Henry Gray: Still Howlin'

(As published in the August 4, 1999, issue of the Times of Acadiana...)

A perusal of any ticket-selling website shows that there’s no shortage of musical living legends on the road these days.  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are playing together for the first time in more than a decade, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon for the first time ever.  The problem is that anyone who wants good seats at both shows will spend a total of $190.50—$381.00 if he brings the wife, $827.25 if he adds the two-point-five kids.

The good news for people with both a mortgage and a taste for legendary concerts is that the Summer Cultural Arts Series by Henry Gray at the Lafayette Middle School auditorium this Sunday afternoon costs absolutely nothing.  Backed by Andy Cornett (bass), Brian Bruce (harmonica), and Earl Christopher (drums)—a.k.a. the Cats—the 74-year-old Baton Rouge pianist and veteran of the Howlin’ Wolf group will roll out an hour-long set of the music that’s made him one of the world’s most in-demand blues musicians.

Henry Gray was born on January 19, 1925, in Kenner and grew up in the town of Alsen.  By the age of eight, he’d taught himself piano, and by 16 he’d begun playing with a band in a local club.  Although he joined the Army two years later and eventually saw combat in the Philippines during the last years of World War II, he continued to hone his musical skills in USO shows by playing rock-and-roll and rhythm-and-blues.  “The same thing I play now,” he recalls.  “They love it today, and they loved it then.”

Upon his discharge, Gray moved north to Chicago and fell in with a burgeoning electric-blues scene that would transform rock-and-roll 20 years later when approximated by the Rolling Stones.  By the time he joined the Howlin’ Wolf band in 1956, he’d spent a decade making a name for himself both as a session musician (having recorded with Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Reed, Junior Wells, and Willie Dixon) and as a live performer (with Bo Diddley and Morris Pejoe).  When he left Howlin’ Wolf in 1968, he’d etched his name in blues history.  Since then he has maintained that place with a performance schedule that would exhaust many a younger man.

It was at a club performance  in Baton Rouge during the early 1970s that Gray first met Andy Cornett, the bassist and harmonica player who would eventually become his manager.  “There were people like Tabby Thomas, Guitar Kelly, Silas Hogan, and Moses ‘Whispering’ Smith,” says Cornett, 49, who now resides in Lafayette.  “Henry was playing piano, and he was amazing.  Between sets we were both meandering in the crowd, and I kept thinking, ‘I ought to go up to him and tell him I really like his stuff.’”

Suddenly, Cornett bumped into someone, turned around, and found himself face-to-face with the great man himself.  After a brief exchange—in which Cornett admitted that he played harmonica and guitar “a little bit”—Gray offered a hearty “Keep it up, man, keep it up” and shuffled off.

A year later, the two met again.  “They had him playing at LSU in the Student Union building for Black History Month,” says Cornett, “and he was ripping it, man!  He took a break, and I went up to him.  I said, ‘How are you doing, Mr. Gray?  You remember me?’  He said, ‘Yeah, I remember you.  You playin’ harmonica still?’  I went, ‘Damn!  That was pretty amazing to me.”  Cornett, harmonica in hand, asked to sit in, and Gray said O.K.  “We locked in,” says Cornett, “and we really ain’t looked back since.”

The Gray-Cornett combination has proved mutually rewarding.  Cornett has had the pleasure of performing with his hero, and Gray has benefitted from Cornett’s organizational skills.  Cornett not only set up a steady backing band for Gray, who dislikes performing solo, but also has kept Gray in the public eye by scheduling tours and recording sessions like the one in 1988 that resulted in the Blind Pig album Lucky Man.

Lucky Man elevated Gray’s public profile, but those closest to him think that it fell short of doing Gray justice.  “I don’t think it was a well-produced record,” says the veteran British slide guitarist Martin Simpson, who has performed with Gray off and on for the last 10 years.  “I don’t think it represented what Henry really is.”  Brian Bruce remembers that he and Cornett had sent Blind Pig a tape of Gray with the Cats but that the label’s producers thought that they could get a better record out of him themselves.  “They did their take on Henry,” says Bruce, “but it wasn’t Henry in his element.”

Gray’s element, according to practically everyone who has seen him perform, is the stage.  To this end, Cornett organized a Henry Gray show last March at the Grant Street Dancehall that not only brought Gray together with Martin Simpson again but that also brought Simpson together with his Acadiana slide-guitar counterpart Sonny Landreth.  One result was Live: The Blues Won’t Let Me Take My Rest, a 15-song, 73-minute CD of the evening’s highlights with which Cornett hopes to attract the attention of a record company capable of promoting it as the major blues release that it is.  (Those disinclined to wait can order it at http://bayouweb.home.mindspring.com/grayweb/henry1.htm.)

“We spent about three years trying to put this together,” says Bruce.  “We have a number of different recordings from different clubs, but there was always something that didn’t work.  This one made it.”

“We had been talking for a long time about doing something that we had complete control over,” adds Cornett, “and it worked.  The night was amazing, and we were able to capture it.”

Cornett and Bruce are not alone in their enthusiasm.  The album has yet to be officially released, and already the blurbs are piling up.  “His piano and voice are in top form as he boogies, shuffles, strides, and plays straight 12-to-the-bar blues,” says the Louisiana Music Factory’s Jerry Brock.  “This new CD is delightful and is a great addition to my collection,” says the Saphire Uppity Blues Women’s Ann Rabson.  “These are raw, deep blues, musically unpredictable and unfettered.”

Gray's own assessment of the album is terser.  “It’s all right,” he says.  “It came out pretty good.”

It’s a hot July afternoon, and Gray is relaxing in the living room of his Baton Rouge home after a month-long European tour.  His popularity abroad, which is considerable, has a downside.  While it enables him to make more money in a month than most other 74-year-old men make in a year, it also requires him to submit to rigors that musicians half his age have been known to find taxing.  “They want me to go back to Europe in September,” he says, “but I don’t think I’m going.  I’m tired.”

According to Gray, the most tiring parts of a tour are the amount of sleep that he gets (“hardly none”) and the riding (“Travel all day and play half of the night”).  Then there’s the availability, or the lack thereof, of sidemen.  On this latest tour, he was paired with the Marva Wright band for three weeks, but he also did a week of solo gigs.  “I’ve played by myself all over the world,” he says, “but that don’t mean to say I like it.  By yourself is a killer.  I like to be with somebody.”

Last July Gray made headlines by performing for Mick Jagger.  It seems that the head Rolling Stone had requested the presence of the Legends of Chicago Blues—an all-star ensemble featuring Gray and other original members of the Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter bands—at his 55th birthday party, and the American Legends concert promoters were happy to oblige.

In addition to Gray, the Legends of Chicago Blues include Dave Myers and Little Smokey Smothers (guitars), Abb Locke (sax), Mojo Buford (harmonica), Bob Stoger (bass), and Willie “Big Eyes” Smith (drums).  Together they attended the Rolling Stones concert at the Stade de France in Paris before proceeding to the hotel at which Jagger’s private birthday party was held.  That the Stones had made their initial splash by covering songs such as Howlin' Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster” and Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You” made the hiring of the Legends seem almost like a belated thank-you gift.

At one point, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and members of the Stones’ extended stage band joined Gray and company for an impromptu jam, after which Richards was heard to exclaim, “This band is the shit!”  Coming from Richards, such praise was high, probably in more ways than one.

As with most aspects of his career, Gray has little to say about partying with Jagger.  (Q: [Coaxingly] “That must have been some party.”  A: “It was.”)  When pressed for reminiscences, anecdotes—anything—from his dozen years with Howlin’ Wolf and his 20 years as a member of Chicago’s blues elite, all he’ll say is “I don’t know stories.  They was all nice to me.”

