Trash, Treasure, Oddities, Obsessions and Obligations
This is the “oddball” collection. This is the one that confirms standing prejudices that country music is best when dark, that madness lurks just beneath the veneer of fiddle and steel guitar, that its politics are morbid and reactionary. This is the collection that makes country music look like a socio-anthropological artifact of a long dead micro culture. This is the one you’ve been waiting for.
Continue reading ‘Report From The Country, Part Seven: The Cruel World’
Ah, the fifties! When innovation blossomed, conformity abounded and paranoia lurked behind every tree! (Or so I hear — I wasn’t alive then.)
Rather than offer fresh historic perspective, don’t these laboriously culled excerpts merely serve to confirm our own self-serving predjudices? We love to laugh at these tatters of media ephermera, at the unashamed nakedness of their bias, at the barefaced innocence of their wrongheaded arrogance. Otherwise, we’d be forced to admit that we have more in common with our former selves than we care to admit.
Continue reading ‘Things I Should Throw Out: More From A 1951 Phoenix Gazette’
I’ve been thinking about bubblegum pop this week, ever since I discovered my old contribution to “Bubblegum Is The Naked Truth” posted to Kim Cooper’s Bubblegum University site. It’s not the greatest thing I ever wrote, but at least my name is spelled right. Thanks for the link, Kim! Here’s a link to the article:
I remember reading somewhere that Japanese collectors regularly decend upon the US and buy up every piece of old vinyl they can find. I witnessed this phenomenon first hand one day when I visited my favorite comic store. I found the owner packing up his entire roomful of old five-for-a-dollar comics for delivery to a collector in Japan. Now I’m afraid to visit that country for fear of finding everything I’ve been looking for on sale for unreachably astronomical prices.
When my wife took a business trip to Japan recently, I warned her not to return without a suitcase full of that country’s national treasures. I’m happy to report that she did well. Now it’s payback time!
Fortune found me one afternoon in Cincinnati, Ohio back in 1988. We’d driven all night from Nashville, Tennessee, and I’d crashed hard for most of the day. Now I wandered up and down the street in front of the gig, waiting for sound check to start. My companion had already worn out her welcome. We had nothing to say to one another — we were both exhausted, and we were strangers. A typical draggy day on the road.
And then I found “Live At Dancetown USA” by George Jones in the back of a dusty record shop. A British release on the small indie Del-Rio label (a subsidy of Ace Records), it was not an easy record to find. In fact, I never saw another copy. I never saw it on CD at all. (Remember, this was before the ubiquitous convenience of internet shopping.) I can’t believe this is currently out of print. The Jones legend shines brighter on this record than on just about any other in my collection.
Continue reading ‘Report From The Country, Part Six: George Jones Live At Dancetown USA’
Though it may be Arizona’s capital and largest city, Phoenix began as a small agricultural community set up to supply food to the mining towns that thrived north of the valley. The most famous of these is Jerome, which still supports a mini tourist mecca perched on the side of Mingus mountain atop a maze of abandoned mine shafts. But a hundred years ago, over a dozen boomtowns clustered among the Bradshaw mountain range. These were sustained by the “Impossible Railroad,” so named for its ambitiously precarious route into the remote hllls.
One of the fondest memories of my teens is The Love Workshop, a fifteen minute comedy program produced in Phoenix for KDKB radio back in 1976. Nowadays, we’d call its themes and subject matter “politically incorrect.” But during its brief run, the Love Workshop’s hosts, Vern & Craig, were merely “offensive.” In fact, they still are, and the modern potential listener would be wise to take this fact under advisement.