BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Stocks aren't the only sector of American industry reeling from last week's terrorist attacks. The folks who create the artistic expressions that offer both escape and insight into the world situation have been derailed and befuddled by the new world order, too. Here are some items illustrating the attacks' ripple effect in the music industry: The hit list One of my favorite episodes of the old TV series "WKRP in Cincinnati" involved a radical preacher named Dr. Bob who asked the fictional radio station not to play a list of certain songs he and his followers found offensive. It's a pretty poignant discussion of artistic expression and censorship — for TV, anyway — and it features Mr. Carlson (Gordon Jump) reading the words to John Lennon's "Imagine," which the preacher dismisses as anti-God and "communist" despite its lack of any offensive words. "Imagine" allegedly made another hit list this week when Clear Channel Communications, the Texas-based company that owns nearly 1,170 radio stations nationwide — including six in Tulsa — circulated a list of 150 "lyrically questionable" songs and suggested its stations consider the wisdom of playing them in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks, according to the New York Times. It's a curious list (see page D-4). Some selections are obviously insensitive for this particular moment in history -- Soundgarden's "Blow Up the Outside World," Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" or "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by Tulsa's own GAP Band — but others are truly bizarre and overreaching. Some poor, pin-headed exec somewhere must have racked his brain for titles that might allude to anything related to the tragedy, such as planes (the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride," Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets") or New York City (Sinatra's signature song "New York, New York," the Drifters' "On Broadway"). Some songs, though, are even patriotic, like Neil Diamond's "America," or universally uplifting, like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World." Clear Channel was quick yesterday to issue a denial. It was carefully worded, denying the fact that they actually banned any songs but not denying that a list was circulated. Accoridng to the Times, the company's corporate headquarters generated a small list of songs to reconsider, and an "overzealous" regional executive expanded it and circulated it widely. Tulsa DJs never saw one, anyway. Rick Cohn, vice president and marketing manager of Tulsa's Clear Channel stations, said he had seen no song list from his corporate headquarters. What he had seen was a statement "suggesting that each program director should take the pulse of their market to judge the sensitivity of listeners given the circumstances now," he said Wednesday. "We voluntarily went through our playlists to see if there were things we might want to avoid in good taste," Cohn said. "I mean, `Leaving on a Jet Plane' just doesn't seem like the song KQLL `Cool 106' needs to be playing right now." Wise choices, surely, as long as they aren't mandatory and lasting. After all, in times like these, music is what we should be turning to, not running from. One of the songs on the list, Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," gives voice to a narrator who assures the listener of help through whatever trials and sadness we encounter. Of course, Lennon's "Imagine" is the ultimate sing-along in times of desperately needed unity: You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one. You ought not be in pictures Three months ago, DJ Pam and Boots Riley holed up with their Photoshop manuals and produced what they thought would be a cool and controversial image for the cover of their new CD. They had no idea how controversial it could have been. The image features the two rappers standing with the World Trade Center Towers looming behind them. DJ Pam is on the left holding drumsticks while Riley, on the right, is pressing a button on what is assumed to be a bomb detonator; the towers behind them are exploding in flames and smoke — at what look like the exact spots where the two hijacked airplanes hit on Sept. 11. Needless to say, the duo's record company, 75 Ark, has ordered all the covers destroyed and replaced before the CD, innocently titled "Party Music," is released Nov. 5. "The intent of the cover was to use the World Trade Center to symbolize capitalism," Riley said this week. "This is a very unfortunate coincidence, and my condolences go out to the families and friends of the victims." This is the second album release interrupted by the attacks. Neo-progressive rock group Dream Theater's "Live Scenes From New York" was yanked back from shelves last week because its cover depicted the Manhattan skyline, complete with WTC towers and the Statue of Liberty, in flames. Local benefit song Michael Jackson has already written his benefit song for the victims of last week's terrorist attacks, which he hopes to cast with big stars (a la "We Are the World") and release within a month. For my money, though, I'll stick with Bristow native Alan Pitts' tune, "She Still Stands Tall," penned last week after the tragedies and already a moderate hit. KOTV, channel 6 has played Pitts' song several times, complete with a video montage assembled by the station. The song has rocketed up the country chart at www.soundclick.com since it was posted on Sunday. Pitts also may perform the song at the Tulsa State Fair; arrangements are pending. Demand for the song has already overwhelmed Pitts and his Tulsa-based band. Until full-scale production of a CD can be completed, Pitts has been burning copies on his home computer. He hopes to have them available soon for $10, with a third of the money going to the American Red Cross. For information about obtaining a copy, call Redneck Kid Productions at (918) 582-5316. Off the road The attacks last week interrupted the music business, namely some tours that were making the rounds on the East Coast. Some of the bands that canceled shows around the country in the wake of the attacks were Aerosmith, the Beach Boys, Blink 182, Blues Traveler, Clint Black, Jimmy Buffett, Coldplay, Billy Gilman, Phil Lesh, Jerry Seinfeld and They Might Be Giants. Oddly enough, the Pledge of Allegiance Tour — featuring such deathly metal acts as Slipknot, System of a Down, Rammstein and Mudvayne — was scheduled to begin last week. The first four dates in the upper Midwest were rescheduled for later in October. Also, the annual CMJ Music Marathon has been rescheduled from its original dates last weekend to Oct. 10-13. Carol Anderson of CMA Promotions reported that most of the Christian pop shows she represents are moving ahead. "They feel that the kids need words of hope even more than before," she said. Most of the artists' publicists we deal with as journalists are headquartered in Manhattan, and it's been nerve-wracking checking in with them the past week. Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, posted an editorial on the magazine's web site last week encouraging Americans not to hide at home throughout the aftermath. "If you afraid to buy tickets and attend public events, then you let the bastards win," he wrote. "Make no mistake about it, no one can completely guarantee your safety as you walk through the turnstiles. But then, no one can guarantee it as you sit on the couch at home, either." A final word Jessica Hopper at Hopper PR in Chicago summed up the nation's sudden readjustment of priorities in an email to industry insiders last week: "Nothing like profound tragedy to make our myopic punk world and scene squabbles seem truly meaningless." By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Last time I saw David Garza, he brought me to my knees. Quite literally — a park in Austin, a year and a half ago, and Garza strutted onto the outdoor stage under the black clouds of a brewing storm and dared the lightning bolts to fly by the bald audacity of his guitar playing. All he had at his disposal was his clipped, cat-like voice and a revved-up Rickenbacker guitar, but no plaintive singer-songwriter was he. All by himself he rocked harder than every lineup of Starship on a single stage, yelping and growling and playing that guitar so hard and fast and with such conviction and clarity, well, I actually worried he was hurting himself. But he brought all the layered, looped tracks from his Atlantic debut album to life with the sweat of his brow instead of the flick of a switch, and by the time he finished "Discoball World" I was on my knees at the edge of the stage, clawing at my face and bellowing. Fortunately, I was not alone. So if you're headed down the 'pike this weekend to catch matchbox 20 (whatever) and Train (snore), don't linger in those overpriced Bricktown restaurants too long and miss the opening act, 'cause it's David Garza (that's dah-VEED to you, gringo) and that same, lone guitar, and I guarantee he'll justify the ticket price and the gas money in 30 all-too-short minutes. "Yeah, that's what I'm doing on this matchbox 20 tour, and it's real fun," Garza said in an interview last week from a tour stop in El Paso, Texas. "I'm coming off a string of shows in clubs, solo stuff, you know, but you don't get to bring out the loud amps in these small clubs. On those outdoor stages and in those arenas, I can crank it up." He says this with an obvious timbre of relish, even though Garza — Billboard magazine compared him to "trailblazers such as Prince, David Bowie and Prince" — is as gut-wrenching with a slow hand as he is when he's smokin'. His particular oomph makes him a bit of an anomaly in the laid-back, folkie Austin, Texas, music scene from which he's been based since landing at the University of Texas on a classical guitar scholarship. After dabbling in cover bands — "playing Billy Idol and INXS and Big Audio Dynamite for dances" — Garza thrust a band called Twang Twang Shock-a-Boom into the scene where the likes of Asleep at the Wheel shuffle along as politely as possible. Record label execs showed up at his shows like lawyers in an emergency room — so fast that Garza rebuffed a few offers until he felt his songs were ready for the big time. "I guess it happened somewhat fast back then. I got my start playing solo guitar at an Italian restaurant. I was the guy who wandered from table to table, and I had to hold my own with the single instrument," Garza said. "Now that I get to travel a little farther and wider, I try to push it a little. So much music today is so dense and thick, with a lot of beats and loops and programs and samples. For me personally, the most revolutionary thing I can do is play unaccompanied, loud electric guitar." His affection for stripped-down r-a-w-k rock only hints at the irony of his latest album title, "Overdub," his second release for Lava-Atlantic Records. A chunkier, rougher record than the previous two — "This Euphoria," his dreamy debut for Atlantic, and "Kingdom Come and Go," a solo acoustic record on Garza's own Wide Open Records label -- "Overdub" symbolizes more personal philosophy than studio trickery. "A lot of what I've done over the last 10 years is overdub things. You know, there's a redemptive idea in overdubbing. Spiritually, lyrically — as I'm growing older I start looking at how to fix things in my life, similar to the recording process. It's not as clean in real life. You don't get to fix your mistakes by patching in an overdub," Garza said. "This album sounds rougher basically because I got to produce it. I had the time and the budget, and I got to work with bassist Doug Wimbish (Tackhead, Sugarhill Gang) and drummer Will Calhoun (Living Colour). When those guys step, the earth shakes. That sound is the crumbling of buildings as they're ringing their terror in the tracks. We got a bold, old rock sound — just three humans playing in a circle. "It's different from the way most albums are made, and have been made for since '92 or '93 — the whole building of tracks, not necessarily the performance of a song. It starts with that perfect time loop, over which the drummer plays some funky drums. Then the bass player stops playing Nintendo and puts in his line. Then you call the guitar player on his cell phone and tell him to come in do his guitar parts. Then you wait for your special guest stars to come in from the limo. The way this was done was we three guys shook hands and started playing rock 'n' roll. `Bloodsuckers' was the first thing we played together, and I said, `Oh yeah, this is going to work.' " There were a few guest stars in this process, though -- Craig Ross, a fellow Austin rocker who contributes much of the six-string stomp heard on his phenomenal 1996 release "Dead Spy Report" and everybody's favorite lovelorn indie waif, Juliana Hatfield, whose bright voice adds to the lilt of "Keep on Crying." For now, though, Garza's on the road by himself, standing on the shoulders of giants even though his sound is just as tall. "Like I said, I can turn it up on this tour," he said, "and man, if I can make your ears bleed, I'll go for it." Matchbox 20, Train and Garza play at 7 p.m. Wednesday (Sept 12) at the Myriad Convention Center in Oklahoma City. Call (405) 297-3300 for information and tickets, or buy tickets online at www.tickets.com. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Before going on the air, Davit Souders mentions this band from Coffeyville that's been bugging him — in a good way. They're called Pheb:ate, they've got a fresh debut CD and for the last several weeks the band and its small legion of supporters from the Kansas border have been tying up the phone lines during Souders' late-night local music radio show, "Home Groan," begging him to play something from the new CD. "These crazy kids," Souders says, "they still want to get on the ol' radio." So the show starts — 11 p.m. sharp, as it does every Sunday night on KMYZ 104.5-FM — and pretty soon the phone lines are blinking again. This time, though, one of them is a cellular call. The producer patches it into the studio speakers. "Look out the window!" cries a jubilant young woman through the satellite static. We go to the window and eight floors down in the parking lot is a gaggle of young'uns, waving hysterically and brandishing an acoustic guitar. For the next half hour, the crowd grows, and the young woman on hold keeps begging to be allowed into the studio. At one point, things get a little loony, with the band's female fans so eager to show their support that they show, well, more of themselves than their mommas would have appreciated. It's one video camera away from becoming "Home Groan Girls Gone Wild." Souders — a true rock 'n' roll warrior, but a businessman who enjoys at least a modicum of control — eventually relents, and the band is ushered upstairs for a quick on-air chat and an impromptu performance in the studio. After the show, the whole group hangs outside and plays guitar, confident their assertiveness has scored them a major marketing triumph. "That's as pure as it gets in my book, right there," Souders says later that night. "I mean, Jim Halsey (local music entrepreneur) is always talking about the psychic payoff musicians get from things like this. Boom — there it is on those faces right there. Because when it comes down to it, it's not really about money and girls and sales figures, it's about getting played. It's about getting to feel like the work you've put into something means something, anything, to even one little radio host like me." In the nearly six years he's been hosting "Home Groan," a weekly show dedicated to Tulsa-area original music, Souders has been buttered up by bands hoping to score a spin on his show. They know when he's due on the air, and sometimes they lie in wait in that same parking lot outside the station, thrusting CDs in his hand and sometimes a pizza or two — learning early lessons of salesmanship the hard way. As America's — and Tulsa's — radio landscape becomes more vanilla, monochromatic and pre-recorded, "Home Groan" has survived as a refreshing oasis, largely due to madcap moments like this one. More importantly, though, is the influence the show has maintained — the impact radio airplay (even in the worst possible timeslot, late on a Sunday night) has on the evolutionary spark of a local and regional artistic scene. Why else would two or three dozen kids from Coffeyville drive an hour in the dark of night to harass an innocent DJ? Souders, of course, is more than a DJ. He's been formulating fiendish local concerts as Diabolical Productions for more than a decade, having worked hand-in-hand for several years at the Cain's Ballroom when Larry Shaeffer was there, and having owned and operated his own nightclub, Ikon, in three Tulsa locations. He's also a musician, once a member of a local band called Lynx and currently singing for a revolving forum of local players called D.D.S. He even makes his own kilts, but perhaps that's another story (best told by the accompanying photo). His radio career began in the eighth grade in the late '70s, when he was the voice of Tulsa Public Schools lunch menus on KAKC. For this duty — reading the advance warnings of tomorrow's institutional slop — he created an on-air personality called Dr. Psycho Fanatic. Everything you need to know about Souders (other than his obsessions with Elvis Presley and his idol, Alan Freed) likely is summed up in this fact: to this day, the Dr. Psycho Fanatic gig is still on his resume. From 1990 to 1994, Souders hosted the "Teknopolis" electronic music show, which bounced between three different local stations. In '96, he picked up the "Home Groan" gig, replacing its original host, Admiral Twin drummer-singer Jarrod Gollihare. He has certainly made the show his own. In particular, he has been instrumental in applying the show's brand to occasional "Home Groan" "low-dough" concerts featuring local bands as well as two "Home Groan" CD compilations. The former have been especially illustrative of the show's success. "We had a show at Cain's a couple of years ago where we had about 500 kids," Souders said. "Of course, I emcee a la Alan Freed, and you know I end all the radio shows with my little catchphrase: 'I'm not evil, I'm just Diabolical.' So I get up on stage at this show and say, 'I'm not evil, I'm just . . .' and the bulk of the crowd shouts, 'Diabolical!' I was blown away." Souders hopes to one day produce another CD compilation, probably of live performances from those low-dough shows, but the plans to reopen Ikon are in the deep freeze. Meanwhile, Diabolical continues bringing interesting shows to Tulsa. But Souders is clearly in his element behind the microphone, scratching his head underneath the trademark bandana and directing a new band into the public arena. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World When Dwight Twilley released "Tulsa" in 1999 — his first album of new material in more than a decade, his ninth in a quarter-century — the CD garnered high critical praise (and won him two Spot Music Awards), particularly in Europe where critics and fans snatched up the disc indignantly, practically scolding Twilley for being absent from music-making all those years. Little did they know — he was absent from the record-store shelves but not from studios. In the early '90s, before moving back to Tulsa from Los Angeles, Twilley — who scored Top 20 hits with "I'm on Fire" in 1975 and "Girls" in 1984 — recorded an album of new material and called it "The Luck." Ironically, the album had no luck at all. Producer Richie Podolor wasn't happy with the offers he received for the album from record labels, and the tapes wound up shelved, written off and eventually forgotten. Now "The Luck" is seeing daylight due to a sequence of happy windfalls — the critical success of "Tulsa," the formation of his own record company (the Big Oak Recording Group, named for the most prominent feature in Twilley's midtown Tulsa front lawn), and the addition of the Dwight Twilley Band to the eligibility list for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "The Luck" will be released internationally on Tuesday. "It's been very frustrating to have these songs collecting dust," Twilley said in a recent interview. "I think it's a really serious studio record." Some of the tracks from "The Luck" have shaken off that dust in the last couple of years, appearing on the Twilley rarities collection "Between the Cracks, Vol. 1." The title track was re-recorded for "Tulsa," "because I think it's a good song and I thought it would never come out," Twilley said. Fortunately, Twilley's brand of rock 'n' roll — rootsy in the tradition of a meaty, Sun Records backbeat and classic in the sense of the purest pop classicism a la the Beatles -- is so timeless that "The Luck" still sounds as fresh as the day it was recorded. Even the song with Tom Petty's backing vocals — from tapes that are much older. "Petty's on another album of mine and he probably doesn't even know it," Twilley chuckles. "When he came in to do 'Girls' with me (in 1984), we also cut a song called 'Forget About It Baby.' I discovered those tapes while I was working on 'The Luck' and — since I never let a good song go — decided to redo some of the drums. I always loved the song but I hated what the producers did to it. Then we redid the bass, and then this and then that. Now the only thing remaining from the original sessions are my and Tom's voices." Twilley's first outing to promote the "new" album is a doozy: on Sept. 28, he's headlining the Serie-B pop festival in Calahorra, Spain. Other acts on the eclectic pop-rock bill include Mudhoney, Bevis Frond, Cotton Mather and Death Cab for Cutie. The new band assembled for the show includes Dave White and Bill Padgett (the Nashville Rebels behind local rockabilly stud Brian Parton), Jerry Naifeh (original percussionist for the Dwight Twilley Band), guitarist Tom Hanford and bassist Sean Standing Bear. Despite the European success of Twilley's band and solo efforts in the past, this will be his first-ever European performance. "We recorded over there, but we never played live," Twilley said. "Clive (Davis, former head of Arista Records) had this policy not to play his acts there. And last year, we did this press tour across the continent behind `Tulsa,' and the first question out of every journalist's mouth was, 'When are you coming?'" That media tour opened Twilley's eyes to the differences between American and European music markets — as well as the rebirth of his own popularity there. One music-industry representative in England floored Twilley by informing him that he had named his son after him, James for James Paul McCartney and Dwight for Dwight Twilley. "Sitting down personally with the press over there, it becomes immediately apparent that there's still a deep appreciation for the pop song there," Twilley said. "When I was a kid in the music business, the philosophy was, 'I'll give 'em the record they can't refuse.' That's all disappeared here in America. The song is no longer the focal point. It's the packaging. The song won't save you here anymore. The business has gotten too big. There are great bands writing great songs over there, and they're getting by on those songs. And, I mean, they're still talking about great acts like Paul Revere and the Raiders. Who over here still knows who they were?" One American honor has edged within reach, though. This year, the Dwight Twilley Band — the original mid-'70s lineup, which included the late Phil Seymour, a local pop talent of equal stature — has become eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "There's no letter or announcement for that kind of thing. You just suddenly appear on the magic list. All of a sudden we were getting tons of e-mails from people saying, 'Congratulations!' and we had no idea what we'd done," Twilley said. "I figured no one would remember me. I'm honored to just be on the list." Other new eligibles include Bruce Springsteen, the Sex Pistols and Blondie. "Some people campaign for that, you know. They write letters and take out ads and really push to get inducted," Twilley said, then paused. "I'm a little too busy for that." After the jaunt to Spain, Twilley said he hopes to begin recording a proper follow-up to "Tulsa." The album won Best National Album and Twilley won Artist of the Year at the first Spot Music Awards. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World It's a warm October night in Manhattan, and whenever the doors open at the Irving Plaza a swirling racket spills into the street, turning heads on 14th Street and in Union Square. A light crowd is milling around inside the Cain's Ballroom-sized music hall. They're New Yorkers, they're cool, sophisticated, surprised by nothing and amused by everything. But the poker faces are falling, and the kids are — gasp! — dancing. "Jesus!" exclaims one young man the second he lays his eyes on Brian Haas, who's wincing as if he's just been stabbed and pounding out his pain on his poor Fender Rhodes piano. "What the (heck) is his problem?" he asks. Thing is, the man's smiling as he asks this — wonderment rather than annoyance — and for the next half hour he hardly moves a muscle, riveted by the sonic freakout on stage. His girlfriend catches up to him midway through the set, her face contorting in horrible confusion. Her little mental label-gun is misfiring, unable to classify the data flooding her aural inputs. She stammers for a moment, then says, to no one in particular, "That's . . . that's . . . crazy. My God . . ." "What did he say? What are they called?" the man asks, with a hint of desperation, afraid to let the moment slip away without obtaining some kind of quantifiable information. "That," I interject, proudly, "is the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey." • • • Back in Tulsa, just two weeks ago. The living room floor of Brian Haas's house is lined with six slumping sacks full of provisions procured from Wild Oats Market. The coffee table is stacked with nutritional supplements, organic soaps and plastic bottles labeled "herbal liquid." It's almost midnight, and the band needs to blow Tulsa by 3 a.m. in order to make tomorrow's gig in Indianapolis. They've been home a day and a half. Haas sighs. "There's still cooking to do, too," he says. He points to the herbal liquid bottles. "That's the fuel of the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey right there," he says, in perfect earnest. "It's all about nutrition. We eat well, we keep ourselves healthy while we're on the road — that's what keeps us getting along, keeps us happy." On the dashboard of the band van is a dog-eared copy of The Tofu Tollbooth, a book detailing the location of every health-food store in America. Turning debaucherous rock 'n' roll road myths on their heads, when the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey boys hit a new town they make a beeline for the bee pollen, throwing back wheatgrass shots at the juice bar instead of whiskey shots at the beer hall. "We're wheatgrass connoisseurs now," chuckles bassist Reed Mathis. "We can tell the difference between sun-bloomed and fluorescent-grown." They've even written two new