The one subject he will discuss is money.  Why did he leave Morris Pejoe in 1956 for Howlin’ Wolf?  “More money.  I wanted money.  I needed money.  So I did it.”  Why, although his résumé includes playing spirituals in a Chicago church, does he avoid playing gospel music in his shows?  “I don’t get paid for that.  I’ve never made a dime on gospel.  I get paid for playing the blues.  I’ve got to eat too.”  What advice does he have for young musicians?  “I would tell them to listen to the blues if they want to make some money.  There’s nobody that wants to listen to rock-and-roll but teenagers.  Old folks, they don’t want to hear rock-and-roll.  They want the blues.”

Gray is wrong about a couple of things.  First, there is money in rock-and-roll.  (Just ask Ticketmaster employees about Bruce $pringsteen and Paul $imon.)  Second, old folks aren’t the only ones who like their blues Gray.  Tab Benoit’s duet with Gray on “Too Many Dirty Dishes” is a high point of Benoit’s 1997 live album Swampland Jam.  And Kenny Neal, the son of Gray’s fellow Baton Rouge bluesman and occasional touring partner Raful Neal, sings a killer lead vocal on “The Red Rooster,” a track from Telarc’s Grammy-nominated Tribute to Howlin’ Wolf, on which Gray performs. 

But Gray is right about a bluesman’s needing to watch his wallet.  “These old guys have seen too much,” says Cornett, who once had to tell a record company that Gray was blowing off a scheduled recording session in favor of a European tour that paid better.  “You know, too many promises, not enough money.”

Sit with Henry Gray long enough, however, and something besides the love of money glints from beneath the cracks in his facade.  Labeling that something can be difficult, but it’s at the root of what makes musicians treasure the memory of their first encounter with him.  “At the end of the very first song that we played together,” Martin Simpson recalls, “he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you ever get above me, boy!’”  The Gueydan guitarist Bobby Broussard recalls that he “had a really screwed-up guitar” when he first performed with Gray.  “It sounded terrible when I went to play some slide.  But he liked me and accepted me, which I thought was amazing.”

Perhaps when it comes to identifying his true motivation, Gray himself says it best: “I get paid for the blues, I love the blues, and I play the blues.  Now that makes sense to me!” 

Eric Clapton: Clapton Chronicles--The Best of Eric Clapton (1999)

(As published in New Zealand's Brass ... )

Eric Clapton
Clapton Chronicles: The Best of Eric Clapton
(Reprise)

Obviously, this isn't "the best of Eric Clapton"--it's the hits of Eric Clapton, 1985-1998. Those who've forgotten Clapton had hits for the first half of that period will, upon hearing them again, be reminded of why they forgot: For all their stadium-sized hooks, "Pretending," "Forever Man," and "It's in the Way That You Use It" testify to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of translating blues power and Tulsa shuffle into high-tech bombast. On the plus side, Clapton’s hits from 1992 onward testify just as persuasively to his ability to make maturity-accommodating pop. Only the terminally adolescent won’t hear "My Father's Eyes" and "Tears in Heaven" as hummably humble attempts to come to grips with the Larger Issues. And even the two new songs, including the one with the Crystal Gayle title (!) written by Diane Warren (!!), sound like more than afterthoughts. What doesn't is the Bo Diddley cover and the unplugged "Layla." And if Warner Bros. had gone back to '83, they could've included "I've Got a Rock n' Roll Heart." Rating: Five reasons to cry out of ten.

Millie Jackson: The Bitch Is Back (1999)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

"A couple of times," says the husky-voiced soul singer on the other end of the line, "I just had to knock the living daylights out of him to let him know that even though I'm a woman, I hit pretty hard."

In different times, the woman could've been Aretha Franklin talking about Ted White or Tina Turner about Ike. This time, however, it's Millie Jackson, the notoriously lascivious deep-soul diva, recalling the son she raised as a single mom in a man's, man's, man's world. "One day when he was a teenager," she continues, "I slapped him in the mouth. Blood flew and scared the hell out of both of us. He got scared and said, 'No, mama! No more! Don't hit me, Mama!' He ran upstairs, and I yelled, 'Now, get upstairs before I kill ya!'

'Then I told my girlfriend, 'Go see if he's all right.'" Jackson explodes into laughter. The irony that after twenty-eight years of making records her greatest hit may turn out to have been not a song but an act of decidedly tough love is not lost on her. "He was talking back to me, so I just stopped him. I busted his lip, he saw the blood, and it scared him. I saw the blood, and it scared me.

"We gained a new respect for each other," she adds, then explodes into laughter again.

It's a Saturday morning, and Jackson is doing interviews from her home in Atlanta to promote the release of Between the Sheets, her new domestic best-of on BMG's House of Hits/7N label. A sixteen-track chronicle of her eleven years on Spring Records (1972-'83), it joins Jive's 1994 The Very Best! of Millie Jackson in restoring to easy availability the career highlights of a singer who during her prime was every bit the equal--and sometimes the superior--of Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, and the Pointer Sisters, black female acts who during the '70's and '80's crossed over to white audiences while Jackson maintained a marginal mainstream presence at best. (Only 1972's "Ask Me What You Want" and 1973's "Hurts So Good," which reached twenty-seven and twenty-four respectively, hit the top-forty.)

Looking back, it's easy to see that what kept Jackson from crossing over had nothing to do with her singing and everything to do with her monologues, blunt raps in which she discussed marriage and adultery like a female cross between Redd Foxx and Little Richard. She titled her excellent 1979 live album Live and Uncensored and her 1982 one Live and Outrageous (Rated XXX). Both titles fit. And, unlike '74's Caught Up (which reached twenty-one on the album charts) and '77's Feelin' Bitchy (thirty-four), neither live album went mainstream.

Between the Sheets emphasizes Jackson the Singer at the expense of Jackson the Bitchy Monologist, reducing her eleven-minute version of "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right," for instance, to three minutes and twenty-eight seconds by excising the rap portion altogether. The singing it emphasizes, though, does justice to Jackson's considerable interpretive gifts. Rare is the professional who can make Allen Toussaint ("I'll Be Rolling [with The Punches]") and Bobby Goldsboro ("Summer [The First Time]") sound as if they belong in the same career.

By including all ten minutes and thirty-nine seconds of '77's "All the Way Lover," however, the collection does capture one classic Millie monologue. "When I speak of an all-the-way lover," she begins, "I'm not only referring to the men, 'cause some of you women ain't shit either."

... And if you're not watching TV, you're on the telephone gossiping, tellin' your business. You're sittin' there talkin' about "Oh, honey, my old man sure did put a killin' on me last night! Ooh! It sure was good!" And your girlfriend be sittin' up talkin' about "Oh?" 'Cause she really didn't think the nigga could do nothin', and now you done told her how good it is she wants to go over and test it herself. Done blew your shit.... If not that, when your man get in, feelin' in a good and lovely mood, wantin' to get down and put some good lovin' on you for real, you be talkin' 'bout "Oh, no! I went to the beauty shop today, child! You can't be runnin' your fingers through my hair and messin' up my hair. I got my hair done!" Couldn't get his fingers through most of your hair if he wanted to, as nappy as it is.

"In fact," the monologue continues, "if I was some of these men, I'd just go out and get myself a sissy and call it a day and forget about it!"

