Thrasher's Blog: 08/01/2004

Steve Earle Starts The Revolution

Photos by Thrasher

Earlier this evening we saw Steve Earle at a record release event for the album The Revolution Starts.. Now at Borders book store in downtown Washington, DC.

Earle performed for nearly an hour on acoustic guitar and a couple of harmonicas. The fairly large audience seemed to be in a revolutionary mood and overflowed onto the staircase, spilling onto the main floor upstairs.

Opening the set with "F the CC", Earle spit out the lyrics:

So fuck the FCC
Fuck the FBI
Fuck the CIA
Living in the motherfuckin' USA

When he concluded the song, he acknowledged that he was performing only a few blocks from the White House, FBI, and FCC, by saying that he "wanted to get that song out of the way before he was arrested."

Shortly thereafter, when he saw 2 very young children with their mother, he apologized for the profanity in the song. Then he commented, "I figure it's better that they learn to cuss from me rather than Vice President Dick Cheney". This brought a round of laughter and loud applause.
steve-earle-med

From there on Steve had the crowd in his hand as he played several more songs from the new album including "The Revolution Starts.. Now" and "Rich Man's War". Before playing "Rich Man's War", Earle said that he wrote the song first and then realized he needed to write a bunch more in order to have an album in time for the election. He went on to comment about the writing process and his passion for making the album.

As strange as it might sound, Earle professed his deep love of country and explained that this album was made out of a desparate hope that it might help steer the U.S. back to a time of greater tolerance for freedom of expression.

After the set, we had our CD autographed by Steve which was cool. We even got the CD a day before it's official release tomorrow.
signing

I asked Steve about going to New York City next week for the Republican convention and he said he would be there. But he was really going to seeing his favorite baseball team - the New York Yankees.
autograph

Lastly, The Orlando Sentinel calls Earle "a 21st century Woody Guthrie." From largehearted boy - a boy, a girl and his radio. Also, Steve Earle is the "Artists of the Week" on internet radio station on Live365 - Mansion On The Hill. Tune in. More on Steve Earle's music and political views.

Wilco on The Wire Cover

Over on The Wire, Edwin Pouncey hears how Chicago's alt.Country stars cracked the cocoon of success to release the free spirits within.

"I often think of Neil Young's career--for obvious reasons--when I think of Tweedy, what with Young putting out albums that alienate fans...rock-a-billy, computerized vocals etc...

But with each Wilco album they seem to be tracing a deliberate trajectory toward what might be called, and has been called here, the avant guarde, but I can tell you from my experience, most of my friends who are heavily in to avant guarde art whether John Cage, Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, or whomever, do not find Wilco's forays to be avant guard at all, I don't know, maybe they think a few noise tracks are a half-hearted commitment to breaking the mold of acceptable(ed) culture. I do not agree with them, I have loved each album.

I just wonder if Wilco will take a similar path to Young's, making acoustic/folkish albums as well as sound experiments, or if they are indeed on a developmental arc toward challenging weirdness which could also be cool. I'm open, but if the latter is the case, there might be a time when they're too avant for their fan base and not avant enough to catch the real cultural rebels, just a thought.

Or it could also make for a weird mix in the crowd--the last time I saw Steve Earle, there were a bunch of leftist college types (where I might fall) mingling with drunken rednecks (into whom I might fall when drunken), maybe that's how music changes the world....

Anyways, whatever direction they take, I feel certain it will come from an honest assessment of what they think is beautiful, and not--as has been suggested--deliberately trying to be weird/different etc. I think when that is the goal, the work usually fails, of course my avant friends would say a work never fails, just works to different ends, but then again I probably sound like a Wire-reading-chin-scratcher to some of you, so I'll stop....

Later"

Sweet Harmony at WolfTrap, VA - 8/17/04

Photos by Thrasher

Last week, we caught the Sweet Harmony tour with Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Patti Griffith, Gilliam Welch and David Rawlings at WolfTrap Performing Arts Center, Vienna, VA.

The show was fabulous on so many levels that it's been hard for me to do it justice with a review. I took a bunch of photos and thought I'd put them up while I tried to compose something about the special evening.

At the moment, all I can really say is that I heard angels sing that evening. Everyone was enchanted by the love that poured from the stage and didn't want the evening to end.

There was tremendous respect among the artists as they traded off with one another. Emmylou would solo. The Buddy would join and then Patti. Then Buddy would drop off and come back solo and be joined by Gillian Welch who would be joined by Rawlings. And on & on it went.
harris, welch, griffith

Great stuff. Hopefully more later. In the meantime, here's some more on Emmylou Harris.

