power" back in "power trio," is midway through an hour-long set of songs from their latest LP, Libido Speedway.

"Yeah!" shouts a well-oiled coed from the back of the crowd as a song-ending chord dissolves amid second-hand smoke.

"Yeah!" shouts Orbit's guitar-bashing frontman, Jeff Lowe Robbins, in return.

"Fuck yeah!" shouts the coed.

"Fuck yeah!" answers Robbins.

"Hell fuck yeah!" shouts the coed.

Nothing.

Then, "Sorry--'Hell fuck yeah!'" chuckles Robbins. "You'll have to excuse us," he explains. "We're from Boston, and we're just learning."

In some ways, the members of Orbit really are just learning. Despite several years of Beantown dues-paying, this tour is their first go-'round in the major leagues.

Their minor-league experience, however, is both considerable and impressive. Since 1994, Robbins, Wally Gagel (bass), and Paul Buckley (drums) have run Lunch Records, the label on which their EP La Mano and their first few singles appeared. Buckley did the hands-on work, leaving Robbins free to indulge his web-designing skills on behalf of not only Lunch but also a number of other clients, including the venerable Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Gagel, on the other hand, spent his pre-Orbit years becoming one of the most sought-after producer-engineer-recorder-mixer-programmer-writer-musicians in the music business.

As the producer and co-composer of Folk Implosion's "Communion" and "Natural One" and a knob-twiddler on recent recordings by Sebadoh, Juliana Hatfield, and Rancid, the Orbit bassist still finds his skills in great demand--so great, in fact, that he recently had the privilege of jetting out to L.A. at the behest of Don Was and mixing two songs for the new Rolling Stones album. ("Keith's work hours are from about ten at night until nine A.M.," Gagel said recently. "[But] I was on East Coast time, so ... I'd get there in the early afternoon and start to fade around six A.M.")

To Robbins, Buckley, and Gagel, however, such extracurricular activities are back-burner items. Their main objective is to launch Orbit, and anyone who doubts their commitment to that goal should log onto the trio's home page (www.lunch.com) and click on the "tour diary" link. Described by Robbins as the piece de resistance of the site, the diary lists the nearly two hundred shows that the band has played since its inception and includes the group's take on what went down at each.

"We decided to play the songs from the new album," writes Robbins of Orbit Gig 129 at T.T. the Bears in Cambridge, MA. "People kept yelling for stuff from the old album though. I told them to fuck off." Other high points include Robbins' description of the time he was almost "arrested for eating Subway in a Taco Bell" and Buckley's description of gig 141 in Dallas: "Dallas is just the opposite of Boston on St. Patrick's Day. Lame, lame lame. They wouldn't know a good time if it sat on their face and wiggled!"

Theoreticians might disagree over which is harder--the touring or the gig-by-gig writing about it--but few dispute that Orbit is as hardworking as they are good. Providing further confirmation of their strengths is the fact that they've just been tabbed to play Lollapalooza's second stage throughout the month of August.

Not all of their strengths, however, are live ones. Despite its apparently spontaneous combustibility, Libido Speedway is in many ways a careful studio creation. "Our album took a long time to make," Robbins recalls with a touch of regret. "About twice or three times as long as we were expecting it to, actually."

Robbins' regret is somewhat surprising considering the high quality of the finished product. In "Nocturnal Autodrive" and "Amp," for instance, Orbit impales garagey guitars on rabble-rousing hooks and shout-along choruses as if this album were their only shot at rock glory. In other words, they toy with rock's basic elements in such a way as to draw attention away from the elements themselves and toward the big, throbbing groove thing in the middle.

"We'd come from an indie-rock background, where you come in and do your album in a week," Robbins explains, "and we thought doing this album in a month-and-a-half would be great. We could do a really killer album in a month-and-a-half. Then we got in there, and, you know, we went through this producer named Ben Grosse [Filter, Flaming Lips, Jane's Addiction], who's a very meticulous guy, so we took a long time. I think it came out really well, but it was frustrating at times, going through the meat grinder. Paul and I had a lot of extra time and tried to find other things to do."

One of the other things they did was to record an unlisted instrumental bonus track and a Klaatu-like walk through the woods that ends when a child spookily says, "You can turn the CD off now." "His name is Alex," says Robbins. "He's our attorney's nephew. We stuck the DAT in front of him and got him to say a whole bunch of things." As for the outdoors stroll: "Paul got stoned, took the DAT recorder, and walked around through the frozen grass at one of the places we were recording. When we started sequencing the album, we thought, 'Let's put that on it!'"

Several weeks before their Shanahan's show, Orbit played the Orange County Fairgrounds in Riverside, California. Besides going on at the indecently early hour of seven-thirty P.M., the show was weird for other reasons. First, Orbit went on after a hypnotist, and so surprised were they that they failed to take advantage of the situation: Orbit could have, in other words, asked the mesmerist to convince the crowd that--well, what would Orbit request of an opening-act hypnotist?

"I don’t know," says Robbins. "But there are some bands out there who seem as if they must have hypnotized the crowd in order to get the reactions they get."

Laughing, he digresses. "Did you ever see those R-rated hypnotists, the ones who get people to strip and stuff like that? I don't understand how that works, but I think it's a combination of stage fright and whatever it takes to get them up there in the first place to simply be told, 'Sleep!'"