These days, instead of striving to recapture the momentum of her youth, Jackson has capitalized on her gift for direct, extemporaneous communication by becoming the latest in a long list of celebrities to try her luck at talk radio. Currently, her daily three-hour Millie Jackson Show can only be heard on Dallas's KKDA Soul 73 AM (she does the show via a special hook-up from her home), but she has hopes for syndication. "Basically," she says, "it's whatever I want to do."

What she usually wants to do is play music, comment on the news, and, in what's certainly a talk-radio first, lead a twenty-minute aerobics class at the top of hour number three. "You count along with them, you tell them what to do, and you play a lot of Michael and Janet," she laughs.

"I just did it one day, being stupid. Johnnie Taylor has this song called 'Throw Your Hands in the Air,' and he was going, 'Throw 'em up!' And I said, 'Two, three, four--throw 'em up! Two, three--' And the girl on the other end said, "Oh, that was nice! I like the way you did that!" So I made it part of the show."

Little did she know how popular the segment would become. "I went away to do a concert, and when I came back, some lady called me up and said, 'Millie, where were you Friday? You know I have these people over here on my porch every day at five o'clock! You made us so mad, we just went to Dairy Queen!' So I said, 'Well, I guess I've got to do it because she's got the people over there on her porch.' So at five o'clock I holler, 'It's three-F time! Fat folk on the floor!'"

She explodes into laughter again. Clearly, despite looking back with Between the Sheets, she's in no mood to live off past glories. As for that teenaged son whom she once popped in the mouth, he--like his sister, Jackson's daughter Keisha--has grown into responsible adulthood with nary a scar to show for having matured in the shadow of an R&B singer with an infamously dirty mouth.

"When my son turned twenty-one." Jackson says, "we took him out to dinner, and he goes, 'Can I have a Heineken?' I said, 'Yeah, you're twenty-one. Why not?' He must've had about two swallows, swore he was drunk, came home, went to bed, and talked about 'Oh, that beer just knocked me out!'"

More explosive laughter. "And my daughter--she's part of the choir at church, part of the praise team. It's so funny!"

When pressed for the secret of successful single-parenting (which she readily admits is "harder" than the traditional kind), she'll say only that "nobody knows what they do when they come to children" and that all she did was "follow [her] instincts and do [her] best."

It's not exactly Dr. Laura, but then Dr. Laura won't ever likely top the R&B charts. Either way, it looks as if there's more than one way for a middle-aged woman to make a living out of feelin' bitchy.

Carol Wood: To Ferne Halwes Kowthe in Sondry Londes! (1999)

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

Those who missed Dr. Carol Wood's performance of medieval harp music at Barnes and Noble last Saturday can make amends in two ways.

First, they can attend her return Barnes and Noble engagement on Sunday, December 12. Second, they can buy her debut CD, The Chaucer Songbook, which she released last August on her own Epona Records in moments stolen from her busy schedule as a professor of Medieval literature at McNeese State University. Of course, true connoisseurs of the ancient arts in which Wood specializes will do both.

One of Wood's specialties is medieval Welsh literature, in which she holds a Ph.D. (Her book An Overview of Welsh Poetry Before the Norman Conquest [Edwin Mellen Press] has been called "an impressive treatment.") Another of her specialties is playing the harp, or, to be more precise, five harps. "I have a concert harp, a Dusty Strings harp--that's the main one that I play on the CD--a gothic-style harp, a little lap harp, and the first harp that I ever got," Wood says. "Sometimes I feel kind of silly to have as many as I do."

She shouldn't. Her five harps and her nineteen years of playing them have opened doors for both herself (she spent four years as the second harpist in the Lake Charles Symphony) and her students, who for nearly twenty years now have had the rare opportunity of learning from a professor with expertise in more than one art. In addition to recording The Chaucer Songbook, she's written a soon-to-be-published companion book of the same name featuring her arrangements for voice and harp.

McNeese, Wood says, is the ideal setting for cultural cross-pollination. "At a lot of other schools, it's tricky for the faculty to get, say, a Friday off to go to another school and give a lecture or some other kind of presentation.

“But McNeese,” she continues, “gives all of us as faculty members who are doing things--for example, Bob Butler, our Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, who goes on national book tours when a book is released--great flexibility to miss classes and make them up later as long as we're not denying our students their rights in terms of what they should be getting."

No one who spends time with The Chaucer Songbook CD will accuse Wood of denying the members of her new and growing extracurricular audience what they should be getting. The music, for one thing, is authentic. Wood has traced the lyrics and-or the melodies of most of the seventeen songs directly to Chaucer's works or Chaucer's time and performed them with simplicity and restraint.

And although the disc features Wood's harp, it also features the singing of several classically trained Lake Charles singers and, on six songs, the winsome singing of Wood herself. "I hadn't really done any singing in a long time," she says, "so it was a little bit scary to try to get my voice up to speed again. But since the CD has been released and I've been doing more singing as part of my gigs, I get a lot more favorable comments. So I feel much more comfortable about singing now."

The disc's twelve-page booklet provides the lyrics both in their original languages and in modern English as well as just enough history to make one want to start researching Medieval music oneself.

Take, for instance, Bishop Richard de Ledrede's "Peperit Virgo," the melody of which accompanies Wood's recording of "Maid in the Moor." "That's one of the songs that I love the most," Wood says, "It's very strange. Bishop Ledrede said that he wrote 'Peperit Virgo' so that his monks would sing religious words to this song instead of the lewd and secular words. We don't know quite what Bishop Ledrede was even objecting to, but he probably sensed in the song some kind of ancient, pagan survival of something."

Ironically, Wood wrote The Chaucer Songbook book first and only recorded the CD after Mel Bay offered her a modest recording budget as part of the book deal. The company, however, has been sitting on the book for some time now, and although it's currently slated for publication in early 2000, Wood says she's "not holding [her] breath."

What she is doing is preparing to record a follow-up CD, this time a voice-and-harp arrangement of the X.J. Kennedy poem cycle The Beasts of Bethlehem. As for whether the grants she's applied for come through, she's not holding her breath for those either.

"I'm trying to get up steam and start recording soon," she says. "I'll go on and do it regardless."

J. Kordosh: The Incredible String Band vs. John Travolta (1999)

(As published at Beliefnet ... )

I did not write this piece, but I did have the privilege of soliciting it during my brief stint as Beliefnet's music point man in late 1999. The man who did write it, J. Kordosh, is one of the greatest rock writers of all time, a scribe who along with Dave DiMartino, Chuck Eddy, and John Mendelssohn made Creem ("The World's Only Rock & Roll Magazine!")(http://www.creemmagazine.com/_site/Pages/About.html) during its post-Lester Bangs years the magazine I most looked forward to reading every month (and in whose "letters" section I proudly made an appearance in 1986). Lucky for us all, Kordosh still writes (http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/framed/). Luckier for us all, this incomparable piece of his on the Incredible String Band is now available again for the first time.

THE INCREDIBLE STRING BAND VS. JOHN TRAVOLTA!
by J. Kordosh

About eighty-three years ago, in the late 1960s, a British duo released a series of records that were simply fascinating. The guys--Mike Heron and Robin Williamson--called themselves the Incredible String Band, and they were.

Incredible, I mean. And a string band, too.

Heron and Williamson produced a charming blend of folk, pop, psychedelia, bluegrass and lots more. (The ISB played just about everything playable, including kazoos.) There was a transcendent quality about their work; they were post-Beatles minstrels plying mushroom-driven Folk. And, as they developed, many of their songs showed a decided Christian influence, especially those penned by Williamson.

(Williamson, if you remember the ISB, was the one who thought six minutes of music was nothing more than a succinct intro.)