Steve Earle's Regime Change Rock

A major article in Mother Jones on Steve Earle's upcoming 'The Revolution Starts...Now'. The interview by David Corn follows Earle into the studio in Nashville for the recording sessions and explores the album's political themes.

"The idea that artists are not supposed to comment on social matters -- like the Dixie Chicks -- is crap," Earle says. "Artists have always been the consciences of their societies. And I don't sing good enough to be an entertainer."

"Warrior," another of the first six songs, is a spoken-word piece about the costs of war, modeled on the prologue of Henry V and set against a Doors-y tune. It's Earle doing Patti Smith doing William Burroughs, in iambic pentameter. ("There are no honorable frays to join/only mean death dealt out in dibs and dabs.") When Earle adds extra guitar tracks to "Warrior", his sole guidance: "this should sound like Neil Young 30-feet tall."

"A POLITICAL ALBUM -- it's a dangerous thing," Earle says. "I may have come into this record with no songs, but I knew what I wanted to say. It's about the war." The trick, Earle maintains, is knowing when to "communicate in human terms" -- that is, telling a story that makes a point -- and when to "communicate in rhetorical terms." The FCC song is definitely an example of the latter. Does singing about political matters -- war, the death penalty, and lousy HMOs -- have any noticeable impact?

"I've had people tell me the stuff I've written has changed their minds on the death penalty." Anyway, he notes, "Pete Seeger said all songs are political; lullabies are political to babies."

On a Music Box review by John Metzger:

"Throughout 'The Revolution Starts...Now' Earle once again exercises his Constitutional right to speak his mind, though he tones down the seething anger that pervaded much of Jerusalem in order to find a more persuasive, humanistic approach to sharing his points of view. As a result, his customarily mighty lyrics are all the sharper for it."

More on Steve Earle, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Dave Matthews, James Taylor, Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks, John Fogerty, John Mellencamp, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Neil Young and political songs.

Is Alt-Country Dead?

From the Dallas Morning News an article on how alt-country became musical roadkill by THOR CHRISTENSEN:

"The exuberance it had in the beginning has faded away now," says singer Alejandro Escovedo. "I don't think alternative country really exists anymore. It was just a little spark, and it didn't really change anything."

So how did this "next big thing" wind up as just roadkill on the music-biz annual report?

Like so many fizzled experiments in pop music, it was a mix of unrealistic expectations and bad marketing. It was also a case of déjà vu.

In the early '80s – 10 years before anyone thought to add "alt" to "country" – the movement was known as "cowpunk." As Lone Justice, Jason & the Scorchers and Rank & File began attracting critics and radio play, predictions of platinum records swirled

"When it started, it was just punk rock," says Mr. Escovedo, ex-member of Rank & File. "We were listening to Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins and Chuck Berry, just trying to educate the audience and ourselves about all these great things you never heard on the radio."

The article goes on to site the influence of Uncle Tupelo and the "No Depression" sound.

"Any music that has the word 'country' in it, people under 21 immediately think 'dumb-ass redneck," says Old 97's guitarist Ken Bethea. "It's like a wall: The rock crowd that buys popular music hates country. If Neil Young and Tom Petty came out today, they'd be called 'alt-country,' and they'd be doomed."

More on those alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo.

Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo on Neil Young

Over on Blogcritics' StarPolish Interview with Sonic Youth, some interesting comments by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo guitarist on alienating fans with musical experimentation:

LEE RANALDO: "I don't think that's true. In fact, I think it sort of happens in a kind of the reverse -- it's easy to alienate the fans that have kind of come recently and sort of dip in and check it out, and then move on to something else. I think especially for a band like us, our hardcore fans are really interested in the different directions that we go, and the same goes for us; if we like an artist, even if they go through a period that has you scratching your heads and wondering, 'What the fuck are they doing?' -- like with Neil Young or someone like that when he goes off on these crazy tangents -- you still like something about who they are and what they're enough doing that you keep coming back to see where they're going. Hopefully they come around and do stuff you really love again, as Young has for sure. So I think that because we've been around for so long, there have been fans that have been with us for a really long period of time, and in general they look for us to do different things and sort of challenge their expectations of who we are and what we are."

More on Sonic Youth and Neil Young's influences on the 1991 Weld Tour. Also, Frank over on Chromewaves has a few thoughts on Sonic Youth and a link to Uncut with an article stating that "Sonic Youth taught Neil Young the art of feedback".

