Tom Jones: Praise & Blame (2010)

To quote Chrissie Hynde, it must be Christmas time.

First, Nina Hagen--as harrowingly frightening a space cadet as has ever been coughed forth by a black-hole--makes an honest-to-God (no pun intended) gospel album.

And now Tom Jones.

Yep, that Tom Jones, the Vegas stalwart most famous for his tight pants, chest hair, and panty-bestrewn mic stands.

Actually, it’s not the first time a Sin City heartthrob has put his hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water. In 2003, Englebert Humperdinck released Always Hear the Harmony: The Gospel Sessions.

It wasn’t very good.

Jones’ Praise & Blame (Lost Highway), however, is.

For the most part.

And the stud is seventy!

And he doesn’t dye his hair!

And Englebert Humperdinck does!

But before continuing to praise Praise & Blame, let's get the blame out of the way. Jones’s voice was never on a par with that of his fellow Vegas attraction, Elvis Presley. And the fact that Jones’s versions of “Didn’t It Rain,” “Don’t Knock,” and “Burning Hell” are characterized by roadhouse-rockabilly arrangements reminiscent of Presley’s “I Got a Feeling in My Body” (the Dennis Linde-penned gospel barn-burner that showed up on 1979’s Our Memories Of Elvis Vol. 2) only makes the contrast more apparent.

More blame: Jones doesn’t sing as well as Bob Dylan (whose “What Good Am I?” opens the album), Billy Joe Shaver (“If I Give My Soul”), Mahalia Jackson (“Didn’t It Rain”), or Blind Willie Johnson (“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”) either. His voice is too stentorian, belting where a caress or a love tap would do. But thus has he always been. And anyway his not singing as well as Prince didn’t hurt (much) the version of “Kiss” that he recorded with the Art of Noise in 1988.

Back to the praise: Jones does at least as much with his vocal instrument as Nina Hagen does with hers. Both are limited, but both, when brought to a boil by gospel fervor, can provide the spark it takes to get a fire going. I mean, that’s how it is with God’s love.

You want to pass it on.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. I had a friend in high school named Emily. She was madly in love with Tom Jones, even though he was old enough to be her not-so-great grandfather when she drove ninety miles to see him (on a school night no less) in concert in 1978. She somehow got backstage and not only met her Welsh idol but also got a photo of him signing the white dress she had worn to the show. I know because she proudly showed the photo around. (And I’m pretty sure she deserved to wear white if you know what I mean. A seventeen-year-old’s boldly declaring her love for Tom Jones in 1978--when all the hip chicks were slavering over John Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever and Grease--was akin to wearing a chastity belt.) I thought she was, you know, a little weird. But she was also nice--and pretty when she wore contacts instead of black-rimmed librarian glasses. And on some level I made a mental note that if Tom Jones was good enough for Emily, he was good enough for me

Now he's giving me that old-time religion.

Which, come to think of it--seeing as how the name of one of his biggest hits was “Delilah”--was only inevitable.

Next in the series: Wayne Newton!

You read it here first.

(More on Praise and Blame: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/tom-jones-a-new-peak-for-the-voice-of-the-valleys-still-hitting-the-heights-2040064.html)

(Nina Hagen: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/nina-hagen-personal-jesus-2010.html)

Billy Joe Shaver: Freedom’s Child (2003)

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

Billy Joe Shaver
Freedom’s Child
(Compadre)

Recently, after warning them that they were about to hear “real country,” I played this album for a mini-van full of quiz-bowl-bound high-school freshman. Two songs in, one remarked that this was not in fact real country, and would I please play Tim McGraw’s Greatest Hits? To be fair, the subject of the mellow first cut--the elusiveness of intimacy over even the longest of hauls--is hardly kid stuff. But had my student waited for “That’s What She Said Last Night” and “Déja Blues,” he would’ve been rewarded with bawdy puns and rowdy choruses--solid foils, in other words, for the detailed, nostalgic reminiscences that the rest of this lovingly executed, gospel-tinged, Triple-A-radio-friendly music comprises. Meanwhile, no one who caught Shaver with Kinky Friedman last fall will be surprised to learn that Shaver-the-singer remains equal to the challenges posed by Shaver-the-writer these days. Rating: Four freedom’s fathers out of five.