By their fourth release, an ambitious double-LP with a wryly ambitious title (Wee Tam/The Big Huge), his musings on Christianity were in plain sight. "Job's Tears" starts with Christ's crucifixion ("The thieves were stealers, but reason condemned him / And the grave was empty where they had laid him") and ends with a description of heaven ("All will be one, all will be one.") "The Mountain of God" ends with "Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost / As it was in the beginning, is now and shall ever be / World without end, amen." And "Ducks on a Pond" has a line that positively gives me goosebumps: "Peacocks talking of the color gray/ Awaking soundly in darkest day / A howling tempest on a silent sea / Lovely Jesus nailed to a tree."

Back in 1967, that was not my dad's Christianity!

Not all of the ISB's work, nor even all of Williamson's, was as Christian-influenced as the songs mentioned. Actually, a lot of them simply oozed with good vibes, nature trips and magickal meanderings. Sort of like Donovan for the erudite. Or maybe the snobbish.

But the Christian element was certainly there. Nor were the ISB as obscure as you might think: their prior album, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, had hit number five on the charts. They recorded for the then-cutting edge Elektra label, and were one of only two British bands to play Woodstock, the other being the nonsectarian Who. (Unless you incorrectly count the Jimi Hendrix Experience as British.)

So whatever happened to these whimsical hippies?

In a word, Scientology.

Scientology (which means, literally, "Having nothing at all to do with science") was in a boom period in the late '60s. The ISB were pretty big into drugs by this time, and Scientologists were good at recruiting drugged-out hippies, Hollywood stars and drugged-out hippie Hollywood stars. After a gig at the Fillmore East in 1968, Williamson and his girlfriend were introduced to Scientology through a friend and enrolled at the New York Scientology Center.

(By the way, Williamson's girlfriend was named Licorice. No kidding. These guys really did have a lot going for them!)

Mike Heron joined shortly thereafter, and, voila, the ISB became the Really Pretty Adequate String Band. They sure never made anything as interesting as Wee Tam/The Big Huge again. In 1973, Heron was quoted in the New Musical Express as saying, "We were completely saturated in drugs and we realized we were screwing up and going out of our minds . . . I don't think the albums that came out immediately after Wee Tam were necessarily of the same stature." Good thinking there, Mike!

Things were grim. Starting with their 1972 album, Myrrh, the ISB's albums contained the liner note "Thanks to LRH," which refers to L. Ron Hubbard. Ron's the fellow who dreamt up Scientology. He went on to make millions of dollars, write a series of ridiculous science-fiction novels that will soon be a Major Motion Picture (Battlefield Earth, starring Church of Scientology poster boy John Travolta), and eventually die.

Incidentally, the grave was not empty where they had laid him. (Actually, I think he was buried at sea, but you get the idea.)

At the end of the spiral came three songs from a 1974 concert, a benefit for you-know-what. The album, which contained a pitch for Hubbard's Scientology bible, Dianetics, has been described as horrible. And correctly described, I might add. They were the last recordings of the Incredible String Band.

By all accounts, Williamson remains a Scientologist to this very day.

Incredible.

Julie Miller: Broken Things (1999)

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

Julie Miller
Broken Things
(Hightone)

Miller is so mystically intense that even such spiritual next of kin as she has seem like Amy Grant by comparison. Who else besides maybe Gillian Welch or Alison Krauss would go mainstream with lines like "Sun and moon will be replaced / with the light of Jesus' face" and "My life belongs to him / who will raise the dead again"? And speaking of miracles, Miller's voice somehow sounds as fragile and childlike on the rockers as it does on the tearjerkers. Like the archetypes of which she's fond--gospel as train, water as sacrament, wind as spirit, devil as cocaine--her singing and star-studded accompaniment feel simultaneously ancient and new. Those who thought she'd never top '97's Blue Pony will be glad to know they were wrong. Rating: Four widows and orphans out of five.

Randy Newman: Bad Love (1999)

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

Randy Newman
Bad Love
(Dreamworks)

The satire is sharp and unsparing, the sound redolent of the modern-day studio without succumbing to gimmickry, and the music a complex blend of the half-dozen-or-so styles that Newman has spent the last thirty years adapting to his aesthetic needs. His current targets and-or topics include TV zombies, Medieval Europe, middle-aged rock stars, mendacity, Karl Marx, shame (a song title), and himself, each of which he responds to with ambiguity and bile. And he sets the two ballads to his ex- to melodies as sad and pretty as the one to which he set his Toy Story 2 ballad for Jessie. Rating: Four-and-a-half infinities and beyond out of five.

311: Soundsystem (1999)

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

311
Soundsystem
(Capricorn)

The metal-plated power chords bridge formats, generations, and genres the way the half-sung, half-rapped rhymes mix perspectives , idioms, and value systems. Granted, some of those systems are bankrupt, but even "Flowing," which starts out annoyingly unfocused, gets around to describing a lived-in experience or state of mind eventually. If "Mindspin" didn't view "mysteries" and "truth" as mutually exclusive, and if "Large in the Margin" and "Livin' & Rockin'" didn't patch in dirty words just to get a sales-boosting warning label, this disc might be masterly art instead of masterly product. Rating: Three-and-a-half Red Hot Beastie Peppers out of five.

Electric Light Orchestra, Jeff Lynne (1999)

(As published in Salem Press's Popular Musicians ... )


ORIGINAL MEMBERS: Jeff Lynne (b. 1947), Roy Wood (b. 1946), Bev Bevan (b. 1944), Rick Price.

BEST-KNOWN LINE-UP: Jeff Lynne (b. 1947), Bev Bevan (b. 1944), Richard Tandy (b. 1948), Kelly Groucutt (b. 1945), Mik Kaminski (b. 1951), Melvyn Gale (b. 1952), Hugh McDowell (b. 1953).
OTHER MEMBERS: Mike Edwards, Michael D'Albuquerque, others.

FIRST ALBUM RELEASE: No Answer, 1972.

MUSICAL STYLES: pop, rock and roll, disco.

Formed in Birmingham, England, in 1971, the Electric Light Orchestra grew out of the successful U.K. rock band the Move. Led by Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, ELO attempted to blend pop songcraft with classical grandeur, eventually discovering a formula that transformed the group into one of the most successful "hit machines" of the 1970's. Although attrition among the group's members and changes in musical fashion led to the group's calling it a day in 1986, Jeff Lynne continued to find outlets for his unique sound, both as a producer and as a member of the rock and roll supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys.

"Move"-ing On. From its beginnings in 1966, the Move contained the nucleus of what would later become the Electric Light Orchestra. The multi-instrumentalist Roy Wood and the drummer Bev Bevan were both part of the original ELO lineup. Jeff Lynne, who would later emerge as ELO's leader, joined the Move in 1969, shortly after the release of its Shazam album. As if to foreshadow ELO's classical leanings, the Move based "Night of Fear," its first single, on Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

The conflict among the members of the Move over the group's direction resulted in frequent lineup changes and wide-ranging musical experimentation. Indeed, the group's very eclecticism may have accounted more than anything else for their failure to establish a large U.S. following. When Wood and Lynne announced in 1971 that the Move would become the Electric Light Orchestra and that more lineup changes would follow, few who had followed the group were surprised.

Misses, Hits, and More Misses. At first, the Electric Light Orchestra appeared as likely to fail in the U.S. as the Move had. ELO's debut album, 1972's No Answer, yielded only one minor hit (the five-minute "10538 Overture") and was distinguished mostly by the failure of its rock and classical elements to cohere. The group's 1973 album, Electric Light Orchestra II, with the eleven-minute "Kuiama" and the eight-minute "Roll Over Beethoven," did little to change the general perception of Lynne as a talented but self-indulgent bandleader. (Wood left shortly after the release of No Answer.)