Suddenly, it hits him. "That's what I want to do some night--get some people onstage, tell them, 'Sleep!' and see what happens.

“But,” he says, “I wouldn't know what to do with them after that--except call 911 and ask for a hypnotist to come wake them up."

Heck, let ’em sleep, Jeff. Anyone who can fall asleep on Orbit’s libido speedway probably deserves to be run over.

Danny Gatton: In Concert 9/9/94 (1997)

(As published in Real Groove ... )

Danny Gatton
In Concert 9/9/94
(Big Mo)

Most musicians who get hyped as "best-kept secrets" deserve to remain under wraps. The late Danny Gatton, however, deserved more exposure. By the time he turned in this sixty-five-minute performance at the Birchmere club in Alexandria, VA, he'd already spent two or three decades as a D.C.-area guitar hero, enjoyed a short-lived major-label career as the "best unknown guitar player in the world," and returned to obscurity as one born to it. Judging from the barely audible 'tween-tracks applause, the crowd in front of which In Concert 9/9/94 was recorded couldn't have exceeded one hundred. Yet Gatton and his backup duo (the upright bassist John Previti and the drummer Timm Biery) really bear down and stretch out, treating an impressively diverse program of jazz (Sonny Rollins' "Sunnymoon for Two," Duke Ellington's "Caravan," Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy"), demijazz (Chuck Mangione's "Land of Make Believe"), rock-and-roll ("Apache," a "Surf Medley" of "Walk Don't Run" and "Wipeout"), folk-boogie ("Orange Blossom Medley") and originals ("88 Elmira," "Blues Newburg") with an improvisational intensity and lightness of touch not usually associated with journeymen. Enjoyable under most circumstances, and essential for those times when one's drinking buddies get misty over Jimi and Stevie Ray.

Orb: Orblivion; Orbit: Libido Speedway (1997)

(As published in New Zealand's Real Groove ... )

Orb
Orblivion
(Island)

Orbit
Libido Speedway
(A&M)

From an alphabetical perspective, only Roy Orbison stands between Orb and Orbit. From a musical perspective, however, other differences come into play. Orbit, for instance, has songs like "Nocturnal Autodrive" and "Amp," which pile garage guitar and rabble-rousing choruses atop cool bass riffs and hot Slade ones respectively. Orb, on the other hand, has "tracks" like "Ubiquity" and "Bedouin," which pile computer-generated samples atop computer-generated samples and go sprockety-wockety when they're not going chick-a-wocka or schprrroinnngg! Orbit has songs like "Bicycle Song" and "Carnival," which deal with bicycles and carnivals respectively. Orb, on the other hand, has tracks like "Delta MK II" and "PI," which deal with, you know, like, the void and stuff. Actually, one of Orblivion's tracks, "S.A.L.T.," deals with sex and the Book of Revelation, if I'm hearing the "lyrics" correctly. Another, "Toxygene," begins "Now, wait a minute!" then develops a disco gallop. And "Secrets" begins with a weather forecast before flaaanging off into sheer schwoosh! In other words, Tangerine Dream meets Metal Machine Music--or is it Einsturzende Neubauten? On stage, the three members of Orbit play guitar-bass-drums and sing to clubs full of beer-swigging fans. Orb, on the other hand, plays "raves," its two members generating clackety-schmackety in time to strobe lights that catch the dancers standing around doing nothing until the drugs kick in. Or, to put it another way, Orb diddles while Orbit burns. Ratings: Orbit (7), Orb (2), Orbison (10).

(More Orbit: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/orbit-libido-shuffle-1997.html)

COPS (1997)

(As published in WORLD during the year I was its television critic ... )

To appreciate better the importance of television's longest-running real-life drama, COPS (Fox, Saturday, 8:00 EST), imagine the following: It's 1991, and the show has chosen the officers of the Los Angeles Police Department as its subject. Late one night, a squad car becomes involved in a dangerous, high-speed chase. Several tense minutes later, the police, having brought the vehicle to a halt, experience difficulty in subduing the drug-crazed driver. Exasperated, they hammer him to the ground with billy clubs and finally bring him under control.


Other than the fact that the segment might merit the series another Emmy nomination, nothing in it would strike those familiar with either the show or police work as a big deal, least of all that the reckless driver's name would happen to be Rodney King.

That the Rodney King incident wasn't an episode of COPS instead of a home movie is a shame. Without so much as a voiceover, the show would've almost certainly presented King as a thug who even with his beating got off easy.

Every week COPS provides an officer's-eye-view of (mostly) big-city life in the United States. What emerges is a portrait of the police as unglamorous heroes doing a dangerous job for an ungrateful public. What also emerges is a portrait of that public as a tired, poor, huddled mass of wretched refuse yearning to break laws--and to lie about doing so to avoid going to jail.

No law is too big or too small. During a typical season, a viewer will see inner-city crack addicts arrested for possession, intoxicated Mardi Gras revelers arrested for public urination, cross-dressing prostitutes arrested for theft, middle-aged joyriders arrested for going the wrong way on one-way streets, and dozens of variations thereon. An occasional disaster rescue or domestic dispute will interrupt the flow of criminal activity, most of which has its roots in the drug trade.