As Frank points out in his comment below, this sentiment comes from Neil being inspired to assemble the "Arc" record after touring with Sonic Youth in 1991 on the Weld Tour.

Dios covers Neil Young's sublime 'Birds'

A clever and humorous review from NME of the new album by Dios by Alex Needham:

"While 'Nobody's Perfect' and 'You Got Me All Wrong' are authentically and memorably tuneful, other songs reveal Dios to be West Coast psychedelia's equivalent to Ikea. Their songs are serviceable, accessible and respectable in appearance, but are ultimately a cobbled-together approximation of someone else's classic design. This becomes glaringly apparent when Dios cover Neil Young's sublime 'Birds' and make it sound exactly like everything else on the album - full of the sunbaked, soft-headed torpor brought on by too many summertime spliffs. The incorporation of The Beach Boys' 'You Still Believe In Me' into 'Fifty Cents' makes their deficiencies even more obvious."

Wilco in Toronto

Photo by Frank on Chromewaves

A super review, setlist and photos of Wilco in Toronto last night over on .: chromewaves.net v5.0. Frank was blown away and had this to say on the show:

I'm not really one given to hyperbole, so you'll appreciate that I mean it when I say Wilco is the best fucking band on the planet. And that that was the best show I have ever seen. Swear. To. God. I don't even know where to begin.

This is the fifth time I've seen Wilco live, so you'd think that I'd have a pretty good idea of what to expect from their shows, and I thought I did. Maybe it was the new lineup - the fourth different one I've seen - the high-on-life Jeff Tweedy or the electricity in the sold-out, (relatively) tiny venue, but last night they absolutely killed. From the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that opened 'Muzzle Of Bees', the band was in another zone completely

Also word from Frank that a Bit Torrent FLAC download of the concert is available.

So if Wilco's in your town... one word GO! I was blown away by the new band when they rolled through DC earlier at 9:30 Club.

Jim Byrnes Band covers "For The Turnstiles"

The Jim Byrnes Band has a cover of Neil Young's "For The Turnstiles" on their latest CD Fresh Horses. Expecting to Fly posts on Rust:

Thanks e2f!

Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot.

A very fascinating article in today's washingtonpost.com (August 3, 2004) on the origins of the haunting shortwave radio effects used on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album.

I found it quite amazing to learn that the shortwave radio effects used on the album are actual broadcasts of CIA and other intelligence agencies coded messages.

It's fascinating that the shortwave radio operator Akin Fernandez recorded these broadcasts for years without ever realizing what they were and that the "cryptic messages became music to his ears".

Fernandez sued Wilco for the effects unauthorized use on the CD and the band eventually settled out of court.

The Post's Segal writes:

"So what's a rock band to do if it wants to keep the guitars and churn new ground? How do you make something so familiar seem daring?

Enter Wilco, a quintet that started as an alt-country act and is now boldly going where no rockers have gone before. Two years ago the group released an album with a song called "Poor Places." It starts as a droopy ballad, but eventually the drums fade, the melody evaporates, and up roars a truly terrifying hurricane of sound. As it builds to a climax, a woman's urgent semaphore peeks through the noise:

"Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot. Yankee. Hotel. Foxtrot."

It's a track from "Conet," the voice of Ms. International Radio Operator herself. The band sampled it and used it to name the album. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" would earn Wilco its strongest reviews ever -- it was No. 1 that year in the Village Voice national poll of music critics -- and it sold decently, too.

At various moments on "Yankee" you can hear lead singer and co-songwriter Jeff Tweedy struggling with the where-do-we-go-now question. And he finds an answer, or at least part of an answer, in the same place as Fernandez, way way out there, in the ionosphere. Which is apparently where you wind up now when you seek the unpainted corner of the musical canvas.

It's enough to make you think that what's left of rock's frontier isn't very pretty; there isn't even music playing there. At some point -- after punk crested, perhaps, in the late '70s -- innovation in guitar pop became a matter of creative arithmetic. Blind Willie McTell plus Led Zeppelin times garage rock equals the White Stripes. The Velvet Underground plus the Cars divided by an intercom system equals the Strokes. But this has limits, too. The Strokes' second album, "Room on Fire," is just a rehash of their first. It's redundant and kind of gutless. It's everything that Fernandez hates.

"Conet" ultimately defines the crux of rock's problem in middle age. How do you double back without seeming timid? How do you roll forward without seeming incomprehensible for its own sake?"

More on Wilco and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And in case that's not enough, here's a discussion on Velvet Rope of Slate article bashing Wilco's "Ghost".