With On the Third Day (1973), however, the group's vision began coming into focus, and both Eldorado (1974) and Face the Music (1975) contained top-ten hits. The 1975 album Olé ELO collected the best-known songs from ELO's first five albums and went gold. The lineup had solidified as well. Joining Lynne, Bevan, and the keyboardist Richard Tandy were the bassist Kelly Groucutt, the violinist Mik Kaminski, and the cellists Hugh McDowell and Melvyn Gale. Although Kaminski, McDowell, and Gale participated mainly in the group's live performances (the albums' orchestral sections were often performed by full orchestras), they were included in all ELO photos and personnel listings until the Discovery album in 1979.

It was this seven-man lineup that toured in 1976 in support of A New World Record, the group's first platinum album. The album yielded three hit singles, the second of which, "Do Ya," had been a minor hit for the Move in 1972, and the third of which, "Telephone Line," became their third top-ten and first gold single.

Out of the Blue, into the Black. Further evidence of the group's popularity was the success of its 1977 album, Out of the Blue. Despite the popularity in the 1970's of two-record live albums, two-record studio albums were seldom attempted. (Fleetwood Mac's Tusk would not appear until 1979). Nonetheless, Out of the Blue became the group's second platinum album, and the singles "Turn to Stone," "Sweet Talkin' Woman," and "Mr. Blue Sky" helped the group maintain a presence on top-forty airwaves into the fall of 1978.

By this time, the ELO sound had become extremely ornate. Lynne and Groucutt frequently overdubbed their Beatle-esque vocal harmonies into simulated choirs when they weren't using actual ones, and orchestras augmented by Tandy's futuristic synthesizer sounds turned up on almost every track. And although the results, like many of Lynne's lyrics, were often clever, the cumulative effect was becoming heavy-handed. Perhaps it was a sense of having reached a saturation point that led the group to lighten both its membership and its sound for Discovery. On the album's inner sleeve, only Lynne, Bevan, Tandy, and Groucutt were pictured.

Whatever its reasons, the newly streamlined ELO placed four of Discovery's tracks on the top forty in an era when two singles per album was the norm and three a happy exception. By the end of 1980, the group's 1979 Greatest Hits album and subsequent soundtrack to the film Xanadu had sold another three million copies.

The Descent. Over the next six years, ELO released three albums, only one of which--the 1981 album Time--went gold. All three yielded top-twenty hits, with "Hold On Tight" becoming the group's fifth top-ten single, but underselling tours, the appearance of the 1986 Balance of Power album on the relatively minor CBS Associated label, and the shrinking of the "Orchestra" to three members symbolized the group's having worn out its welcome. By 1987, Bevan was filling the drum seat for Black Sabbath.

Otis and Clayton. Lynne immediately became a much sought-after producer, developing connections that culminated in his joining Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and George Harrison in the rock and roll supergroup the Traveling Wilburys. Each superstar's identity was thinly disguised by a Wilbury-family nickname: Lynne was "Otis Wilbury" on the group's 1988 debut and "Clayton Wilbury" on its 1990 sequel. (His 1990 solo album, Armchair Theatre, caused little excitement.)

Because the sound that Lynne had crafted for ELO owed a great deal to the Beatles, many considered his joining the Traveling Wilburys, which contained an actual Beatle in Harrison , particularly fitting.

SELECT DISCOGRAPHY

No Answer, 1972 (album)
Electric Light Orchestra II, 1973 (album)
On the Third Day, 1973 (album)
"Can't Get It Out of My Head," 1975 (single; from the Eldorado album, 1974)
"Evil Woman," 1975 (single; from Face the Music, 1975)
"Telephone Line,"1977 (single; from A New World Record, 1976)
Out of the Blue, 1977 (album)
"Don't Bring Me Down," 1979 (single; from Discovery, 1979)
"I'm Alive," 1980 (single; from the Xanadu soundtrack, 1980)
"Hold On Tight," 1981 (single; from Time, 1981)
Secret Messages, 1983 (album)
Balance of Power, 1986 (album)
Traveling Wilburys Volume One, 1988 (album; Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison)
Afterglow, 1990 (ELO box set; previously released and previously unreleased material)
Armchair Theatre, 1990 (Jeff Lynne solo album)
Traveling Wilburys Volume Three, 1990 (album; Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty)

AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for Traveling Wilburys Volume One, 1989.

FOR THE RECORD

*The phrase "No Answer" does not appear on the cover of the No Answer album because the album supposed to be titled simply Electric Light Orchestra. It was accidentally re-titled as the result of an unanswered record-company phone call.

*During the first part of their 1978 world tour in support of the Out of the Blue album, ELO performed inside a 250,000-pound, laser-equipped "spaceship" that remains one of the most spectacular stage sets in the history of live rock. Ironically, elements of the performance weren't "live" at all; nearly ten years before Milli Vanilli was shamed from the music business for lip-synching, ELO was known to enhance its "spaceship" performances with pre-recorded strings and vocals.

(More Electric Light Orchestra: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/electric-light-orchestra-zoom-2001.html)

Bruce Daigrepont: Add It Up (1999)

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

One sign that a musician has "made it" is that his story can be told in numbers. For the New Orleans Cajun-music stalwart Bruce Daigrepont, who spent his college days preparing for a career as an accountant, the numerical approach is especially revealing.

Take the number four. Daigrepont's new album, Paradis, is his fourth, and like his others, it bears the imprint of the Massachusetts-based Rounder Records, the most Cajun-friendly independent label outside Acadiana. So pleased has the label been with Daigrepont's submissions, in fact, that it's never so much as changed a 'tit fer.

"I didn't know anybody at Rounder," says Daigrepont. "I just sent them a tape, and a few weeks later, one of the owners showed up at Tipitina's and said, 'We got your tape, we love it, and we want to release it.'"

His reference to the legendary Tipitina's brings up the number thirteen, a number that in Daigrepont's case has nothing to do with bad luck and everything to do with how many years he's been the legendary New Orleans club's Sunday-night entertainment.

The young adults, not-so-young adults, tourists, locals, and children who packed Tiptina's for the Paradis record-release party last month were treated not only to a free bowl of red beans and rice and some cake but also to three hours of prime live music from Daigrepont and his band (Gina Forsyth, fiddle; Jim Markway, bass; Lynn Abbott, drums).

How many songs does Daigrepont play on a typical Sunday night? "Around forty-five, fifty," he estimates. The total number of songs his band knows, he says, is "maybe three hundred."

Then there's the number three: Daigrepont and his wife Sue have three children, the oldest of which appears on the cover of Daigrepont's third album, 1995's Petit Cadeau. Three is also the number of the other Cajun acts who can stand alongside Daigrepont in terms of staying true to Cajun music's roots while invigorating its tradition: BeauSoleil, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, and Balfa Toujours. Anyone who doesn't think that's rareified company probably also likes his gumbo mild.

Also significant is fourteen, the total number of cover songs that Daigrepont has recorded during his career. At an average of only three-and-a-half covers per album, his output consists of considerably less recycled material than that of the typical Cajun musician. "I've got a family," he says "I don't need to spend sixteen dollars on a recording that I've got similar ones to at home."

Obviously, the accounting major in Daigrepont hasn't completely disappeared. "I don't think I've started repeating myself yet. I don't know how people do it once they've made ten or fifteen or twenty-five albums. I don't think I would keep making records if I started feeling like I wasn’t doing anything new."