The value of the series lies in its nearly unedited presentation of its subjects. "We don't editorialize about what [the cops] do or how they do it," explains John Langley, the show's executive producer and creator, in an interview at the COPS website. "We just show it, and hopefully [sic] the facts speak for themselves."

It is this policy of noninterference that makes the series as bracing now as it was when it debuted eight years ago. The viewer who comes to it after a diet of TV's slanted "documentary" fare may find the jerkiness of the hand-held cameras and the warts-and-all view of the criminal activity jarring at first. (Blurred faces and muted expletives are the only censorship.) But it’s with such techniques that COPS is able to convey one of its primary messages: Reality is not politically correct. That a disproportionate number of the drug arrests occur in minority neighborhoods, for instance--and that many of the officers are themselves black or Hispanic--does not seem to trouble the show's producers. Neither does the fact that "police brutality," shown in its proper context, is often revealed to be nothing more than a professional response to a provocative situation.

Like Langley, who says that producing the series has given him "a profound respect for police offers ... and everyone else involved in public service," those who watch the show will find their appreciation for law enforcement--and for the fragility of the civilization that spurns it--reinforced.

G. Love & Special Sauce: Play That Funky Music, White Boy (1997)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Lots of young musicians claim to be staying true to their roots and branching out in new directions at the same time, but few actually put their music where their mouths are.

The twenty-five-year-old Philadelphian known as G. Love, however, and his rhythm section of Jimmy Jazz Prescott and Jeff Clemens--a.k.a. Special Sauce--are an exception. Genuinely rooted in a love of '60s singer-songwriters and '80s old-school rappers, they've developed a sound over the course of their three-album career that's as deep as it is wide.

Their new album, Yeah, It's That Easy (Okeh/Epic), is their deepest and widest to date. It's deep is in that several of its songs broach subject matter that, by G. Love standards, is uncommonly serious. It's wide in that outsiders such as the All Fellas Band, the Philly Cartel, and the King's Court--combos with whom G. Love occasionally jams and performs when Special Sauce is on the back burner--make substantial contributions.

"The Philly Cartel is studio musicians from Philly," Love explains, "and the King's Court is a group of older guys from Boston that we've done some shows with. My drummer used to play with them in a New Orleans R&B group. We pass the mic around and sing old blues songs, and we sing my songs too."

Philly, New Orleans, R&B, old blues--these elements and more percolate beneath the surface of G. Love's music and often bubble over. On 1995's Coast to Coast Motel, for instance, Love's gutbucket guitar picking and Clemens' slapping drums combine to transform "Everybody" into a Mississippi Delta front-porch blues-a-thon, while the Rebirth Brass Band transforms "Bye Bye Baby" into a Mardi Gras party march headed straight down Bourbon Street.

As for the G-man's considerable rapping skills, his Jonathan Richman-as-Beastie Boy impersonation makes him one of hip-hop's few great white hopes.

Ironically, the Philly influence--if by "Philly" one means "Philly soul"--was the last of the ingredients in this native Philadelphian's sound to emerge. Barely discernible on his first two albums, it comes to the fore on Yeah, It's That Easy, especially in the background vocals. "Take You There" and "Lay Down the Law," for instance, pay tribute to the Thom Bell-era Spinners. The "ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh"s in "Making Amends," on the other hand, do the same re: the Ohio Players circa "Love Rollercoaster," while the vocal breaks in "Stepping Stones" tip a hat to the Beatles.

"I arranged the background vocals on that one and on everything else except what the All Fellas sing," says Love. "They sing on 'I-76,' 'Lay Down the Law,' and '200 Years,' and Katman [the All Fellas bassist] arranges those, or we all arrange them together.

“The way we figured out the background vocals on this album was to stand around one mic and do it. It's so cool to be able to say, 'There should be a "whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo here," or "O.K., you guys repeat this hear."' I really love to sing, and I especially love to harmonize. It's an incredible feeling, really. That was one of the greatest parts of making this record."

According to Love, though, the vocals are just one of the innovations he was intent on including. The new-and-improved melodies are another.

"I've been wanting to incorporate more melodies into my music. I feel that a lot of my music has been more rhythmic and not very melodic. So with this new record I wanted to have not only more background vocals but more melodies too."

Also making their debut on the new album are G. Love's first topical and protest songs. Until now, numbers like "Baby's Got Sauce," "Cold Beverage," "Fatman" (from '94's G. Love and Special Sauce), "Sweet Sugar Mama," "Soda Pop," and "Small Fish" (from Motel) have made him the undisputed champion of food and beverage imagery. For that matter, Yeah, It's That Easy includes "Recipe," and the disc's CD-ROM portion features "Cookin' with G.," an up-close-and-personal mini-movie of G. Love shopping for the ingredients of, and eventually preparing, one of his favorite dishes.

The album's main course, however, consists of meatier fare. "Lay Down the Law," for instance, takes its details from an ongoing real-life tragedy. "That one,” says Love, “is about a roommate and childhood friend of mine who had a heroin addiction and got himself into a lot of trouble through that."