songs about their daily focus: "Daily Wheatgrass Shots Burned a Brand-New Pathway Through My Brain" and "The FDA Has Made Our Food Worse Than Drugs." "They're instrumentals, of course, but they still get the message out about healing yourself," Haas says. "Goes hand in hand with music, right? Especially ours." • • • The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey certainly couldn't be healthier. Two years ago the band trimmed down from a seven-piece to a trio before signing a management contract that's kept them jogging around the country constantly ever since. The incessant touring has paid off in supple, sinewy new tunes — and a new recording contract. The band is currently in negotiation with the independent Shanachie Entertainment label for a six-CD contract. The trio these days comprises two founding members — Haas and Mathis — and a new drummer, Richard Haas, younger brother of Brian. Richard joined the group in April, replacing original percussionist Matt Edwards, who's now making films in the Tulsa area. (The band's name comes from Brian's CB handle when he was a tot. Alas, there is no Jacob Fred.) The two brothers have played together off and on since grade school — in fact, the first-ever incarnation of the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey was this trio jamming at the Haas home after homework had been completed — and Brian credits the "spiritual unity" of playing with his lil' bro with the bigger and bigger crowds showing up to Jacob Fred shows around the country. "Richard is so simple, so primal. He comes out of that African school of drumming where the role of the drum is to get you dancing," Brian said in a recent interview. "It has really freed Reed and I to get into this free-jazz freakout, but at the same time, everybody's dancing. We've finally mastered the best of both worlds." The crowds are, indeed, growing. Some clubs, including the Irving Plaza, ask all patrons who they've come to see each night; that way they can determine whether or not the opening act was a significant draw. At that October show, there were 15 people who'd come especially to see the Jacob Fred trio. When the boys returned to the same venue four months later, the tally was 130. "We've refused to dumb it down or do anything the music industry has asked us to do, and yet people keep coming out," Brian said, with no small amount of wonder at his band's luck. • • • It's not all luck, though. The Jacob Fred formula — if there could possibly be a construct to the band's free-form musical journeys — takes the strength and will of Medeski, Martin and Wood and spreads it like seedy, all-fruit jam (organic, of course) across the improvisational landscape terraced by jazz pioneers from Mingus to Monk. The word "unique" is often applied lightly in music, but these wide-eyed, intense young men fashion songs and shows that attract all the benefits of that word and none of the guilt. It's paying off, too — the record deal, the booking contract with the London-based Agency Group, numerous high-profile opening slots (most recently Tower of Power, Mike Clark, Project Logic), an average of 200 mp3 downloads daily from band's web site, and nominations for Artist of the Year at the Spot Music Awards every year thus far. But more than physical gains, these three musicians are high on their own creative energies. "Remember the song 'Good Energy Perpetuates Good Energy' from the 'Live in Tokyo' CD?" Brian asked. "For the first time, we're realizing that every single night. But then, playing 25 shows a month from coast to coast kind of forces your music to evolve. Really fast." Funny thing about that old CD, too, the "Live in Tokyo" set. It was recorded here in Tulsa — at the Eclipse, no less — but the band soon might actually make it to Japan. "I started noticing this Japanese couple at every one of our shows," Mathis said. "In New York and in California, it turns out they flew out to see us. They were flipping out, they loved us. They said, `We've got to get you guys to Japan.' We're supposed to have distribution (for the CD) over there by next spring, and these are people who've brought other bands over before. They were shocked to hear we hadn't been before. They heard `Live in Tokyo' and believed it." The band's current CD of new material is "Self Is Gone," its title swiped from a Tulsa World headline about the disembarking of a University of Tulsa coach. Also available is "Bloom," a compilation from the band's early albums spanning '96 to '98, plus several previously unreleased tracks. JACOB FRED JAZZ ODYSSEY with And There Stand Empires, the Mad Laugh and Brad James and the Organic Boogie Band When 8 p.m. Friday Where Curly's, 216 N. Elgin Ave. Admission $7 at the door BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World He was the quiet one, but the silence he has left behind has carved a cavern in the Tulsa music scene that will not be easily filled. Sean Layton, 29, an immensely talented Tulsa drummer, died last weekend, ending a career that invigorated the creative spirits of countless local musicians and music fans. A funeral took place Monday morning, but the real tribute occurred that night at Living Arts of Tulsa when dozens of Layton's friends and fellow musicians — one and the same, in most cases — conducted a drumming circle in Layton's memory. Layton was the first drummer for the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey. After leaving the band in '99, he joined Steve Pryor's Neighbors, which also included Jacob Fred bassist Reed Mathis (who is already planning a retrospective tribute CD of Layton's songs). Until several months ago, Layton was ubiquitous in the Tulsa music scene, providing the pulse for projects from Mummy Weenie to Leslie Brown. I have interviewed Layton maybe a half dozen times. He rarely spoke up, but when he did, it always mattered. It was usually the last word on a particular subject. I remember a typically circuitous interview with all seven members of Jacob Fred, a discussion of the band's reasons for recording all of its records live. Layton seized a rare pause in the harangue and said, "We're just a live band and there's nothing we can do about it." End of discussion. For Layton, that's how life and music was — a spiritual compulsion. He spoke little about his art, choosing to channel all those things he couldn't do anything about into his drumming and singing. His work on kits for the Neighbors was certainly enough, but in that band he began to expand his talents into composing and singing. His voice was unmistakable — a lot of Leon Redbone and a little Charlie Brown. He sang beautiful lyrics capturing his awe at everything from the majesty of a forest to the dancers in "Stomp." It's those positive messages his friends will remember most. "I went and looked at my bookshelf after I heard that he died," said Jacob Fred keyboardist Brian Haas this week. "There are at least 30 titles in there that he gave to me. He spread so much knowledge and goodness in his life. He also introduced me to so many people I know in the Tulsa music scene. He affected my life in ways that will always be remembered and deeply, deeply appreciated." As a mere listener, I am cautious about claiming that a musician affected my life as deeply as he did a fellow player. Then again, those of us in the crowd are who they're making the music for, and it is their mission to affect us. Layton never failed to lift my spirit, and I rest easier believing at least that his is now lifted as high as it can go. This post contains complete reviews of this annual festival ...
Community, kin embrace annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival BY THOMAS CONNER 07/14/2001 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — Arlo Guthrie drove into town by himself in a pickup truck. Before he appeared on stage Wednesday night here at the Crystal Theater, Woody Guthrie's younger sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, insisted the audience sing "Happy Birthday" to him, his 54th birthday having been Tuesday. Like a good relative, he grinned and bore it, waving to the crowd. A young woman behind me sighed and chuckled, "It's a family affair tonight." And every night this weekend. That comment nailed the overriding spirit of this year's Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, the fourth annual folk music celebration in the late balladeer's hometown organized by the intra-state Woody Guthrie Coalition. It's all about family -- immediate, extended and created. The first two rows at Wednesday night's tribute concert were full of Guthrie relatives. Don Conoscenti and Ellis Paul shared the stage that night, and Conoscenti ribbed Paul about his new haircut; they've spent the week tagging around town together as if they were actually brothers. As fans arrive in the campground and at the various Okemah venues, there are numerous jubilant reunions of old friends, many of whom see each other once a year -- at this festival. Larry Long, who is scheduled to perform on the main stage Saturday night, said in a conversation earlier this week that this family feeling is exactly why this festival has remained successful in these early years. Long, an Iowa native, struggled with a Woody Guthrie tribute concert in 1989 here in Okemah, when the town was still somewhat divided over honoring its hometown hero (a dispute that arose because of the communist company Guthrie sometimes kept in the 40s). "This festival has a great capacity to do good work and honor the place that Okemah is," Long said. "When we were trying it, that's what we wanted to achieve: to make this a celebration of the traditions that nurtured Woody, his sense of love of community and place and the family traditions that make places like Okemah so delightful." A sense of community and a laid-back spirit made Wednesday night's tribute concert all the more enjoyable. For the first time in the festival's four years, though, the Wednesday night show had a handful of empty seats, largely because previous kick-off shows have featured big-name talent. This year the Wednesday fund-raiser was the annual tribute concert modeled after the bi-coastal tributes following Guthrie's death in 1967. Nearly two dozen performers cycled through the show, performing Guthrie songs between readings of Guthrie's prose. But the lack of mega-commercial giants on the historic Crystal stage hardly dampened the energy or worth of the ticket. Instead, performers and audience were able to let their hair down and experience the occasional magic that occurs when everyone laughs and thinks, "Well, we're all family here." Of course, when a reviewer begins carping about the laid-back spirit of a performance, that usually means the sound system was bad and the performers forgot some words and there were some production mistakes. Some and maybe all of these things were true Wednesday night. The crucial difference is that nothing seriously derailed the show -- or the moments of magic -- and if there's somebody out there complaining I'd be real surprised. The first magic moment came early, on the fourth song. Conoscenti and Paul together sang Guthrie's eerie portrait of a Vigilante Man, accompanied only by Conoscenti's Kokopeli-painted banjo. He played the song with a ghostly tension and foreboding, and Paul's piercing harmony gave it an unearthly feel. The song marched like a posse through the darkness, evoking Stephen Stills live performances of "Black Queen." They kept their eyes locked on each other from start to finish -- who knows if they'd ever performed this together before? -- and the audience barely breathed. The second breath-taker was nicely balanced, the fourth song from the end. Mary Reynolds, a native of Oklahoma City, played and sang "Hobo's Lullaby." It's not as important to say that she played the song as it is to say she sang it. Reynold's voice is a clarion call, a beautiful and controlled birdsong, and with the help of two friends backing her with harmonies, the performance was as if three angels were hovering over a lonely hobo in a dank boxcar, their voices alone filling him with hope. Those were the jaw-droppers. Other great moments included Slaid Cleaves' chilling reading of "1913 Massacre," a festival repeat that never gets old; a fiery (but not brimstony) run through "Jesus Christ" by the versatile and spunky trio Still on the Hill; and the playful -- and only barely cheesey -- dialogue between the Farm Couple on "Philadelphia Lawyer." After the all-star finales -- with every performer from the night crammed on the stage for "Hard Travelin'" (jumpstarted by Paul, who belts it out with gusto), "Oklahoma Hills" and "This Land Is Your Land" -- half the audience hung around chatting and meeting the musicians. The theater sweepers eventually had to shove people out the door. There was no boundary between star and fan, no rushing off to an ivory tour bus. This is folk music, after all, and the folks gathered here this weekend are one big family. Audience heats up on opening evening BY THOMAS CONNER 07/14/2001 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — Pity the band with that first set. It's Thursday evening at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival -- on an outdoor stage, in July, in Oklahoma, for Pete's sake -- the sun's still high enough in the sky to make misery, and nobody is fool enough to be out in the heat. Well, some folks were. A dedicated stage crew and about 30 fans when the first band started. "What in tarnation are we doing out here?" asked a fan to no one in particular. By the time Xavier finished its opening set, though, the crowd was coming on, hauling lawn