One way that Daigrepont has kept his sound new is to simplify. Paradis, for instance, features no guitars--not rhythm, not lead, not steel--at all. "You know what I'm proud of on this record?" he asks. "It's small. It's just accordion, fiddle, bass, and drums. It's pretty close to us playing live."

And it's good. Although the blend of fiddle, accordion, and Daigrepont's bright, tenor voice has long been one of contemporary Cajun music's most enjoyable sounds, the use to which Daigrepont puts those sounds on Paradis is his most ambitious to date.

In songs such as "Hommage Aux Récolteurs" (a two-step in praise of farmers), "Le Diable Est Laché" (an apocalyptic blues in which it's both the fire and the water next time), and "Je Suis Pas Un Prisonnier" (a waltz in condemnation of materialism), he offers a penetrating vision of both the Cajun experience and the sense in which it symbolizes the plight of all who feel like strangers in a strange land.

Daigrepont himself is partial to "Je Suis Pas Un Prisonnier." "That was a waltz I had written, oh, ten years ago and never shown to anybody. I knew it was something different. To me it sounded very old, like something that could've come out of the 1800's. I thought, 'This is kind of strange. How good is it?'

“Then a few years ago I showed Gina Forsyth the song, and she said, 'This is great!' Then we showed it to the band, we started playing it, and it developed into a good song.

"If one of my songs comes too easy to my band," he says, "I'm probably not doing something real creative. But if I can see sort of a little bit of a puzzled look in their face as to where it's going--right at first--that's a good sign."

On Paradis, Daigrepont's band seems to have gotten that look just the right number of times.

Bruce Cockburn: Dessert in Sri Lanka (1999)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Bruce Cockburn must surely hold the record for the most consecutive album-cover appearances in the same pair of round, wire-rimmed spectacles.

For twenty-five albums now, beginning with the his self-titled 1969 debut and continuing with his just-released Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu (Rykodisc) (well, on the back cover anyway), the Artist Formerly Known As Canada's Best-Kept Secret has peered out at his steadily growing audience with a confrontational forthrightness entirely appropriate to his confrontationally forthright songs.

Glasses aside, however, little else about Cockburn has remained constant. His music has grown from acoustic folk to folk-rock tinged with jazz and Third-World rhythms to electric rock tinged with amps cranked to ten. As for his lyrics, no one else in the "pop-rock" category has made so much out of Christianity, left-wing politics, and eros.

Breakfast in New Orleans, however, despite revisiting themes long present in Cockburn's oeuvre, breaks new ground, most notably on "Mango," Cockburn's first-ever paean to what he euphemistically calls "the great, cosmic, female thing." "It was the juiciness and the sweetness, I suppose," Cockburn laughs. "A banana was never in question."

Gynecological fruit metaphors aren't the album's only firsts. Another is the appearance of an actual golden oldie, "Blueberry Hill." But Cockburn's decision to tackle Fats Domino has less to do with the "New Orleans" in the album's title than it does with Bambi and the Deer Hunters, a Toronto group with whom Cockburn occasionally performs and whose only mandate, he says, "is to do only songs we don't know."

The Deer Hunters didn't know "Blueberry Hill."

"I've always liked the song," recalls Cockburn, who was eleven when Domino's version hit. "So it has some sort of sentimental resonance that way. But, more to the point, the sentiment that it expresses is reasonably current for me."

Exactly what that sentiment is Cockburn won't say, but on an album in which the mango represents the "great cosmic female thing," blueberry hills begin to seem like great cosmic female things themselves. One thing's for sure, Cockburn's performance of the song as a duet with the Cowboy Junkies' sexy-voiced Margo Timmins only intensifies its latent sensuality.


Cockburn isn't known for latency. For years, in fact, he has boldly striven to prove that a polysyllabic vocabulary and a feel for humanity's earthier urges can not only coexist but also complement each other. Like most musical experimentalists, he's notched his share of failures; unlike most, his successes far outweigh his duds.

Perhaps his best-known formal innovation is his introduction of spoken-word recitation into a format famous for accommodating singing. "Some ideas and words just don't want to be squeezed into a melodic framework," he explains. "So they end up spoken."

Cockburn traces his awareness of the technique to a most unhip source: Wink Martindale and his 1959 novelty hit, "Deck of Cards." "Wink Martindale did nothing but talk," Cockburn remembers, "but at least he knew how to do that. So there is a precedent for spoken-word even in the poppier side of music. I've never made a conscious attempt to emulate Wink Martindale, but I probably wouldn't have thought of it if I'd never heard 'Deck of Cards.' Who knows?"

Cockburn likes asking questions. His most notorious ones have been directed at the military-industrial complex, often in rather inflammatory language. "If I had a rocket launcher," he sang in his 1984 song of the same name, "some son of a bitch would die," and, two years later, "You don't really give a flying fuck about the people in misery" ("Call It Democracy").

"The Sex Pistols [used such language], but people like me didn't," Cockburn says, laughing. "But those words are not used lightly in any of the points where they appear. They're there because they're the right word for that spot. Besides, I think there are more explicit lyrics [in my songs] that aren't cuss words."


Recently Cockburn has lent his energies to the Vietnam Veterans Of America Foundation and their campaign to make the production, sale, export, and deployment of anti-personnel land mines an international crime. Land mines, however, have nothing to do with "Let the Bad Air Out," Breakfast's most political song. The "piss-off" behind that song, as it turns out, just happens to be the same one behind Pat Buchanan's presidential candidacy: NAFTA.

"Most Canadian industry," says Cockburn, "just about died within the first year of the original Canada-U.S. Free-Trade Agreement, which was a total sell-out of Canadian culture, identity, and economy. Companies moved their headquarters elsewhere, and [after NAFTA] they could move not only to the States but to Mexico too and get even cheaper labor.

"It's not just us that are suffering from it, of course," he continues. "It's a generalized transfer of power from elected governments to boards of directors around the world, governments that have become the servants of those other powers, most of them willingly so. And, unfortunately, people have bought into it."

Bleak thoughts, no doubt, but not utterly despairing. What keeps even Cockburn's angriest songs from pessimism is their undertow of what can only be called Christian hope.


Breakfast contains no overtly religious songs, but in the context of Cockburn's body of work, a song such as "Last Night of the World" takes on a spiritual dimension: "I learned as a child not to trust in my body," he sings. "There's a day when we all have to be pried loose."

"I still tend to think in terms of a Christian framework," says Cockburn, "but it's a framework that's been stretched and pounded considerably by experience. And it continues to be stretched and pounded, broken open here and there, in lots of ways.

"It's an on-going process," he adds. "I do think the job of life is to get ready for graduation, as it were, and when the time comes, we leave these bodies behind and graduate to something else.

“I don't necessarily think that that needs to mean an immediate arrival in front of the Pearly Gates, but it may."

Note to St. Peter: Cockburn will be the guy in the round, wire-rimmed specs.

Abba (1999)

(As published in Salem Press's Popular Musicians ... )

ORIGINAL MEMBERS: Bjorn Ulvaeus (b. 1945), Anni-Frid Lyngstad (b. 1945), Benny Andersson (b. 1946), Agnetha Faltskog (b. 1950)

FIRST ALBUM RELEASE: Waterloo, 1974 (The group's 1973 album Ring Ring was credited to "Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha, and Frida" and remained unreleased in the United States for twenty years.)

MUSICAL STYLES: pop, disco, bubblegum

Formed in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, Abba consisted of two couples whose division of labor, like their marriages, seemed for a while to have been made in heaven. With the photogenic Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad singing the catchy pop songs of Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, Abba went from being the first internationally recognized pop group to come from Sweden to being one of the most commercially successful pop groups of all time. Abba disbanded in 1983, several years after the dissolution of the group members' marriages. Nevertheless, its many original albums and hit collections continue to sell millions of copies worldwide.