Then there's "Slipped Away (The Ballad of Lauretha Vaird)," a song based on the real-life story of a Philadelphia policewoman killed in the line of duty. Poignant and detailed, it's a "Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" for the '90s. "That' the only song I've ever researched," Love admits. "I went to the library and got all the articles. It was a really big story in Philadelphia, and it struck me as being such a tragic tale.

“But when we tried to capture the emotion in the studio, it was hard. The producer and the drummer were really struggling to find a good beat. Finally, after doing it a couple of times the way the producer wanted, with a click track or whatever, I said, 'Let's just play it!' So we did, and everybody was right in the zone. It really came together, and it's all live.

"Making this record,” he says, “I definitely wanted to choose songs of mine that were more than just party grooves. I wanted songs that were really saying something."

Bop bop shoo be doo wah.

Buckwheat Zydeco: Trouble (1997)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Buckwheat Zydeco
Trouble
(Mesa)

On first listen, this long-awaited follow-up to 1993's celebrity-studded Five Card Stud seems like an abandonment of the good fight that Stanley Dural, Jr., has been fighting for going on ten years now: the fight to transform zydeco from a commercially negligible roots-music offshoot into a genre every bit as capable of getting the world's attention as reggae and blues if not rock, pop, and country. Without Five Card Stud's big-name cameos (Willie Nelson, Mavis Staples, David Hidalgo), big-name producer (Steve Berlin), or royal-flush covers ("Hey Baby," "This Train"), how could Trouble seem like anything but a concession?

But subsequent listens prove that what purists always say about too many cooks is sometimes right. Big names or no big names, Trouble-funk doesn't come any juicier than the hard-to-stop "Hard to Stop" or the hard-chargin' "Hard Chargin'." Throw in the nearly-as-juicy "Heard You Twice the First Time" (a title worthy of mid-'60's Dylan, no?) and the ready-made singalong "Do You Remember the Time" (a que-sera-sera song that unearths the long-buried connection between zydeco and Doris Day), and you have four good reasons for listening.

About the fifth, an accordion-driven version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads," Dural's fans will probably argue. Gutsy, yes, but maybe self-defeating, too. The song is, after all, closely associated with guitar players. Besides, Dural sounds positively happy as he proclaims, "I really believe I'm sinking down," or about twice as happy as a singer singing about eternally damning decisions should. Elsewhere, however, Dural's cheer fits right in with the music's, a cheer embodied by one of the brightest and punchiest accordion-rubboard-trumpet-sax concoctions of the year so far.

Pat Boone, B.J. Thomas: Proving Their Mettle (1997)

(As published in WORLD ... )


The uproar caused by Pat Boone's promotion of his In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy (Hip-O) album should cause Christians to ask themselves a sobering question: Why should the world take seriously our outrage over matters like abortion and euthanasia when we, by crying wolf over nothing more than Pat Boone's sudden fondness for dog collars and Led Zeppelin, prove ourselves incapable of distinguishing between the important and the trivial?

At worst, Boone's appearance on the American Music Awards last January in a heavy-metal get-up was a miscalculation. He thought people would find the idea of him in leather and tattoos funny, and he was wrong. But miscalculating and sinning are two different things, and mature believers do not confuse them as easily as the supporters of the Trinity Broadcasting Network did when, in response to the "metallized" Boone, they demanded and got his TV program handed to them on a platter.

Lost in the brouhaha is the album at the heart of it. Ludicrous on its surface, In a Metal Mood actually delivers a musical thrill or two. The big-band arrangements come courtesy of some of the genre's best arrangers and transform such notoriously noisy numbers as Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Guns N' Roses "Paradise City" into crisply swinging jump tunes. What keeps more of the songs from making the transformation is the singing. Never in a league with Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra, Boone at sixty-two neither croons nor mugs with the elan necessary to wrest art from novelty.

The same, however, cannot be said for B.J. Thomas, who even in middle age sings with as much youthful pop finesse as he did when he sang "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" to the top of the charts over twenty-five years ago. I Believe (Warner Resound), the second installment in his carefully planned return to gospel music, consists mostly of gospel standards ("Love Lifted Me," "Sweet Hour of Prayer"), with new versions of "Happy Man" and "You Gave Me Love"--Christian-radio hits from his first gospel period--included for good measure.

The reason his first gospel period came to an end should sound familiar to Pat Boone: Scandalized by Thomas's continuing to perform his secular hits, the Christian-music audience of the early '80s eventually hounded him from the genre.

"It was a very hurtful time for my wife Gloria and me," Thomas told WORLD, "and I must admit that I did have my heart broken. I experienced a lot of bitterness, and I regret to say that I didn't really handle it very well. It shook me to the core."

I Believe and its predecessor, 1995's Precious Memories, are Thomas's way of re-extending the right hand of fellowship to this same audience.

"I almost feel that this is a divine appointment that I'm keeping, with this music and with my Heavenly Father. I think [the controversy] was just a way for him to help me see what real love is, to really find my faith and not have it be a superficial thing that depended on my being successful, liked or appreciated."

Little Richard: Live at the Heymann (1997)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )

Not to imply that the crowd who packed the Heymann Center to see Little Richard last week was old or anything, but when you overhear pre-show chitchat like “I’ve been getting AARP stuff in the mail since I was fifty,” you know you’re not in a mosh pit.