chairs and fans into the field where the Pastures of Plenty main stage looms. By the time the Red Dirt Rangers brought down the rafters, the audience was several hundred strong. Xavier is the band featuring Abe Guthrie -- son of Arlo Guthrie and thus grandson of the festival's honored namesake. They've come a long way, baby. What was once a clunky and often ill-advised heavy metal band has matured over the last decade into a tight and buoyant Southern-sounding rock band. The quartet opened the main stage festival by singing an a cappella version of the Beatles' "Nowhere Man," no doubt a ringer in their repertoire but an ironic opening to the festival; the song describes an anonymous slacker who couldn't be more the reverse of Woody Guthrie's do-or-die gumption. The rest of the band's set chugged ahead unfettered, maintaining the same sharp harmonies through rootsy rock that see-sawed between Alabama's rockin' side and Little Feat's country side. But the heat was getting to them, too. "We're from Massachusetts, so this hundred degrees is a bit different for us," guitarist Randy Cormier said from the stage. "We just shoveled out our last bit of snow up there." As the sun dipped behind the Okemah hill, the Thursday night main stage bill continued to shine. Grammy-winner Pierce Pettis slipped by, and Lucy Kaplansky (who's performed with everyone, from Shawn Colvin and Dar Williams to John Gorka and Bill Morrissey) played a beautiful, subdued set, which included a surprising cover of Roxy Music's "More Than This." Slaid Cleaves moseyed his way through a batch of songs that further proves he is one of the most talented singers out of Austin, Texas (if not the reincarnation of Cisco Houston himself). He led off with his current hit, "Broke Down," before singing a character sketch of a very colorful character. The song included a couple of yodels, which both generated their own applause. When fellow Austin musician Darcie Deaville joined him onstage, she ribbed him about the yodeling. "I got that from Don Walser," Cleaves said, and the two of them then played a Walser tune. Cleaves later added his own, festival-centric verses to Guthrie's "I Aint Got No Home" and then closed with a haunting, pre-"Mermaid Avenue" collaboration with Guthrie: Cleaves' tune to a 1940 Guthrie lyric, "This Morning I Was Born Again." The Red Dirt Rangers closed the show with their usual backbeat, once again being the first festival act to get audience members on their feet dancing. They opened with "Rangers Command," a groove-greased Guthrie original and the title track from their latest album. Later, they played a tune by the late Benny Craig, a former Ranger and a much-missed and talented multi-instrumentalist. The tune, called "Leave This World a Better Place," was unusually funky for Craig -- or was that the Rangers? -- but its lyrical sentiments were perfect for a festival honoring a scrappy songwriter who tried his utmost to leave the world just so. Off-stage activities sometimes outshine headliners BY THOMAS CONNER 07/17/2001 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — The Woody Guthrie Folk Festival has grown substantially in its four years, so much so that the experience involves much more than the evening headliners in the pasture. Music and other activities continue throughout the day, especially on the weekend. Here's a round-up of some of the magic moments from around Woody Guthries hometown this weekend: It's not in the brochure This festival offers an awful lot of music for the hungry folk fan, but there's even more available than fans find printed in the official schedule. Sometimes the best shows of the week occur at about 4 in the morning in the parking lot of the OK Motor Lodge. That's the only motel in town, and during the festival it's full of musicians and concert organizers. Musicians often live by the slogan, "I'll sleep when I'm dead," so when they get home after the night's gigs, many of them pull lawn chairs into a corner of the parking lot and swap songs until dawn. Friday night (er, Saturday morning), for instance, found Jimmy LaFave, Bill Erickson, Bob Childers, Terry Ware, Emily Kaitz, members of Xavier and scattered Red Dirt Rangers camped out with several fans and budding musicians softly strumming tunes in the cool July night. Kaitz had her stand-up bass on the blacktop and lightened the mood early on with a song about bass players taking over the world and righting its fret-ful wrongs. Erickson tried unsuccessfully to lead a sing-along ("I guess they're too tired," he later muttered; of course, he actually said tarred), and LaFave coursed the group through "You Ain't Going Nowhere." Dawn usually found a handful of these desperados still fumbling through "Sweet Home Alabama." Coffee, black as night Those all-night parking-lot sessions take their toll, though, when you're scheduled to perform the next morning. Of course, 12:40 p.m. isn't morning to most of us, but it's the crack of dawn to most guitar-slingers. Bob Childers needed a lot of coffee Friday morning. His early afternoon set at the Brick Street Cafi may have been slow going at first, but Green Country native Childers is armed with a wily charm that squeezed through his own squinting eyes. Thanks to a Brick Street waitress who kept his coffee mug topped off on stage ("I'm loving you right now," Childers said as she poured him coffee at the microphone, "I'm gonna write a song about you"), the early-bird crowd learned or was reminded of Childer's tall talents as a songwriter. He muddled his way through original classics such as "Sweet Okie Girl," "Restless Spirit" and his appropriate finale, the eloquent "Woody's Road." Just when he thought he was off to bed, the crowd hooted for an encore, a rarity on the afternoon indoor stages. Can I see some I.D.? At this or any other music festival, the surest way to find great performers is to follow the performers. See the shows the musicians see, and your eyes and ears will rarely be sore. Case in point: the crowd for Dustin Pittsley was practically half the festival roster. Pittsley is another hot blues phenom, a teenager fresh out of Chandler High School. He recently placed third in the "Jam With Kenny Wayne Shepherd" contest, and his looks and licks are dead ringers for that blues guitar upper classman. He wailed on an acoustic guitar Saturday afternoon inside the Brick Street Cafi while pal Smiley Dryden huffed on harmonica and main-stage star Kevin Bowe sat in on a few of Pittsley's groove-jammed originals. A name to know. A harp with no strings "We got accused once of being a bluegrass band," said DoublNotSpyz singer John Williams midway through the band's Friday set at the Brick Street Cafi. "We had all the instruments. It was an easy mistake." He then launches into a song with a Jew's harp solo. Easy mistake, indeed. The DoublNotSpyz (ask a "Beverly Hillbillies" fan to explain the name) are more than mere bluegrass, though, and Williams is often the proof. He was tapped as a favorite harmonica player throughout the festival, especially during Wednesday night's tribute concert and that's the instrument through which he rocks the hardest. He's more interesting to listen to than big-shots like Blues Traveler's John Popper because Williams wailing isn't just self-aggrandizing improvisation; Williams sticks by the melody being steered by singer and co-songwriter Larry Spears and keeps his audience in the song, not the spotlight. His harp-heaving alone received a standing ovation Friday. Coming into his own Austin-based singer-songwriter Michael Fracasso started his set Saturday afternoon in the Crystal Theater with his poignant, droning reflection on the 1950s, and he ended with a song called "1962." The timespan framed him well: his naked, honest songs are deeply rooted in that era of folk music's second great revival, the same era that inspired a young Dylan. In white T-shirt and cuffed blue jeans, Fracasso's rugged Rust Belt looks belied his sensitive nature. It's that sensitivity that produces such beautifully crafted original songs ("Wise Blood," inspired by the novel "The Last Temptation of Christ," was enormously uplifting) and is able to tap into vast new realms of emotion buried deep within old songs. His reading of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre," for instance, is a masterpiece of vocal and acoustic dynamics. I've heard that song and even his rendition of it dozens of times, but I must confess: Saturday's performance of it flooded my eyelids more than a bit. That's how folk songs stay alive in the hearts of the people. Everything's new, again This happens every year, and Friday afternoon was no different. A young guy or his girlfriend stumble wide-eyed down Okemah's bustling Main Street. They're brand new to the festival, no doubt, and they stop a stranger to ask about the goings-on. Then one of them asks, from a well of perfect innocence, "So when does Woody Guthrie perform?" Woody, we hardly knew ye. Woody Guthrie Festival draws together friends and family BY THOMAS CONNER 07/17/2001 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — Near the end of his Saturday night set headlining the Pastures of Plenty main stage, Arlo Guthrie, son of the namesake of this weeks Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, started a sweet old tune by one of his dad's friends, Leadbelly. "There've been enough people playing songs by my dad. I'd like to play a song by one of his friends. That's kind of what this festival is about a festival of friends," Guthrie said. Indeed, the four-day festival this year glowed with the jubilation of reunited friends and renewed family ties, in the audience and backstage. Some company used to offer a long-distance calling plan called "Friends and Family," and this fourth Woody Guthrie Folk Festival could have flown that same banner. The unseasonably cool and clear weather, which came through late Thursday night -- just before the festival schedule reached its full intensity outdoors -- aided both attitude and attendance. Friday and Saturday shows at the outdoor stage were crowded, despite organizers nervousness about not having a big name on the festival bill this year. All that big-name talk is more than a little insulting to Arlo, though, who is hardly a slouch. For a festival honoring his late folksinging father, he's plenty big enough and clearly draws and holds a large crowd. Austin songwriter Jimmy LaFave mentioned during his Friday night set that he wishes the festival were called the Woody and Arlo Guthrie Folk Festival. Arlo has performed at each Guthrie festival thus far and has remained dedicated to the gathering, which brings together a good chunk of his relatives, too. After his performance at Wednesday night's tribute concert, he hardly had time to talk to fans and media; there were too many relatives to greet. For Arlo, this is a family affair, in every respect. In fact, backing him up Saturday night was Xavier, the band featuring Arlos son, Abe. (Sara Lee, Arlos daughter who thrilled audiences at last years festival, could not attend this year because she's finishing an album.) Xavier had opened the outdoor stage on Thursday night with a powerful blend of homey harmonies and taut rock, which beefed up Arlos songs considerably. We've heard Arlo strumming and wheezing through his songs so many years now that we forget how tightly they usually are written and how easily they can rock if given to the right band. The Xavier boys gave Arlo some muscle and breadth through "Coming to Los Angeles," "Chilling of the Evening" (which opened the show as a tribute to the weather, perhaps?), and a springy version of the blues classic "St. James Infirmary." Preceding Arlo was the Joel Rafael Band, another family affair. Playing violin for her dad was Jamaica Rafael, who also sang a creeping and eventually moving version of Woody's "Pastures of Plenty." Joel sang a few Guthrie songs with his inimitable patience and grace, as well as his talking tune about his first visit to Okemah and this festival a few years ago. The song describes his surprise upon being unable to find a parking space outside of Lou's Rocky Road Tavern in Okemah that first night. As a result of the song and the familial friendship kindled between Joel and Lou, there's a sign up outside the bar reserving a space especially for him in perpetuity. Friday nights main-stage lineup was almost one big clique. Vance Gilbert, Don Conoscenti and Ellis Paul have been close friends for several years now, and they played the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival this year one after another, in that order. "We hardly ever get to play together, or even see each other for long stretches of time, being out on the road as much as we are," Paul said Saturday afternoon. From the stage Friday night, after inviting Conoscenti to join him for a couple of songs (including "3,000 Miles"), Paul said, "I haven't played with Don in about six months. It's a lot like not having sex for six months." Go ahead, snicker, but these guys really think that much of each other. Gilbert even performed a song he had written years ago for Paul, a semi-bitter broken-hearted lament about Paul's plans to move from their Boston base to Nashville. Its an amazing song, "Taking It All to Nashville," expressing deep love between two (heterosexual) men, and it was the jewel of Gilbert's set. "I'm not mad at him anymore," Gilbert said from the stage after finishing the song. "He moved back to Boston." Gilbert's performance was amazingly powerful. He dished the sass between songs, joking that "LaFave sounded blacker than I do, like a cross between Bob Dylan and Al Green," but his songs couldn't be sweeter or more delicately constructed. His voice is like butter, and when he was called back for an encore -- not a given occurrence at this festival, by any means -- he showcased it by stepping into the audience, sans microphone, and singing a moving myth called "The King of Rome." He is definitely a new member of the festival family. Oddly enough, though, for all the spirit of camaraderie and family, I never heard anyone on stage Saturday night, the festival's climax, wish Woody a happy 89th birthday. That is, after all, the reason this festival occurs in the hottest possible part of the summer; Woody Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912. If the festival maintains the strength it enjoyed this year (on what organizers thought might be a slow year), he may be reborn again every July in a pasture west of his old hometown. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Kevin Bowe and his band, the Okemah Prophets, performed in Okemah for the first time at last year's Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. They lucked out with an indoor cafe show during the heat of an afternoon, and their Ramblin' Jack Elliott-meets-the Replacements songs bowled over a crowd of Guthrie fans, including Guthrie cohort (and last year's headliner) Pete Seeger. After the Prophets' fiery set, Seeger even remarked, "That's different, but of course I like it." Kevin Bowe and his band will be back at the Woody Guthrie Festival this week -- with a high-profile slot on the outdoor main stage Saturday night -- and Bowe says he's eager to return. His road to Okemah from his native Minneapolis has been a long and winding one (appropriately for an acolyte of the festival's namesake) and owes its coming full circle to the magic of the Internet. Last year, one of the festival organizers entered "Okemah" into an online search engine just to see what returns would come up; suddenly he was reading about this Minneapolis-based band called the Okemah Prophets and led by a widely acclaimed songwriter (who's written for the likes of Jonny Lang, Leo Kottke, Peter Case, Chuck Prophet, Delbert McClinton and more). Two phone calls later, they were booked. In an interview from his Minnesota home this week, Bowe retraced his circuitous route from young punk to Guthrie-influenced songwriter and band leader. TC: How and when did you discover Woody? KB: Well, I'm 40 years old. My musical coming of age was in the '70s. Music had gotten so awful by the late '70s with the corporatization of rock. I mean, I first listened to radio as a young teen, when FM was freeform and had no playlists. You'd hear Led Zeppelin segue into John Prine. The first record I bought was by Taj Mahal because I'd heard it on the radio and liked it. By the late '70s it was all Foreigner and Heart, and I felt very disenfranchised by the shift. So I started listening to older music. I discovered country through this weird genealogy: "Exile on Main Street" (by the Rolling Stones) has pedal steel on it, and investigating that I found Gram Parson, and through that discovered the Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," and then you get to Hank Williams Sr. and it's all over. I probably discovered Woody through Bob Dylan. I mean, I'm a Jewish guy from Minnesota -- who else am I going to be listening to, right? TC: What grabbed you about Woody's music, though? KB: By the time I discovered Woody Guthrie, I was more of a songwriter than a band guy. I was focused on writing more than performing. That's what grabbed me about him. In the introduction to (Guthrie's novel) "Bound for Glory," Pete Seeger says that any damn fool can write complicated, but it takes a genius to write simple. Also, the humor in Woody's stuff -- that grim humor. TC: The sense of humor is crucial to understanding Woody. Someone mentioned to me the other day that the reason they don't like the film of "Bound for Glory" is that David Carradine (who played Guthrie) has no sense of humor. KB: Sure. I mean, it seems to me like Woody Guthrie was having a great time. He was pissed about certain things, and rightfully so, but he was all about having a good time while bringing down the man, you know? ... I was reminded of Woody a little bit recently when I was watching a bio-pic of Abbie Hoffman called "Steal This Movie." I rented it because I have a song in it, which I just found out about. Anyway, I'd always regarded Hoffman as a bit of a clown, but this movie's position was that he was into using humor to bring down the corrupt forces in government. That reminded me of Woody. TC: Tell me why you wound up primarily a songwriter instead of a front man. KB: When you pick up a guitar at 13, you don't think, "My goal is to make a living writing songs for people younger and more talented than me." I've been in moderately successful bands, but when you hit 30 and the people you went to high school with are becoming really successful, you start to evaluate your strengths. I was sitting there going nowhere, playing in a bar one night, and there was a producer in the audience named David Z (Prince, Jonny Lang). He talked to me afterward and said, "Your band is OK, but your songs are really something. Maybe I could use some sometime." Our first project together was placing my song "Riverside" on Jonny Lang's first album. We've worked on a lot of projects since, and my career now is flying around to work with different artists, writing songs. TC: I read somewhere that Paul Westerberg was instrumental in your turn from performance to writing. KB: For me, it's all about Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg. I don't know if this goes over well at a folk festival, but punk rock was a huge thing for me. TC: Of course, it goes over well. The first year of the festival Billy Bragg was on stage explaining how Woody was the original punk. KB: Well, yeah. You're either someone who gets punk or doesn't, and that's part of my enjoyment of Woody Guthrie. He was more punk than most punks. The Replacements -- well, there's never been a better band, but I don't think Westerberg thinks of himself as a punk. He happened to be an unnaturally gifted songwriter in a punkish band. TC: Your bio makes a point of mentioning your childhood in Minnesota, how you were half Irish and half Serbian in the land of Scandinavian settlers. How did that affect your songwriting, and do you think it was anything like being an Okie in California? KB: Oh yeah. Actually, I feel the same way up here that Woody must have felt in Okemah -- a stranger in a strange land. We've never fit into the scene up here. When we play here, we can't get arrested. But when we play in Nashville or Austin or Okemah, it's a big deal. We refer to Okemah as our hometown. TC: And why did you call your Minneapolis band the Okemah Prophets? KB: In Bound for Glory, Woody describes the town lunatic and calls him the Okemah prophet. He's this guy in the town square who babbles and dances. I've spent a lifetime on stage doing just that. The prophet doesn't think he's babbling, of course, but the people walking by are going, "Yeah, right, there's the prophet." It's the story of my life, playing in bars. That's why it's nice to get to Okemah where the prophets are now at least listened to. This post contains my complete reviews of this annual festival ...
Singer-songwriter's sincere performance a fitting opening to festival BY THOMAS CONNER 07/15/2000 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — Most music fans my age missed the boat on Jackson Browne. We were just coming around when "Lawyers in Love" was being foisted on Top 40 radio (a silly song that was not surprisingly missing from Browne's 1997 greatest hits collection) and the tepid but memorable "Somebody's Baby" was the coda to the quintessential teen-sex film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." These were not Browne's greatest artistic achievements. They were Jackson bollocks. What we young'uns missed were the crucial years of lyrical songwriting eloquence long before that early-'80s wash-out and the equally important years of political proselytizing that followed. As rock critic Dave Marsh has said, Browne's career is like Bob Dylan's in reverse: Browne was first an intensely personal songwriter and then became interested in the politics and social causes of his times. This gave Browne the advantage of employing artful and romantic lyricism to his political songs; the loving detail of these individual pieces helps link his artistic vision to his political idealism. At a gritty event that simply vibrates with Dylan's brave, wheezy influence, Browne's tenderness, humility and grace spearheaded the third annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival with a refreshing and apropos concert Wednesday night in Okemah's historic Crystal Theater. "Folk music is what made me want to start playing music," Browne told the sold-out crowd during his show. "Woody, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly -- these are the people who lit a fire under me." Of course, what else would you say on stage at a Woody Guthrie festival? But he proved his sincerity with a three-hour solo show (he even donated his time for this) of his "more folkish stuff," switching between acoustic guitars and piano to perform nearly 30 of his own carefully drawn classic songs from the last 30 years. He sang an old Rev. Gary Davis cocaine blues tune ("I learned this from a Dave Van Ronk album," he said), Dylan's "Song to Woody" ("Ah, I love that song," he said as he finished) and then Guthrie's own classic "Deportee." Between these, he invoked the nervousness and purpose of every folk singer ever born: "Boy, singing these songs on the edge of your bed is one thing. Singing them in front of other people is, well . . . But, you know, I started singing them not because I was a good singer but because I wrote them." The songs Browne did write, he sang beautifully. After the show, he was mildly distraught, convinced that his voice had been terrible that night. It was not. Thick with its own natural peat and the mid-summer Oklahoma humidity, his voice resonated through the hall with as much reassuring purpose as it always has. It's not a dynamic voice, and Browne's one weakness is that he writes songs within his limited vocal range; he uses the same keys and modulations so that, after a while, the songs tend to sound the same. (The occasional finger-picking and slide guitar Wednesday night threw a nice country-blues change-up, though.) However, Browne's music stands tall over the rest of his ilk -- the laid-back southern California sensitive singer-songwriter stuff of the '70s -- because he somehow managed to avoid the cynicism that corrupted his peers. While Linda Ronstadt tried to prove she was everywoman by singing in Spanish, and the Eagles reunited to sing acidic songs of contempt and charge $300 a ticket, Browne quietly continued through the late '80s and '90s writing songs with quizzical questions and wry social observations. He's no optimist, but -- in the spirit of Guthrie -- he operates from a live-and-let-live perspective that brings an audience to an awareness of personal or political foibles without humiliating the ones at fault. It's a more graceful, humanitarian approach to empowerment through music. As he illustrated Wednesday night, this approach works on both sides of his music. The confessional songs show it just as readily as the socially conscious ones. "Fountain of Sorrow," he pointed out, is about an old girlfriend, and "it turns out the song is better than she deserved." Still, he sang its words at the piano with none of the bitterness we might expect from the situation: "You could be laughing at me, you've got the right / But you go on smiling so clear and bright." A politically fierce song, "Lives in the Balance," rails against the United States' "secret, covert wars" around the world not by calling the president names but by illuminating the toll exacted by these unwise policies: "There are people under fire / There are children at the cannons." It's the same process of focusing on the "right" details that Woody employed. "Deportee" is a song about the victims, not the perpetrators. Empathy is a stronger motivator than anger. Even though, as mentioned, early songs such as "For Everyman" and "Late for the Sky" were unflinchingly personal, the seeds of Browne's social conscience were evident from his first solo hit, "Doctor, My Eyes." Despite its catchy, pleasant Brill Building groove, the song is an early expression of a social observer's initial squint into life's harsh light (lyrics above). Again, here's Browne swiveling the camera around to the person struggling -- in this case, himself -- instead of setting sights on those causing the struggle. It's a cry for help, but not in the sense of whining or welfare; Browne instead seeks validation of his own feelings of sadness and frustration about the world's situation. In this song, he hasn't learned yet how universal that feeling is -- a lesson Guthrie himself learned at about the same point in his own songwriting career. His performance of "Doctor, My Eyes" was part of a medley that began with that song and ended with another early standard, "These Days." As he see-sawed the groove on the piano, Browne began to brighten noticeably. Throughout the bulk of his show, he had been fairly sober, concentrating on songs he hasn't played regularly in concert and closing his eyes in serious songwriter mode. Perhaps it was the song's upbeat momentum or the relief of a relatively stage-shy performer realizing that the concert was nearing its end, but Browne started