Sound and Eurovision. Prior to forming a songwriting and performing partnership that would lay the groundwork for Abba, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus enjoyed individual success as members of the Swedish pop groups the Hep Stars and the Hootenanny Singers, respectively. With Stig Anderson, who would eventually become known as Abba's "fifth member," they established Union Songs and began writing, recording, and producing both their own music and the music of others.

In 1969, Andersson became engaged to Anni-Frid Lyngstad, and Ulvaeus became engaged to Agnetha Faltskog. Both Lyngstad and Faltskog were already established solo performers in Sweden, and eventually the two couples began performing and recording together under the name Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha, and Frida. After failing to qualify as Sweden's entry in the 1973 Eurovision song contest with the song "Ring Ring," the group and Anderson began preparing for the 1974 competition. Shortening its name to the acronym Abba, the group wrote and recorded what would become the first of their many international hits, the 1974 winner of the Eurovision Song Contest, "Waterloo."

The Successful Seventies. Although "Waterloo" reached number six in the U.S. and number one in Britain, Abba appeared to be headed for the dubious distinction of one-hit wonder until the release of "S.O.S." Like "Waterloo," "S.O.S." was distinguished by the overdubbed vocals of Lyngstad and Faltskog and a wall-of-sound backing track featuring a sparkling blend of keyboards and guitars. The song's international popularity caused fans and critics alike to take the group more seriously and, as a result, to expect even more from them.

Far from being daunted, Abba rose to the challenge. Several popular singles later, "Dancing Queen" became the biggest hit of their career, even reaching number one in America. By 1977, Abba's worldwide sales had eclipsed even the Beatles', and, like the Beatles, Abba had begun to feel the pressure of international superstardom. In response to the self-imposed challenge of continually outdoing itself, the group responded in 1977 with an album simply titled The Album, which included some of Abba's longest and most elaborate songs thus far. Viewed by many as a collection of only partially successful experiments, The Album was nevertheless treated kindly compared to The Movie, a feature-length film consisting largely of concert footage that instead of cementing the group's superstar status seemed to reveal its feet of clay.

Despite such missteps, however, Abba consistently enjoyed hit singles throughout the 1970's, even in the U.S., where enthusiasm for the group's music had always been subdued in comparison with the enthusiasm with which it was greeted elsewhere. The Album eventually went platinum, and Voulez-Vous, which followed in 1979 and contained the hits "Voulez-Vous" and "Chiquitita," went gold.

The Families That Play Together? Unlike the Beatles, whose dissolution was due in part to marriage, Abba began to break down as the result of divorce. By 1981, both Ulvaeus and Faltskog's seven-year marriage and Andersson's and Lyngstad's three-year one had ended. Still, the end of the group was not immediately forthcoming. Amid the marital discord, Abba managed to record its two best albums, Super Trouper (1980) and The Visitors (1982), both of which contained hit singles. But when Lyngstad released her Phil Collins-produced solo album Something's Going On in 1982 and the group released no new music in 1983, rumors began to circulate that the title of their latest greatest hits collection, The Singles--The First Ten Years, may have been too optimistic.

These rumors proved true. Faltskog's first post-Abba solo album, Wrap Your Arms Around Me, appeared later that year. In 1984, the soundtrack to the musical Chess, on which Andersson and Ulvaeus had collaborated with the lyricist Tim Rice, provided Murray Head with his first hit in fourteen years, "One Night in Bangkok." Meanwhile, all four group members had either remarried or established new live-in relationships. The 1986 Live album was the last album-length collection of previously unreleased Abba performances.

The Reissue Decade. When Polygram acquired the rights to the Abba catalog in the early 1990's, the company was able to capitalize on the spotty availability of the group's albums by mounting a high-profile reissue campaign. Beginning with Gold/Greatest Hits in 1992, More Abba Gold in 1993, and the four-disc Thank You for the Music box in 1994, Polygram had by 1997 re-released all eight Abba studio albums, making them available on CD for the first time.

Some Abba enthusiasts have been too quick to spot the group's influence. Aside from the fact that both Roxette and Ace of Base, for instance, were also internationally successful Swedish pop exports, they have little in common with Abba aside from their homeland. There was, however, no mistaking Abba's influence on the British pop duo Erasure, who released a well-received four-song EP of Abba covers titled Abba-esque in 1992.

SELECT DISCOGRAPHY

Ring Ring, 1973 (album)
"Waterloo," 1974 (single; from the Waterloo album, 1974)
Abba, 1975 (album)
"Fernando," 1976 (single; from Greatest Hits, 1975)
"Dancing Queen," 1977 (single; from Arrival, 1976)
"Take a Chance on Me," 1978 (single; from The Album, 1977)
Voulez-Vous, 1979 (album)
"The Winner Takes It All," 1980 (single; from Super Trouper, 1980)
The Visitors, 1981 (album)
Live, 1986 (album)
Gold/Greatest Hits, 1992 (album; previously released material)
More Abba Gold, 1993 (album; mostly previously released material)
Thank You for the Music, 1994 (box set; previously released material, outtakes, and alternate versions)

AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Eurovision Song Contest winner for "Waterloo," 1974
BMI award for Most Played Record of the Year for "S.O.S.," 1975
Carl Allen Award (a British most-successful-songwriters award), 1976
Cashbox Top LP/Singles Artists of the Year award, 1976

FOR THE RECORD

*By the late 1970's, Abba had become the most commercially successful pop act in the world, outselling even the Beatles. At the same time, the Stockholm stock exchange listed the group as its second-most lucrative corporation.

*In 1989, an Australian quartet calling itself Bjorn Again was formed. Specializing in recreating Abba's music onstage, the group--which consists of Gavin Edwards ("Bjorn Volvoeus"), Peter Smith ("Benny Anderwear"), Annette Jones ("Agnetha Falstart"), and Tracy Adams ("Frida Longstokin")--successfully toured the United States in 1997.

*During the Stockholm, Sweden, stop of its 1992 "Zoo TV" tour, U2 was joined onstage by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus at the Globe Theatre for a performance of "Dancing Queen"; two years later, seventeen years after its initial release, the song (backed by a "bridal" version performed by the Wedding Band Featuring Blazey Best) became the first single from the Muriel's Wedding soundtrack.

Rod Bernard: Still Going on Forever (1999)

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

The title on his KLFY business card reads "Sales Representative," but to Acadiana residents Rod Bernard will always be the local boy who made good in 1959 when his slow-dance classic "This Should Go On Forever" reached the top twenty and made him the first local musician of the American Bandstand era to enjoy national acclaim.

For the past twenty-five years, Bernard has relegated his performing and recording career to hobby status, preferring the roles of sales rep and family man to that of rock 'n' roller. And, despite the release of the career-spanning Rod Bernard: The Essential Collection (Jin) in 1997, he doubted he'd ever record again.

"I hadn't really been in great demand or anything," Bernard admits. "No one had been calling."

No one, that is, until Jimmy Rogers. The head of the Mesquite, Texas-based CSP Records called last year with an offer to oversee what would become A Louisiana Tradition, the first new solo Rod Bernard album in almost two decades. It was an offer Bernard couldn't resist.

"He's always liked this kind of music," says Bernard. "He said to my son Shane, 'I'd like to come over there and record some singers.' Shane said, 'Well, what about my dad?' That same night Jimmy called me at home."