But no matter. The crowd that partially filled the Cajundome three years ago to see the Beach Boys wasn’t exactly chockfull of spring chickens either, yet a good time was had by all--and their grandchildren.

There weren’t many grandchildren at the Little Richard show. Despite his uncanny self-promotional skills, the sixty-four-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Famer born Richard Penniman hasn’t bridged the generation gap the way the sixty-five-year-old Johnny Cash has.

Nevertheless, when he sets up behind a piano and a mic, he can still rock the decades away. Actually, he spent most of his Heymann show out from behind the piano. For every minute he spent pounding the ivories and “Whoo!”-ing his way through his greatest hits, he spent three stalking the stage, working the crowd with the timing of a comedian and the fervor of an evangelist.

Indeed, at times you could hardly tell whether his agenda was rock-and-roll, comedy, or evangelism, so abruptly did he shift gears.

On the rock-and-roll front, he and his nine-piece band banged out brief, hard-hitting versions of everything from “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Tutti Frutti,” and “Lucille” to “I’ll Be Missing You (Every Breath You Take),” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “Jambalaya.”

On the comedy front, he punctuated his steady stream of one-liners (“I screamed like a white lady!”) and non sequiturs (“Let’s have a big round of applause for my son Danny!” “I’m getting my own TV show in January!”) with his trademark “Shut up!” thirty-two times.

As for the evangelism--well, first some background.

Like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard made headlines early in his career by turning his back on success and attending Bible college. But it wasn’t until a 1979 appearance on the Merv Griffin Show that he “came out” as a Christian. Distributing Bibles to Griffin’s audience, he credited the Lord with delivering him from drugs and homosexuality.

Seven years later, he released a gospel album, Lifetime Friend, on Warner Bros.

Little Richard didn’t hand out Bibles at the Heymann. Instead, his aisle-roaming assistants distributed a book called Finding Peace Within--A Book for People in Need, by E.G. White, L. Munilla, and C.E. Wheeling. Its 211 pages quote from the Bible, maintain that the end is near, and insist that the Sabbath should not be observed on Sunday. A blurb on the back says it's available in "more than one hundred languages."

Along with the book came a black-and-white photo of Little Richard, across which was written “God loves you and cares for you. Please don’t forget that. --Little Richard.”

He even preached an impromptu sermon at one point, challenging the male AARP members of the audience to give up their pornographic magazines and videos and to start loving their wives again. “I know she don’t look the way she used to,” he said, “but neither do you!” Amens followed. All this while the band played “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” softly in the background.

What had started out as a rock-and-roll show, in other words, ended up as a Promise Keepers rally.

Let no one say Little Richard doesn’t understand the times.

The Skeletons: Nothing to Lose (1997)

(As published in New Zealand's Real Groove ... )

The Skeletons
Nothing to Lose
(Hightone)

One might expect a four-piece named the Skeletons to play bare-bones rock, but with this much spirit and humor? On most of these fourteen songs--twelve of which they wrote--the Skeletons begin with a '60's AM-rock riff, establish momentum by singing and playing like the inspired bar band they are (roll over J. Geils and tell Huey Lewis the News), and transform material that looks formulaic on paper into the stuff of really cool jukeboxes. Their nostalgia infatuation is palpable: The two-chord staccato strum of Lou Reed's "Heroin" runs through "Pay to Play," the dirty water of a thousand garage-rock rants runs through "Downhearted" and "I Ain't Lyin'," the theme from an imaginary western runs through the instrumental "Tubbs' Theme," and a chilly Bob Dylan organ (courtesy of the Skeleton key-boardist Joe Terry) runs through practically everything. Their tip-of-the-Stetson to country swing, "Country Boys Don't Cry," is no less spot on, and their covers--"On Your Way Down the Drain" (which Danny Kortchmar wrote for the Kingbees in '66) and "Teardrop City" (which Boyce and Hart wrote for the Monkees in '69)--are as worthy of becoming frat-rock shout-alongs as their untitled, roller-rinky-dinky forteenth track is of becoming the most-danced-to polka at Bill Black's high school reunion. And, to top it off, clever lyrics abound. Anyone hoping to make "bone(r)-pulling" jokes at this group's expense will just have to wait.

Bob Dylan: Time Out of Mind (1997)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Bob Dylan
Time Out of Mind
(Columbia)

When it comes to generating interest in your fortieth album, there's nothing like nearly dying of a mysterious heart infection then recovering just in time to perform for the Pope. Especially when you're a rock icon who, despite having changed the face of popular culture etc. now finds himself eclipsed in the hearts of contemporary record buyers by your Wallflower son. At least Julian and Ziggy waited till their dads were dead! Seriously, despite the return of Daniel Lanois to Dylan's production helm, diehard Dylanites have been debating on the Web and in fanzines for months now whether their Main Man should risk tarnishing his legend with a half-there "comeback" album when he could sail comfortably into rock 'n' roll Valhalla on a sea of boxed sets instead.