smiling. His eyes stared at a distant point, then he would suddenly focus on the crowd before him and smile. By the time he launched into "The Pretender," his most iconic hit song and the most frequently shouted request of the evening, Browne was revived -- and leading a revival. He liked the feel of the line "I'll get up and do it again / Amen" so much that he did it twice with gospel fervor, the same with "Get it up again" later in the song. He seemed so into the flow of the tune that he didn't want to finish the song, telescoping the ending with extended riffing and much satisfied nodding to himself. How many times has he played this song? Thousands? Tens of thousands? And he's still this into it? So when he came out for an encore and played "Take It Easy," the Eagles' breakthrough hit he co-wrote with Glenn Fry, it was clear exactly how much taller Browne stood than his contemporaries. He so easily switches gears between singing about "the blood in the ink of the headlines" and standing on that mythical corner in Winslow, Ariz. But when you hear him in concert, you realize that even "Take It Easy" encourages us to "find a place to make your stand." This undercurrent underscored how much Browne belonged at the opening ceremony of this festival, honoring a songwriter who could also switch gears swiftly -- one minute decrying the fascist menace, the next minute bouncing up and down making kiddie car noises. It was a strong beginning to a worthwhile festival gathering more strength and purpose every year. Seeger sparks Guthrie Festival BY THOMAS CONNER 07/17/2000 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — Folk music, you know, is not about showmanship. This is its saving grace and sometimes its most frustrating trait. It is folk music, after all -- by and for folks -- and each of its practitioners labors to keep their own songs and themselves as close to The People as possible. No fancy clothes. No fancy shows. Sometimes, it seems, not even a simple rehearsal. This is fun and even noble when performing in a coffee house or hootenanny. When entertaining a throng of thousands from a 50-foot stage rig in a spacious pasture east of Okemah, however, folk music's struggle against separation from the masses becomes a tougher fight. Saturday's final concert at the Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival here was such a brave battle -- full of glorious triumphs and tragic defeats. Leading the charge was folk's figurehead, Pete Seeger. Indispensable as a living archive of American folk, Seeger commanded the Pastures of Plenty main stage with a childlike charm, telling the tales behind the songs and leading the audience in sing-alongs with every one. Seeger is the epitome of folk music's anti-showmanship. He'd been in town for days without being mobbed by fans. He has no entourage. He strolls confidently but slowly wearing faded jeans and an untucked knit shirt. He walked by fans and musicians alike in downtown Okemah, most of whom had no idea who the old man was until someone whispered, "Hey, that's Pete Seeger." This is how he took the stage Saturday night -- jeans, untucked, cap askew -- picking at a tall banjo and leading us right away into a sing-along of "Midnight Special." Scruffy looking, scratchy-throated and rarely keeping the beat, the thousands clustered in the steamy Okemah Industrial Park pasture swooned, sang and lit up the late night with an electric storm of flashbulbs. Over the next hour and a half, Pete got the crowd singing not only because he prompted us with each line before he sang it but because the utter joy radiating from his ruddy-cheeked smile was impossible to disallow. He led us through "Turn! Turn! Turn!" with such exuberance you'd think he had composed the tune in a Biblical revelation backstage that evening, not nearly 50 years ago. He sang several of Guthrie's children's songs, such as "Why Oh Why," and led the crowd of all ages through the cheery tune of wonderment. We sang along because he wasn't talking down to us as if we were children; rather, he crackled with the obvious thrill of sharing the song and the joy its has brought him with one more huge crowd of people. All of this was off the cuff, and while Seeger's undying passion for American folk song charged him for the situation, his compatriots on stage didn't fight the good fight with the same conviction. On stage with Seeger and his grandson, Tao Rodriguez, were the Guthrie clan: Arlo, his daughter Sara Lee, his son Abe and Sara Lee's husband Johnny Irion. As the pendulum swung back and forth between Seeger and the Guthries, it was clear the latter suffered most from the spontaneous nature of an unrehearsed mass hootenanny. The Guthries rumbled through a rousing rendition of Woody's "Sinking of the Reuben James," supported by Seeger. But when the Guthries' turn came around again, there were often lengthy deserts of no music. Arlo had a tough time keeping his guitar in tune, and he told mildly amusing stories while cranking his strings -- the same stories he told at the first and second Guthrie festival here. Sometimes he would sit helplessly and wonder aloud what songs they could play that everyone knew. These were always the moments when a family or two would decide to pack up the chairs and blankets and call it a night. Rodriguez saved the show a time or two by belting out some Cuban songs, including an enlivening duet with his grandfather on "Guantanamera," a hit for the Sandpipers in 1966. The show wrapped up with an all-star jangle through "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," featuring a stage full of most of the evening's performers. Preceding the Seeger-Guthrie set Saturday night was another charter performer at the festival, the Joel Rafael Band. A quiet treasure, Rafael brought down nightfall with his patient, comforting roots music. The band consists of congas, acoustic guitars and viola -- a wellspring of wood creating wholly organic and soothing sounds. In addition to being the only performer in three days to point out the bloated, bright full moon shining over the festival grounds, Rafael evoked Guthrie with a most weathered and righteous approach. He first sang "Way Down Yonder in the Minor Key," one of the Guthrie lyrics Billy Bragg and Wilco put to music, then he tackled a rare Guthrie tune called "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son" about the planned lynching of a black woman, her young son and her baby near Okemah early in the century. During his "Talkin' Oklahoma Hills," though, he summed up folk musicians' burgeoning perspective on Guthrie, saying, "Will Rogers is the most famous Oklahoman in the whole country, and Woody Guthrie is the most famous Oklahoman in the whole wide world." Pastures of Plenty: Oklahoma town draws wealth of talent to honor Woody Guthrie BY THOMAS CONNER 07/18/2000 © Tulsa World OKEMAH — The July afternoon heat was hard and brutal, even with an uninspired breeze. Triple-digit temperatures radiated from Okemah's downtown pavement, and shoe soles foolish enough to be tramping up and down Broadway at highnoon stuck to the blacktop. Townspeople hibernated in air-conditioned places of business, peering warily out condensation- coated storefronts. And yet . . . where was that accordion music coming from? In the heart of downtown Okemah, in the little patch of park that now boasts a crude statue of Woody Guthrie, sat Rosemary Hatcher huffing on her squeezebox. A former music teacher from California, now living in Payola, Hatcher was visiting Okemah for the third annual Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival, a festival that took over the small town with live music events from Wednesday to Sunday. On Thursday, she had setup her stool and music stand in the tiny park and was pumping softlyunder the shade of her straw cowboy hat and four huddling pinetrees. "I just got this Woody Guthrie songbook," Hatcher said, clothes-pinning the pages to the music stand. "I'm playing through a lot of songs I haven't played before. You know, they were meant to be played on guitar. This book even tells you where to put your capo. But I think they sound nice with accordion, too. Do you know this one, `Oklahoma Hills'? "I just like to travel and play my music," she said, echoing the sentiments of the majority of musicians playing at the festival, most of whom donate their time for the privilege of offering up their songs in Guthrie's hometown. Feeling hot, hot, hot Erica Wheeler started her set on the festival's Pastures of Plenty main stage with a song called "Hot," she said "in honor of all of you who are." She'd been battling the 100-plus heat index all day Thursday, refusing her 2 p.m. sound check (as all of the day's acts did) because of the oppressive temperatures. On stage that evening, the sun had just begun to ease off as the Maryland songstress began strumming her pretty, strong-voiced songs. "It gets to hot / I ain't complaining / No, I am not," she sang, and she meant it, despite her wardrobe: long sleeves and an ankle-length skirt, all black. The following day, bluesy singer Peter Keane voiced his own ideas about the heat. "Today is Woody's birthday," he said, "and that's why they have the festival here. Makes you kind of wish he'd been born in March or April, doesn't it?" Dying notions The protest against Woody Guthrie in his hometown has dwindled to a feeble poster in a storefront window. It's a blown-up copy of an anonymous newspaper column from a 1989 edition of the Oklahoma Constitution, and it's posted in the window of Okemah's American Legion building. The column, titled "Woody Was No Hero," lambasted the Oklahoma Gazette, a weekly newspaper in Oklahoma City, for honoring Guthrie through its Oklahoma Music Awards. The actual awards were called Woodys. "He loved the totalitarian dictatorship of Josef Stalin," the author proclaimed about the songwriter, on whose guitar was scrawled the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists," and the column wrongly described Guthrie as "a militant atheist." A woman in a nearby clothes shop, when asked about the sign, discouraged investigation of the matter. "That's not how the majority of this town feels anymore," she said. A good sign J.R. Payne knows how Okemah used to feel about Woody. He also knows something about signs that pop up when the festival comes around. "This town for a long time was pretty hooky-hooky over all that propaganda," he said, making a see-sawing so-so motion with both hands, "though none of it amounts to a hill of beans." Payne tends the Okfuskee County Historical Museum, downtownnext to the Crystal Theater where several festival performances take place. He's quick to point out a long sign that sits atop a case of Guthrie artifacts in the museum. The sign reads, "This Land Is Your Land." "I had that sign made several years ago, and one morning I noticed that it had disappeared," Payne said. "But then, when all this Woody Guthrie hullabaloo started just last year or so, well, suddenly that sign came back out." Among three rooms full of regional memorabilia, the museum shows off several Guthrie photographs, including two classphotos (you can quickly pick out Woody's aw-shucks smirk without the aid of the notations) and one photograph of a girlish, near-toddler Guthrie standing outside his family's original Okemah home. Payne, 82, remembers Guthrie from these school days. His first year at Okemah High School was Woody's last year there. "He was living back in the trees there," Payne said, pointing toward the east where Woody had lived alone in his old gang clubhouse behind his family's last Okemah home. "He was just a guy, you know. Funny. He was the joke editor for the school paper. But he was just like anybody else." Real roots music In addition to the main-stage concerts each evening, this year's festival included live music all day long at two Okemah mainstays: the Brick Street Cafe and Lou's Rocky Road Tavern. Several main-stage acts reappeared on these stages -- Ellis Paul played for a while Saturday afternoon at Lou's -- and even more new artists played here, including a new band with an incredible legacy. The group was called Rig, an acronym for the members' last names -- Tao Rodriguez (Pete Seeger's grandson), Sara Lee and Abe Guthrie (Arlo's kids), John Irion (Sara Lee's husband) -- and they played an unadvertised show Saturday afternoon to a packed house at the Brick Street Cafe. Playing mostly old folk songs from their respective family lineages, they opened with a rousing rendition of Guthrie's "Union Maid" and closed with an equally ferocious "Rock Island Line," both belted out with real passion by a red-faced Rodriguez. Seeger and Arlo Guthrie were in attendance, beaming with pride. After-hours amazement Some of the most exciting performances at this year's festival were at the late-night All-Star Jams in the spacious basement of the Brick Street Cafe. Hosted by the Red Dirt Rangers, the shows carried on after each night's main-stage concert and featured the Rangers as a house band for whichever performers happened to be in the cafe with guitars handy. This is where fans could see real musicianship unfold. For instance, Michael Fracasso took the basement stage Thursday night and unleashed a more raucous side of himself, shouting a series of chords to the band before beginning the song and letting the players improvise parts as each song plowed along. George Barton, from Barton and Sweeney, led the band -- which that night featured Don Conoscenti, the Neal Cassady of folkmusic, on drums -- through a visceral blues song, singing, "You don't have to be black to feel blue / Any color will do." Scott