Soon Rogers and Bernard had a deal: Rogers would put up the money, and Bernard would choose the studio, the musicians, the songs. The studio turned out to be Lafayette's La Louisianne Recording Studio, the musicians the cream of Acadiana's considerable crop, and the songs a fetching mixture of oldies ("See You Later, Alligator," "Maybellene"), not-quite-so oldies ("I Can Help"), and nine Bernard originals, the most ever to appear in one place.

"When The Essential Collection came out," Bernard recalls, "some of the DJs around here had mentioned to me, 'It's a shame we don't have any new swamp-pop songs.' So I wrote some."

Local DJs should drop hints Bernard's way more often. From the rollicking "Backwater Bayou" that kicks the disc off to the country weeper "The Fantasy Is Over" that winds the disc down, Bernard, fifty-nine, is at the top of his songwriting form. Even the obvious grandstand plays "Hurricane Watch," "Happy Anniversary," and "Ga De Don, Ga De Don (Gardez Donc)" bear the marks of craftsmanship.

"I'd been working on some of them for about ten years," says Bernard, who found his retirement from music conducive to composition. "I'd write two or three verses and put them in a briefcase in the trunk of my car. Then I'd be driving along, think of something else, and I'd write two or three verses of another one. When Jimmy called, I started putting together all these pieces of paper, lyrics and all. I got serious on finishing the songs."

His seriousness didn’t preclude humor: "Family Secrets" is a shaggy-dog story that starts out like swamp-pop's first-ever extended incest joke before veering back to the terra firma of run-of-the-mill infidelity. And it isn't the album's only joke. Bernard sings the title line in David Houston's "Pain in My Past" as if the pain were in his guess-what instead.

Originally scheduled for February, then pushed back month after month until August, A Louisiana Tradition nearly fell victim to Bernard's sinusitis, a condition that made it hard for him to sing.

In the meantime Bernard and his co-producer David Rachou oversaw the laying down of tracks. Not that multi-genre veterans like Warren Storm, Rufus Thibodeaux, BeauSoleil's Jimmy Breaux, and River Road's Richard Comeaux needed much overseeing. And one gets the feeling from "When I Hold You in My Dreams" that Glenn Himel can play classic piano triplets and Gene Romero arrange classic New Orleans horns in their sleep. Eventually, Bernard's sinuses cleared up. His singing on the new album bespeaks nothing if not good health.

What if A Louisiana Tradition should result in more demands on his time than Bernard would prefer to meet?

"I've already had a good taste of being on the road and all that," says Bernard of his initial go-'round forty years ago. "I talked to a lot of people who do that for a living, and I found that a lot of them weren't really happy. They had no home life, no wife or children, or, if they had them, they lost them or left them along the way. I heard all that, and I said, 'That's not living.'"

Not that Bernard doesn't sometimes catch himself holding a golden statuette in his dreams. "Sometimes, when I watch those country-music-awards shows, I've got to tell you, I have this little tingle inside, and I say, 'What if I'd done that? Would I be there?'

"I don't know," he laughs. "I'd rather leave it a mystery."

ZZ Top/Lynyrd Skynyrd New Year's Eve Show Preview (1999)

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

Even as the thirty-five-year-olds they were when they hijacked MTV back in '84, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, and Frank Beard--a.k.a. ZZ Top--were dirty old men. They wore sunglasses at night the better to ogle the Playboy models who'd pop up in their videos and whose body language said, "Why, Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Hill, what big beards you have!" Mr. Beard, alas, had no beard, but he did talk softly and carry a big stick--two in fact--a most excellent quality in drummers.

Although the high gear into which the band shifted with "Gimme All Your Lovin'" and "Legs" had begun to wear down by "Rough Boy" and "Velcro Fly" two years later, the Houston-based trio had already supplied the world with the following revelation: that Delta blues, Southern-fried boogie, and heavy metal sounded great when white-trash-compacted together and sent careening around the communal brainpan on a bed of the electroperkiest rock-and-roll synthesizers since Pete Townshend programmed "Baba O'Reilly" and "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Tonight ZZ Top rolls into the Cajundome, and those wishing to join their fellow "Tush"-lovers in roto-rooting the band into the next millennium had better plunk for a ticket now or forever hold their afterburners.

Concertgoers who fear that the group's prolonged absence from the charts might have rendered it insensitive to the needs of its female fans will find the mere mention of the group's latest album title--XXX (RCA)--reassuring. They'll also get off on its music, especially the high-tech hogwallow of "Poke Chop Sandwich," "Sinpusher," and "36-22-36," songs that prove Gibbons', Hill's, and Beard's favorite phrase in the Declaration of Independence is the one establishing the pursuit of happiness as a patriotic duty. (Further evidence: their live bump-'n'-grind version of "[Let Me Be Your] Teddy Bear.") Rumor has it, by the way, that the band responds positively to requests for "36-22-36," especially from girls who've got legs and know how to use 'em.

Whether the group will play XXX's best song, however, seems unlikely. It's a studio-as-instrument drum-'n'-bass foray called "Dreadmonboogaloo" that sounds like the Art of Noise lobotomizing Bo Diddley's guitar as a means of establishing a muthaship connection. Throughout it Art Bell's announcer Ross Mitchell intones "East of the Rockies ... West of the Rockies," and souls get sucked screaming into black holes.

It's really quite impressive.

Not quite as impressive these days is Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top's opening act. As those of us who were around twenty-plus years ago remember, ZZ Top--even at its niftiest--wasn't fit to lick the boots of Skynyrd Mach I. The problem, of course, is that Skynyrd Mach I hasn't walked the earth, corporeally anyway, since October 20, 1977, the day its founder, frontman, and brains--Ronnie Van Zandt--went down in rock and roll's second-most-famous plane crash.

Does Lynyrd Skynyrd Mach III or IV deserve credit for soldiering on despite continuing attrition or ignominy for exploiting a once grand rock-and-roll name for the sake of selling a few more overpriced T-shirts?

A better question might be "Is Skynyrd's recent album of all-new material, Edge of Forever (CMC International), any good?" Depends on whom you ask. The current seven-member lineup includes the founding members Gary Rossington (guitars), Billy Powell (keyboards), and Leon Wilkeson (bass), with Ronnie's brother Johnny on vocals and stage presence, both of which he's been providing since the group reformed in 1987. The guitarists Rickey Medlocke and Hughie Thomasson round out the three-guitar attack, with Kenny Arnoff (not Aronoff, Mellencamp fans) on drums. They're all as big, shaggy, and mean looking as professional wrestlers, and, if you don't listen to the lyrics, you might convince yourself that the generic Southern hard rock they offer up on the new songs is approximately where the Ronnie-led Skynyrd would've ended up at this late date anyway.

Maybe. But appropriating clichés (cf. the Johnny-led Skynyrd's "Mean Streets," "Gone Fishin'," "Through It All," "Money Back Guarantee," "Get It While the Gettin's Good") and inventing phrases so resonant that they become clichés (cf. the Ronnie-led Skynyrd's "Free Bird," "Sweet Home Alabama," "Gimme Three Steps," "What's Your Name," "You Got That Right") are too different things, especially considering that the means by which Ronnie turned his EverySouthernman's musings into rebel-rousing rallying cries nearly qualifies as alchemy. (To the extent that he turned them into gold and platinum--the title of what's still the best Skynyrd anthology--he really was an alchemist.)

Still, I admit a fondness for the new album's elegiac "Tomorrow's Goodbye" and "Rough Around the Edges," cornball though they are. And I have a feeling that when Skynyrd Mach III or IV lays into the Ronnie stuff tonight in the 'dome, I'll (probably) admit a fondness for Skynyrd Mach III or IV as well.