They needn't have worried. Far from exposing Dylan as a punch-drunk shadow of his former self, Time Out of Mind adds one more layer of authoritative folk-prophet mystique to his fascinatingly inscrutable public persona. In a sense, it's Oh Mercy, Pt. II, what with Lanois swathing Dylan's every craggy pronouncement in echoey guitars (courtesy of Duke Robillard) and spooky Farfisa organs (courtesy of Augie Meyers). In fact, the lyrics of "Standing in the Doorway" echo the lyrics of Oh Mercy's "Ring Them Bells" as surely as the melodies of "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" and "Not Dark Yet" echo the melody of Oh Mercy's "Shooting Star."

Repeated listenings, however, reveal deeper connections. Familiar Dylan archetypes like "the road," "heaven's door," and "the gate" recur throughout, as does his love-hate relationship with love and hate. Musical archetypes surface too--on "Dirt Road Blues" he slips into a "Maggie's Farm"-like shuffle so naturally you'd swear the times they haven't been a-changin' after all. As for the disc-ending "Highlands," it's his longest recording ever (sixteen minutes) and makes "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" ("Highlands," "Lowlands," get it?) seem brief by comparison. Part sermon, part soliloquy, part shaggy-dog story, it's his "Talking Career-Summary Blues" and essential--if only to hear him admit to liking hard-boiled eggs, Neil Young, and Erica Jong.

Bob Carlisle: Butterfly Kisses (1997)

(As published in WORLD ... )

There are two kinds of people: those who think the late Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" makes a profound statement about fatherhood and cry every time they hear it and those who think the song makes Mormon family-values PSA's seem deep by comparison.

That the former outnumber the latter should surprise no one. Our overwhelming preference for emotion over thought is well documented. And now, with the runaway success of Bob Carlisle's song "Butterfly Kisses," Christians have their own anthem to fluttery fatherhood.

"Butterfly Kisses" takes "Cat's in the Cradle" and turns it upside down. In "Cats," a father ignores his son at every crucial stage, receiving from him the same neglect in the end. In "Butterfly," a father lavishes hugs and kisses on his daughter at every crucial stage, receiving from her the promise of abundant hugs and kisses to come though her marriage doth them part.

Chapin's fatal flaw in "Cats" is that he telegraphs his irony, and irony so baldly telegraphed renders whatever moral the song may contain obvious from the beginning. Carlisle's fatal flaw in "Butterfly" is that he telegraphs his complete lack of irony, and a narrative with no irony at all is predictable.

The problem with an obvious or predictable moral is that it’s hard to take seriously. Which isn't to say that millions of people won't shell out for one anyway: If TV ratings, box-office receipts, and bestseller lists are any indication, wasting money on the obvious and predictable is our national pastime. Even such an exception as the success of the high-cultural Mount Rushmore known as the Three Tenors is belied by the fact that it took all three of them at full volume to overcome our deafness to music that requires patience, intelligence, curiosity, and taste.

The Butterfly Kisses album (Diadem) originally appeared in 1996 as Shades of Grace, and under that name it did what most contemporary-Christian albums do in the mainstream market: nothing. Its transformation into a best-seller came about as the result of its distributor's astutely getting copies into the hands of DJ's just in time for the faux holiday Mother's-Day-Graduation-Day-Father's-Day-Wedding-Season season.

One wonders, though, if sales of the album would be as strong if people didn't have to buy it to get the title song (as of this writing, the "Butterfly Kisses" song is unavailable as a single). Carlisle has a pleasant but indistinct voice--a blend of the Michaels Bolton and McDonald--and material to match. But with the exception of "It Is Well with My Soul," everything else on the album merely recycles overfamiliar pop-Christian bromides to slick but run-of-the-mill instrumentation.

One also wonders if Christians who want to write songs about parent-child relationships from a biblical perspective will ever consult the Bible itself. Much of the book of Proverbs, for instance, consists of a father's advice to his son and is surprisingly unsentimental.

Admittedly, it's hard to imagine the top-forty confection that could turn an exhortation to love wisdom into a million-selling tear-jerker, but that probably says more about the value of top-40 radio and jerked tears than it does the value of Proverbs.

Blue Oyster Cult: Club Ninja Reissue (1997)

(As published in New Zealand's Real Groove ... )

Blue Oyster Cult
Club Ninja
(Koch)

Why Koch--a Port Washington, NY, label that deals mainly in reissuing old C&W--has chosen this 1986 Blue Oyster Cult album to establish their rock-and-roll credentials is anyone's guess, but one thing's for sure: They couldn't have picked a better album to demonstrate the collective shortsightedness of rock critics, MTV, and radio. In '86, critics preferred college rock, MTV preferred heavy metal, and radio preferred I can't remember what. But no one preferred BOC's sci-fi-laced metal-lite. Too bad, too, because Club Ninja is almost as much self-deprecatingly dumb, stadium-rock fun as Agents of Fortune and Spectres. In "Dancin' in the Ruins" it even had a track as worthy of FM immortality as "(Don't Fear) the Reaper," "Godzilla," and "Burnin' for You." Jim Carroll wrote half-decent lyrics for Buck Dharma's "Perfect Water," Richard Meltzer did the same for "Spy in the House of Night," Sandy Pearlman produced, and the title of "Make Rock Not War" explained what went wrong with the Woodstock Generation. Not that Club Ninja holds a candle to Licensed to Ill or Graceland, two 1986 albums about which critics, MTV, and radio were right. But it sure sounds fresh compared to Husker Du's Candy Apple Grey and REM's Lifes Rich Pageant.