"Two for Texas" Show Preview: Kinky Friedman & Billy Joe Shaver (2002)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana, October 2002)

Between writing detective novels, shooting the breeze with Don Imus, keeping several cigar manufacturers in the black, and helping out with the Utopia Rescue Ranch for animals in Medina, Texas, Kinky Friedman doesn’t spend much time in recording studios anymore. His most recent on-disc appearances--Live from Down Under and Classic Snatches from Europe--are collaborative live albums, with Billy Joe Shaver and Little Jewford Shelby respectively on Sphincter Records, the label he co-owns with Shelby and whose motto, give or take an apostrophe, is “Leaving Our Competitors Behind.”

Still, there is one song that Friedman wouldn’t mind returning to the studio to record. “It’s time for me and Willie Nelson to do our duet of ‘Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,’” he says, referring to Ned Sublette's camp-country classic. “I’d like to let everybody know that my heroes have always been faggots.”

Friedman, who’ll turn fifty-eight this Halloween, was politically incorrect long before political incorrectness was cool. A major-label country musician in the mid-’70s, he named his band the Texas Jewboys and gave the world such masterpieces of insensitivity as “Ride ’Em Jewboy” (about the Holocaust), “Men’s Room, L.A.” (about upholding high standards of personal hygiene with a gospel tract), “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” (about keeping women’s libbers in their place), and, his signature tune, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews like Jesus Anymore” (about “a redneck nerd in a bowlin’ shirt ... a-guzzlin’ Lone Star beer / Just talkin’ religion and politics for all the world to hear”). By comparison, songs like “Ol’ Ben Lucas” (rhymes with “mucus,” about an inveterate nose-picker) and “Asshole from El Paso” (a parody of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”) seemed tame.

Friedman readily admits that such material “kept [him] poor” (“It kept down the airplay totally”), but he still performs it, and he’s not the only one. In 1999, Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, Delbert McClinton, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Waits, and other high-profile admirers of the “Kinkster” recorded Pearls in the Snow (Oarfin),a seventeen-track album of Friedman compositions that stands as one of history’s few genuinely useful tribute LPs. Currently on tour with his fellow Texan Billy Joe Shaver on what’s being billed as the “Two for Texas Tour,” Friedman performs tonight at Tipitina’s in New Orleans and tomorrow night at Rabb’s Steak and Spirits in Ruston. “We do a few songs together,” says Friedman, “but mostly it’s back and forth, so there is kind of a tension and a competition. There’s a good dynamic going on.”

For his part, Shaver, sixty-three, is touring in support of The Earth Rolls On (New West), the second in a series of what many had hoped would be a long run of albums featuring him in collaboration with his axe-slinging son Eddy. That the partnership was cut short by Eddy’s drug-related death on New Year’s Eve 2000 at the age of thirty-eight has only deepened the music’s appeal for many of Shaver’s fans, of whom Friedman himself may well be chief. “Kristofferson wrote some great stuff,” Friedman says, “and Harlan Howard did too. But Billy Joe is the best living poet in country music. I mean, the weight of the catalog that he has written is quite outstanding. The difference between us is I’m doing the same songs I was doing twenty years ago. Billy Joe is currently writing great songs.”

Another difference is that Friedman is currently writing best-selling detective novels. In keeping with a tradition established by its fourteen predecessors, the protagonist of the latest, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch (Simon & Schuster), is Friedman himself--or, at least, Friedman as he’d be if instead of a hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, liquor-quaffing, blisteringly satirical, novel-writing Semitic minstrel with friends like Willie Nelson and Don Imus he were a hard-bitten, cigar-chomping, liquor-quaffing, blisteringly satirical, novel-writing Semitic private eye (or, as Friedman would say, “dick”) with friends like Willie Nelson and Don Imus.