Aycock, host of the "Folk Salad" show on KWGS 89.5-FM, led the band through a haunted, wailing rendition of Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee." Friday night, Stillwater's Jason Bolan and the Stragglers took over the stage for three songs and had the entire basement full of people on its feet dancing. The Rangers held court a while each night there, too. Friday night they performed "Dwight Twilley's Garage Sale," a song singer-guitarist Brad Piccolo wrote about stopping at a garage sale run by Tulsa's own pop legend Twilley. "I wish I could afford that guitar," Piccolo sings, "I'd take it home and write a hit song / Say adios to the bars." The Oregon tale This year's Guthrie festival included a film screening among all the music. "Roll On, Columbia: Woody Guthrie and the Bonneville Power Administration" is a documentary about Guthrie's 30-day job in May 1941 writing songs about the dam projects along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. The video was released in February and was produced by Michael Majdic, an associate professor at the University of Oregon. The film neatly sums up this pivotal chapter in Guthrie's career, featuring interviews with Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Mary Guthrie Boyle (Woody's first wife), Studs Terkel, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Nora Guthrie (Woody's sister) and numerous BPA dam workers. It was during this unusual assignment that Guthrie wrote some of his most sparkling work, including "Pastures of Plenty," "Hard Travelin' " and "The Biggest Thing a Man Has Ever Done." The three screenings of the film this weekend in Okemah were part of a larger program that included performances of the songs by another Oregon professor, Bill Murlin, and Guthrie impersonator Carl Allen. Ellis, himself and us Bill McCloud, McCloud is the president of the Orphanage Society in Pryor, which puts on the festival with the Woody Guthrie Coalition, introducd Boston singer Ellis Paul, saying, "People said we'd never get Ellis Paul this year, that he'd gotten too big for us. But that's not what Ellis told us." Paul, who's performed at all three Guthrie festivals thus far, told the large crowd Friday night that he plans to play the festival every year he's asked to. Paul's song "The World Ain't Slowing Down" is featured prominently in the latest hit film from the Farrelly brothers starring Jim Carrey, "Me, Myself and Irene." The only thing the new prominence has brough Paul is the ability to retrieve stolen goods, as he said in a story from the stage. "I went to the premiere of the movie and the party afterwards, and I decided not to take my cell phone inside. I figured, it's a Hollywood party, everyone's going to have the things, I don't want to be one of those people," he said. "When I got out to my car that night, my phone had been stolen." Later that week, Paul was singing the National Anthem at the baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. "A friend of mine there said, `Hey, Ellis, I just talked to the guy who stole your phone.' So I called the number and said,`Hey, you've got my cell phone.' The guy said, `I know. You're famous.' He'd been talking to my old girl friends and probably doing interviews. I think he's doing Letterman next week." Paul played a thrilling, albeit brief, set with fellow singer-songwriter Don Conoscenti and Joel Rafael Band percussionist Jeff Berkeley. He included his rousing rendition of Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'." Shy rockers in flight Ellis Paul has charted higher than the northeast Oklahoma duo of Barton and Sweeney, but the Oklahomans' music has soared much higher -- physically. Earlier this year, NASA astronauts took Barton and Sweeney's latest CD, "On the Timeline," with them on a space shuttle mission. The space walkers heard Barton and Sweeney in a bar one night, bought the disc, then called later to ask if they could take it with them into orbit. One morning during the mission, the astronauts were awakened with one of the tracks. That's a little consolation for Sweeney, who recalls when Paul got the better of him at the 1994 Kerrville New Folk Contest. Paul won first place; Sweeney got second. "That's why his name's a little bigger on the festival T-shirts there," Sweeney laughed. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The Mystery Band has managed to live up to its name again. Rumors are rabid about the band's club gig this weekend: just who is this Doug Wylie, the Mystery Band's new singer? Is it really Dwight Twilley, or just some Twilley wanna-be? The Mystery Band certainly has a history with Twilley. Drummer Jerry Naifeh played drums and percussion on several of Twilley's pivotal early records, including the 1975 hit "I'm on Fire." Naifeh and Mystery Band guitarist Bingo Sloan played on Twilley's latest album, "Tulsa." Longtime Twilley guitarist, Bill Pitcock IV, was also once a member of the band. The other current members are not enigmas to local music fans: Barry Henderson, guitars and keyboards, from the "Mazeppa" show's Bo Velvet and the Desert Snakes; and Rick Berryman, bass, who fans might remember from the Push. Twilley himself has performed with the Mystery Band. In 1990, the band lost two of its members — Chris Campbell and Jim "Tank" Parmley — in an auto accident. Twilley and his longtime songwriting partner Phil Seymour played with the band in the interim. In fact, it was the last time the two local icons performed together on stage before Seymour's death from cancer in '93. Now the Mystery Band is back in action, and this week they're adding the shadowy Wylie. The band claims he looks like Twilley and sounds like Twilley but that he's really just a hot new talent they discovered in Okfuskee. The band's new single, "Come Together," has received airplay on KMOD this week. It's a sharp pop song, but that voice sounds an awful lot like Twilley. Twilley is cagey when you broach the subject. "He apparently does all my favorite old rock 'n' roll songs. He thinks songwriting is stupid. He's doing `Good Golly Miss Molly' and stuff. He does it pretty well, too, so I'm told," Twilley said. "I hear he even tries to do his hair like mine," he said. "I wish him luck." Wylie himself could not be reached for comment. He's been in seclusion with Chris Gaines. Figure out the Dwight Twilley/Doug Wylie mystery for yourself when the Mystery Band plays at 9:30 p.m. Friday at The Break, 4404 S. Peoria Ave. Cover charge is $3. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Pete Seeger is the godhead of American folk music, but like most folks, he was bowled over when he first saw Woody Guthrie perform. "It was a magic moment," Seeger said in a recent interview with the Tulsa World. "Woody had hitchhiked from New York to California for a midnight benefit concert to raise money for the California agricultural workers, most of whom were Okies. I was working in Washington (D.C.), and Alan Lomax drove me up for it ... I was on the program with one song. I got a smattering of polite applause; it's quite embarrassing to think about now, really. Woody was the star of the evening. "He strolled onto that stage with his hat on the back of his head, and he just started telling stories. He started, ‘Oklahoma's a very rich state. We got oil. You want some oil, you go down into a hole and get you some. We got coal. You want coal, you go down into a hole and get you some. You want food, clothes or groceries, you just go into a hole and stay there.' And he did that all night, singing songs and telling jokes. People were just charmed by his laconic control of the situation, and I was one of them." As a close friend of Guthrie's for the next 30-plus years, Seeger would collect countless tales of Woody's musical magic — all the while becoming a folk legend on his own terms. Extraordinary common folk Seeger's destiny ran parallel to Guthrie's throughout the most productive years of their youth. While Guthrie found his path to folk music in his travels among the country's migrant workers and poor, Seeger discovered his way at home. His father, Charles Seeger, was one of the country's premier musicologists. Young Pete fell in love with folk music when he and his father attended a folk festival in 1935 in North Carolina. But Seeger wasn't sure at first where he fit into folk music. After dropping out of Harvard University, he spent much of his time helping Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Song. There he got to know Guthrie, another regular at the archive. The two became fast friends, and Seeger learned everything he could from Guthrie about music, politics and social commitment. After the two songwriters traveled to Oklahoma together in 1940 (see related story), Seeger went back to New York City and formed the Almanac Singers, the precursor to his more famous — and influential — folk group, the Weavers, in the early '50s. With these groups, and on his own, Seeger became a repository of American folk music. He learned the songs and the stories behind them, from centuries-old tales of struggle to new songs from an early '60s upstart named Bob Dylan. Seeger is 81 now, and he doesn't perform as often as he used to. ("I'm 70 percent there from the shoulders down and 30 percent from the shoulders up," he jokes about himself.) Still, he's decided to come to Oklahoma for the third Woody Guthrie Free Folk Festival simply because he can't turn down the opportunity to honor his late friend one more time — especially on his home turf. "I'm glad the people in Okemah are welcoming their friends and neighbors and fellow Oklahomans. It's actually a very brave and noble thing to do this," Seeger said. "Okemah, I don't think, hasn't always been so welcoming. One of the singers at this festival is Larry Long. He's one of Woody's musical children. He never knew Woody but through his songs. He came and worked in the Okemah schools for a year or so, teaching the kids all of Woody's songs. There was a local banker there who was quite upset about that. He felt Woody was best forgotten. He was quite outnumbered." Seeger himself has had his moments of doubt about Woody. When Woody would shove songs into Seeger's hands — freshly ripped from Woody's typewriter — Seeger said he often thought they were too silly, simple or even dumb. Over time, however, Seeger began to see the beauty of Woody's simplicity and innocence. "Over the years, I just gradually realized what an absolute genius Woody was," Seeger said. "He fought long and hard for his beliefs, and he created instantaneously. He rarely rewrote anything. He had the genius of simplicity. Any damn fool can get complicated. I confess that when I first heard ‘This Land Is Your Land,' I thought it was a little simple. That shows how wrong people can be. That song hit the spot with millions." Seeger's own songs have hit the spot with millions. Seeger's songs, though, were most often commercial hits in the hands of other performers — "If I Had a Hammer" for Trini Lopez and Peter, Paul and Mary or "Turn! Turn! Turn!" for the Byrds. The same was true for Guthrie. Most of the young folkies paying tribute these days discovered Woody by way of Dylan. Even Billy Bragg, who made the critically acclaimed "Mermaid Avenue" albums of lost Guthrie lyrics with the band Wilco, heard Dylan first. Guthrie's legacy, though, did not fade, even after his decline throughout the '60s and his death in '67. The opening of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City in 1996 spurred an appropriately grassroots revival of Woody's songs and spirit, part of which resulted in the Okemah festival taking off from its inception three years ago. It's a legacy that's too important to ignore, Seeger said -- it simply can't die. Long life, if not eternal life, is the very essence of the folk tradition. "Woody's legacy will not die, ever. I'm not just saying that. (In the '70s) Woody's second wife Marge went to Washington to seek money to help fight Huntington's Disease. President Carter said to the assembled group there one day, ‘I'm not sure if any of you realize that this man Woody Guthrie, centuries from now, will be better known than anyone in this room,'" Seeger said. "I think he's quite right. Who remembers President Buchanan's name? But everyone knows Stephen Foster." BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World It was the spring of 1940, and Woody Guthrie was becoming a star — or as close to one as he'd ever let himself become. In May of that year, Woody stood alone in Victor Records' New Jersey recording studio and sang out some of his best — and now best-known — songs: "Dust Bowl Refugee," "I Ain't Got No Home," "Do Re Mi," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and many more. He was paid $300 for the session, more money than he'd ever thought a man could be paid for singing "dusty ol' songs." Immediately after the session, Woody wrote to his younger sister Mary Jo back in Oklahoma about his recent good fortune in New York City. "I just bought a new Plymouth, and it really splits the breeze," he said. Then he added, "I'm coming to Oklahoma as soon as I get a check from CBS." Months later, he began that journey back home, and his traveling companion was fellow folksinger Pete Seeger. It would be a pivotal journey for Woody's political motivations and a crystallizing moment in his personal life. According to Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Life, the two young folkies headed south and rolled through the Appalachian Mountains "carrying on a running conversation about music and politics." Along the trip, they stopped briefly in Tennessee to visit the Highlander Folk School, a