Baaba Maal: Information Gladly Given, but Safety Requires Avoiding Unnecessary Conversation (1997)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Nothing gets an interview off to a better start than a friendly introduction.

A different tradition, however, seems to prevail in the West African Republic of Senegal, the home of the world-music superstar and Mango Records recording artist Baaba Maal, who spent a few days last month conducting phone interviews to publicize his forthcoming nineteen-city tour of the U.S. "Before you start the interview," warned an ominously deep-voiced someone named Mr. Raamas, "I would just say that there is a very strict, ten-minute cut-off. Keep an eye on the time, or you will experience an abrupt end to the interview."

Great. So much for the question about whether "Baaba Maal" means "evil sheep noises" in Latin.

Anyway, whether such stringency derives from a clause in Maal's contract, a requirement of his Senegalese-Islamic beliefs, or the simple fear of incurring a trans-Atlantic phone bill will probably remain a mystery. Why, the very pronunciation of "Senegalese-Islamic" takes up fifteen seconds of valuable interview time! So it's not as if any clock-watching journalist will ever ask.

But there's no question about why Maal was on the phone in the first place: His upcoming stateside tour may turn out to be the world-music event of the year.

"Some of the songs [from my new album] I'm going to play on the tour," Maal said at the two-minute mark. "It's going to be for me a way to experiment, to see how people are going to feel about them."

The tour--which, like the new album, is as yet unnamed-- will hit New Orleans' House of Blues on Wednesday, March 5. If Maal's last album, 1994's well-received Firin' in Fouta, is any indication of what the HOB crowd may expect, the evening will consist of songs whose titles leave the unilingual in the fog ("Sidiki," "Nilou," "Ba") and whose proper execution will require--and receive--the enthusiastic performance of a large ensemble adept at playing noisemakers both foreign (kora, hoddu, talking drums) and domestic (guitar, bass, keyboards, drums).

It is, in fact, the high quality of Maal's African-European musical blend and the snakecharming tenor singing he does on top of it that has propelled him to the head of a class that already includes star pupils like Salif Keita and Maal's fellow countryman, Youssou N'Dour. It's a blend he’s been preparing for over a decade. By the time he and his group Daande Lenol released their first "official" album, 1985's Wango, they had already woodshedded over the course of seven "unofficial" albums.

With the worldwide release of Djam Leelii, an acoustic album recorded with the griot Mansour Seck and the oldest of Maal’s four domestically available albums, Maal's reputation took off in earnest. Both the toney British music magazine Q and the rootsy folk magazine Folk Roots voted it one of the best albums of 1989.

Baayo (1991) and Lam Toro (1992) followed, the former another acoustic album and the latter Maal's first overt attempt at his transcontinental blend. By the time he released Firin' in Fouta, the world was as primed for it as he and his band were.

Recorded partially in Dakar, Africa, and partially at Peter Gabriel's Real World studio in Wiltshire, England, Firin' in Fouta turned what had been latent possibilities into palpable realities. In "Sidiki" Maal wove authentic Senegalese chanting into a Eurobeat-inflected rhythm track. In "African Woman" he sang exuberantly of the "beauty, wisdom, and importance of the African woman" over horn and rhythm charts straight out of Havana. In "Swing Yela" he incorporated the rapping of Positive Black Soul, and in both "Njilou" and "Tiedo," he used that most European of musical effects--the string section.

And according to Maal, his new album, which he hopes to finish in May, will sound like the logical next step.


"It's in the same direction. I can call it the succession of Firin' in Fouta because it's still a kind of mix between African traditional music--the sound and ambiances from Africa--mixed with my experiences in the Western countries and their way of playing music. It's also a meeting between me and some people who are very involved with Western music, people like Brian Eno, who is the producer of the album, and Simon Emmerson, who worked on Firin' in Fouta, but I'm going ahead in these experimentations with African music, also. I think it's going to be great."

Coming from lots of other performers, that last sentence would be bragging, but coming from Maal, it’s probably just the truth. Either way, it only took him two seconds to say it, leaving him just enough time to expound on the somewhat unfortunate differences between experiencing live music in his culture and experiencing live music in ours.

"The way people come to see a concert is not the same. I think in America people come to try to understand where this [music] comes from, to see how it's built, to discover something. But here people know everything that you do and can play it too. So a concert, for example, is not just a musician who plays, but everyone who plays with you--it's the whole people, the fans, the public itself who makes the concert, who makes the ambiance.

"But I think the most important difference is that, in Africa, even if the music is getting more commercial now, it was, at the beginning, something that grew up with the society and teaches it something. It's not just something you make to make money. You have a role to play. I think in America the music is completely different.

“People think about how much money it's going to get them before they think about what it's going to do for the people."

Vigilantes of Love: Notes from the Cliffs (1997)

(As published in WORLD ... )

Because the very nature of their chosen genre inhibits elaborate intellectual maneuvering, even a lot of learning can be a dangerous thing where rock-and-rollers are concerned.