Fast-paced, profane, funny, suspenseful, and written in the first person, Meanwhile Back at the Ranch details Friedman’s attempts to find a missing three-legged cat in Texas and a missing, autistic ten-year-old boy in New York. It’s also rife with pop-cultural and rock-and-roll allusions, and Friedman knows how to use ’em: high noon is “Gary Cooper time,” midnight is “Cinderella time,” and a character named Hattie tells a character named Mattie about a thing she saw, just like in Sam the Sham’s “Wooly Bully.” The novel, in short, makes an ideal gift for that literate baby boomer in your life who has almost everything. “The books are what’s happening now,” says Friedman. “My interest and my energy are going into them.”

The effort is paying off. According to the “bibliography” link at kinkyfriedman.com, the novels are “now being published in Swedish, Japanese and fourteen other languages, two of which even Kinky cannot read.” Many of the “Two for Texas” dates, in fact, are doubling as book signings. According to Friedman, however, the audience for his books and the audience for his music seldom overlap. “They’re wholly two different audiences. If I could combine those two, I would have a huge audience.”

It is, he says, his “cross to bear.” “But the Lord only gives you as big a cross as you can carry, you know?”

Kinky Friedman & Billy Joe Shaver: Live in Baton Rouge (2002)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana, October 16, 2002)

A lower-key gig than the “Two for Texas” show at Chelsea’s Café in Baton Rouge last week would be hard to imagine. Even with Jeff “Little Jewford” Shelby’s one-man opening act in full swing inside, the eight-o’clock darkness and the café’s extinguished outer lights rendered signs of life invisible.

Those equipped with night vision, however, would have noticed a cowboy-hatted, mustachioed, cigar-smoking, beer-nursing figure seated at an outside table, and in so doing would have noticed Kinky Friedman, the novelist, country singer, and quintessential Texas Jewboy who would soon be joining his fellow Texan, the equally quintessential Billy Joe Shaver, for an evening of below-the-belt satire, old-time religion, surreal rabble rousing, gallows humor, and song.

It’s too late, obviously, for anyone who missed the show to see it now, but Live from Down Under (Sphincter), the recently released double-disc set of the tour’s Australian leg available at sphincterrecords.com and other fine Sphincter outlets, is a reasonable and entertaining facsimile thereof. Minor set-list discrepancies aside, the main difference between the Baton Rouge and Down Under shows is that the Sydney audience was far less rowdy than the one at Chelsea’s, which consisted primarily of middle-aged men given to hooting, hollering, clapping, guffawing, and flicking Bics to Friedman’s and Shaver’s every pronouncement, wisecrack, and exhortation.

(Friedman: “An intellectual is someone who takes a simple idea and makes it complex”; Shaver: “Simplicity don’t need to be greased”; Friedman: “I hate intellectuals, although I am one”; Shaver: “If you don’t love Jesus, go to hell!”; Friedman: [introducing bandmember Washington Ratso] “He’s the Lebanese boy in the band!”; Shaver: “Jesus is the one who made us all Number Two”; Friedman: [joining hands with Ratso] “Ratso and I consider ourselves the last true hope for peace in the Middle East”; Shaver: [singing “Black Rose”] “The devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own”; Friedman: “Naomi Judd used to tell her children, ‘Always say your prayers and wash your hands, because Jesus and germs are everywhere.’”)

Little Jewford, after warming up the crowd, remained onstage to play electric keyboards, kazoos, and the melodica for both Shaver and Friedman. He also functioned as a one-man Firesign Theater, playing Ed McMahon to Friedman’s Johnny Carson and punctuating the proceedings with MC patter, deadpan asides, and impressively articulate belches.

And then, of course, there were the songs. Singing “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed” always takes matzo balls, especially in a club whose audience includes women armed with beer bottles. But Friedman’s decision to open (after winning the who'll-go-first coin toss) with the sniper narrative “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” on the day that the shooting of a Washington, D.C., school boy highlighted a week of Beltway-area random shootings--well, let’s just say that Jesus ain’t the only Jew they ain’t makin’ more like anymore.