But Bill Mallonee, the leader of the Athens, GA-based Vigilantes of Love, is--and has been for some time now--an exception. Unabashedly well read, he typically squeezes more literary, biblical, and historical allusions into one album than most of his peers squeeze into an entire career.

"Most of the people who listen to us are pretty bookish," he told WORLD, "but they're not academic types so much as Romantics--Christian Romantics, if there is such a thing. They've all read a lot of C.S. Lewis, Frederick Buechner, and Flannery O'Connor. Right now I'm reading Ellen Foster, a book by Kaye Gibbons. She's a Southern novelist. And I just finished Malcolm Muggeridge's Jesus, the Man Who Lived, which is a great book."

He has also just finished the latest Vigilantes album, Slow Dark Train, the songs of which offer such endnote-worthy moments as "Salome's overweight. / She broke Jacob's ladder" ("Locust Years"), "We all need somebody to lie to us, I suppose. / That's why everybody needs a Tokyo Rose" ("Tokyo Rose"), and "How is it I am found in my Judas skin spinning down" ("Judas Skin).

And the lyrics of the matrimony-affirming "Love Cocoon" read like nothing so much as Southern-Gothic John Donne: "Honey, let's get together and build a tabernacle of holy flesh and holy mirth. / Let's take what's coming, enjoy every inch...." Set to the loosest front-porch folk-rock in the group's six-album oeuvre, the song runs a high-art impulse through a low-art sieve and comes up with finer results than those usually dreamt of in the mainstream-music philosophy.

That "flesh" has long been one of Mallonee's favorite images is confirmed by the presence of the songs "Blister Soul" and "Skin" on the Vigilantes' other recent release, V.O.L., a sixteen-track, career-spanning compilation.

"I don't know," Mallonee laughs when asked about his epidermal fixation. "I guess we all have to learn to either live with [our flesh] or hate it. I seem to have a lot of tunes with medical terminology running around in them."

One such song is "Double Cure," one of four new ones recorded especially for V.O.L. Not only do the lyrics contain his most explicit declaration of faith in Christ to date ("I wanna show you my allegiance, Lord. / Yes, I wanna be a son of yours"), but Mallonee's lead guitar underpins his crying-in-the-wilderness vocal with the melody of "All Hail the Power of Jesus' Name."

Still, despite such accomplishments, the head Vigilante still hesitates to describe what he does as "art." "It's just rock-and-roll and pop culture," he demurs. "I take what I do very seriously, but 'recording artist'? I don't know. I didn't start doing this until I was thirty years old.

"I've just now gotten to where the 'singer-songwriter' hat feels comfortable."

Arthur Dodge & Horsefeathers (1997)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Arthur Dodge & Horsefeathers
Arthur Dodge & Horsefeathers
(Barber's Itch)

Nothing fancy here, just a skillful reshuffling of the rock 'n' roll deck by the Lawrence, KS, singer-songwriter Arthur Dodge. Sometimes the songs are sharp enough to make his singing and band seem hotter than they are, and sometimes his singing and band are hot enough to make the songs seem sharper than they are. Either way, the electric numbers (especially "Into the Blue") feature serious rock 'n' roll chops, and his unplugged ones (especially the Stephanie Turner duet "Chuck and Lila") show why Dodge just won the "Best Folk Act" trophy at Kansas City's first annual Klammy Awards show.

As a third-generation-heartland-garage-country-rocker, Dodge's occasionally trips over his roots. Often, though, he really makes something of them. In "Mad Dog" he raps about his favorite subterranean homesick booze over a mean "She's About A-Mover" shuffle, and in "She's So Kind" he starts off with a "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" riff and goes somewhere with a vengeance. You've heard of gilding the lily? Dodge barbs the wire.

Taj Mahal: Señor Blues (1997)

(As published in Real Groove ... )

Taj Mahal
Señor Blues
(Private)

It's weird to realize that a guy who's spent the last thirty years as a living encyclopedia of black musical styles and who goes by the name of a 350-year-old mausoleum in India actually did his growing up in that hotbed of funky ethnicity, Springfield, Massachusetts (pop. 164,000). It's also weird to discover that after thirty-five albums he still brings a sense of discovery to the songs he covers. But the thirty-sixth time's the charm: Señor Blues is the punchiest jazz-blues-gospel-soul album since critics mistook Ted Hawkins' The Next Hundred Years for the real deal several years ago. Jazz, blues, and gospel are inevitable from a living encyclopedia; Mahal was put on this earth, after all, to get first-rate results from second-hand material. But when it comes to soul--well, who'd expect a rendition of "Think" that rivals James Brown's, of "At Last (I Found a Love)" that rivals Marvin Gaye's, or of "Mr. Pitiful" that rivals Otis Redding's? By linking them with jazz (the sinuous Horace Silver-penned title track), blues (Freddy Simon's "I Miss You, Baby," Delbert McClinton's "Real Bad Day"), and gospel (Jon Cleary's pew-stompin' "Oh Lord, Things Are Gettin' Crazy Up Here"), he gives the soul cuts a context rather than a (mere) history. And by singing Hank Williams' "Mind Your Own Business" like Louis Prima and "I Miss You, Baby" like Ray Charles, Mahal proves he's the sizzlingest one-man musical melting pot currently recording for a Windham Hill subsidiary.