training center for labor organizers. The owners, Myles and Zilphia Horton, were focusing on the use of music as an organizing tool. From then on, Woody became preoccupied with writing union songs, and later in the trip he would pen his ultimate labor anthem. They traveled through Arkansas into Oklahoma, stopping in Konawa to visit Woody's family. It was a tense reunion. The Guthries had been split up years before after Woody's mother Nora went to the mental hospital in Norman. After that, Mary Jo was sent to a relative's in Pampa, Texas, and Woody's father, Charley, moved to Oklahoma City. Woody and his older brother were left behind in Okemah to fend for themselves. Woody's inherent restlessness got the better of him, and he left soon after high school. Charley was in Konawa during this visit, but as Klein wrote, there was "a real tension between them, and the visit lasted only a few hours." They pressed on to Oklahoma City, where they spent a night with local Communist Party organizers Bob and Ina Wood. The Woods put Guthrie and Seeger to work, singing for the poor people in the Hooverville shantytown on the banks of the Canadian River. It was during this stay that Woody wrote one of his most recognizable songs, "Union Maid." Later in his life, Woody wrote that the song was inspired by the story of a southern Tenant Farmers' Union organizer who was badly beaten, but in a recent interview with the Tulsa World Seeger recalled the more direct inspiration for the song. "We were in the (Woods') office, and Ina said, ‘Woody, all these union songs are about brothers this and brothers that. How about writing songs about union women?' " Seeger said. "Well, it was true. The (union) meeting that night might have been broken up had it not been for the women and children singing songs and keeping it peaceful." "Union Maid" — with its chorus, "Oh you can't scare me, I'm stickin' to the union" — was written that night as a parody of an older song called "Redwing." At first, Seeger thought Woody's song was silly, but he said its simplicity and directness soon won him over. "His words now are much better than the ‘Redwing' words," he said. "Who would think that ‘stickin' to the' would be such a fun line to sing?" The rest of the trip was personally difficult. Woody and Pete continued to Pampa, where Woody had left behind his first wife and children. That reunion also was tense. Seeger didn't stay long, opting to continue travelling west after a few days. Woody left soon after that, leaving his wife the $300. He headed back through Oklahoma City and picked up Bob Wood, taking him back to New York City for a huge Communist Party convention at Madison Square Garden. When the convention was done, Woody gave Wood the Plymouth so he could get home. It was the official car of the Oklahoma Communist Party for several years after that. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Various Artists " 'Til We Outnumber 'Em" (Righteous Babe Records) This long-delayed recording of an all-star 1996 Woody Guthrie tribute concert at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which celebrated the opening of the Woody Guthrie Archives) is as uneven, prickly and poignant as Guthrie's own life and legacy. Sketchy performances of brilliant songs, jaw-dropping renderings of mediocre movements, oddly edited bits of readings from Guthrie's writings — "'Til We Outnumber 'Em" is a joyous jumble, a striking collage artwork showing how many colors, styles and genres of music make up the current ideal of Woody's vision. Aside from the jerky sequencing and a few hard travelin' renditions, there are some crystalline moments: Ani DiFranco's spare, sweeping shattering of the preciousness built up around "Do Re Mi," Billy Bragg's rascally cooing through "Against th' Law" (tuneless lyrics to which Bragg wrote new music), Bruce Springsteen — the king of car songs — sputtering and vrooming through "Riding in My Car" and the full-cast, full-on, fully transcendent "Hard Travelin' Hootenanny," featuring everyone from Billy Bragg to Arlo Guthrie. Alternately frustrating and fascinating, just like the man in question. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Billy Bragg & Wilco "Mermaid Avenue, Vol. 2" (Elektra Records) The first round of this unique collaboration — British folk-rocker Billy Bragg, American roots-rock band Wilco and various friends interpretting previously unrecorded lyrics by songwriting icon and Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie -- simply begged for a sequel. In fact, according to Bragg and members of Wilco, the first Grammy-nominated "Mermaid Avenue" album, released two years ago, was created with this follow-up in mind. "We knew we'd need another shake when we put the tracks together for 'Mermaid Avenue,'" said Wilco's Jay Bennett, guitarist and co-author of some of the music here. "We even chose songs for the first record based on that. The first album gave a broad view of Woody. It was intended to draw people in. This album is less folky." Less folky, indeed, but much more expansive, ambitious and eclectic. "Volume 2" builds on the pleasant, accessible (and historically important) introduction of the first outing by stretching Woody's ideas through a constantly changing landscape of musical styles, from ramblin' country blues to '60s folk-rock to rollicking roadhouse protest punk. The result, though, is still somehow cohesive. Instead of flying apart in a whorl of splattered Jackson Pollock mess, "Volume 2" holds together like a pointillized Seurat painting — a million separate moments of color that unite to create a single image or impression. Even lyrically, they are disparate subjects, from flying saucers and airplane rides through heaven to Stetson Kennedy and Joe DiMaggio. What unites these songs is difficult to describe. It has to do with attitude, spirit and what Tom Wolfe once called the Unspoken Thing, but mostly it's the fact that the musicians assembled here understand and transmit the optimism and humility of the man in question. It's important, too, that this record is such a tangled collaboration. Were it simply Bragg's solo tribute to the late Guthrie, the inevitable tunnel vision would exclude the multiple opportunities available in these lyrics. A solo effort also would focus the attention selfishly on one performer — an approach not at all suitable to the legacy of the ultimate Everyman. In addition to Bragg and Wilco (sometimes together, sometimes backing each other up, sometimes completely separate), Natalie Merchant — a guest on the first "Mermaid" — turns in one song, the child-like "I Was Born," and deliberately anachronistic young blues singer Corey Harris takes the lead on "Against th' Law." The constant mix scatters any professional egos that might otherwise spoil such a project and therefore keeps us listening to the songs themselves — their humor, their poignancy, their simple and direct expressions of both trivial and earth-shattering themes. It's about the music, not the messengers. This was the case on "Volume 1," but it's almost more successful here largely because of the musical integrity of Wilco's input. Bragg is still at top form, bouncing cheerily through "My Flying Saucer" and spitting out "All You Fascists" as if it were one of his own anti-fascist rants, but Wilco's alternative innovative and derivative fashioning of music for these lost lyrics makes this volume of "Mermaid" a richer, more compelling experience. Bennett and singer Jeff Tweedy fashion "Airline to Heaven," a light-hearted daydream about soaring through heaven on the wings of a prayer, into a stomping, kinetic flight, Tweedy singing through his nose like Dylan the whole time. "Feed of Man" is a socially urgent lyric, and Wilco's bluesy, British Invasion stroll helps the words to grab the listener by the collar, with Tweedy this time spitting out his lines in about two notes as if he were the Animals' Eric Burdon. "Secret of the Sea" rings like the Byrds, and "Blood of the Lamb," a nakedly religious hymn, wobbles along on a woozy Farfisa and Hammond organ like it's being delivered by a carnival chaplain. These new sounds, these old shades — once again this is the testament to Woody's immeasurable importance as a songwriter. Strangers and stragglers still find redemption in these old lyrics, and musicians continue to turn half-century-old songs into brand-new, brilliant creatures. In an era of quick-burn stars, it's almost difficult to comprehend the impact a man could still make 33 years after his death. But here's another example of Woody's continuing imprint — long may it last. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Jacob Fred Jazz Trio "Live at Your Mama's House" (Plum-E Records) The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey started out several years ago with the jazzy name but an overly funky sound. The improv thing was there in spots, but sometimes the boys seemed more concerned with being MCs than emissaries. After the first couple of years and the first thousand Medeski, Martin and Wood bootlegs, Jacob Fred evolved into a true jazz odyssey — and never have its members so deeply explored the innocently psychedelic spirit of improvisation than in this side project, a trio of keyboardist Brian Haas, bassist Reed Mathis and drummer Matt Edwards. The Jacob Fred Trio has been playing weekly at the Bowery for six months, and this single disc captures a handful of the band's best moments there, including Haas' invigorating "Good Energy Perpetuates Good Energy," a meandering Thelonious Monk medley that morphs into an original tribute to former Tulsa bassist Al Ray ("The Man Who Adjusted Tonalities") and a rhapsodic opener, "Pacific," by Odyssey trombone player Matt Leland's father, Max. All of it moves in the same impressionistic space, not leaving you with any lasting tunes but leaving your ears a little looser. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Negativland is a band of self-described "culture jammers" whose musical collage art has landed them in hot water during the last decade. The band's music is a process of cutting up, splicing together and warping various sounds and recordings, netting the flotsam and jetsam of our media culture and fusing it back together in striking, poignant and sometimes grotesque new shapes — and often, new statements. It's just like those art-school collages, only in aural, not visual, art. It's a less-traveled road which has made all the difference for Negativland. Two decades and countless lawsuits into its career, Negativland is touring for the first time in seven years. The True/False Tour brings the band's culture blending into a live and ultimately more bracing setting. The multi-media show incorporates musical instruments and countless sound devices, as well as eight film projectors and three slide projectors. "It took us two years to develop this show because we wanted to be able to do it right and to create something that very few people have experienced before," said Mark Hosler, a charter Negativland member. "About 85 percent of the show, too, is all original material that nobody has heard before. We actually even collage our own material from our own records." Indeed, by 1986 — when a group showed up named Pop Will Eat Itself — Negativland already had established the recipe for that meal. Raiding the sonic junkyards of suburban culture — television, telephones, other people's records -- and juicing up the sounds with occasional keyboards and percussion, Negativland began in 1980 making records that were disjointed aural sculptures. The core members of Negativland met at an after-school job: conducting telephone surveys about people's favorite TV shows. Discovering a shared fascination for tinkering with noises, they followed a friend's advice and assembled their first collages into a self-titled album. "The covers were all hand-made, not because that's what we wanted to do but because we didn't know how you got things printed, how you turned a piece of artwork into printed pieces of cardboard," Hosler said. "So I spent my senior semester of art class making the covers by hand, using old wallpaper books and such. The covers, basically, were collages, too." In the visual arts, this appropriation rarely raises any concerns, but in music — particularly since the advent of hip-hop and sampling — the word "appropriation" attracts lawyers like blood attracts sharks. Negativland has received more than its share of mail with "Attorneys at Law" in the return address, starting with 1989's "Helter Stupid" album, the cover of which featured a photo of convicted Minnesota mass murderer David Broom. The album was a disturbing masterpiece on media manipulation. The most famous run-in with the law, though, occurred a couple of years later when Negativland picked on someone much bigger. The band released a single called "U2," which made fun of Bono's band by picking out the melody of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" on kazoos and included tapes of a profanity-laced studio tantrum by swell-guy radio star Casey Kasem. The resulting legal battle with U2 galvanized the band as crusaders for redefining the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law. The battle and the band's resulting theories are chronicled in a book, "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2," and the group's web site is now a clearinghouse for discussion of the limits of sampling and collage uses of other musicians' work — the difference between piracy and "the transformative re-use of material from multiple sources to create new, original works . . . Collage is not theft." "In the visual arts, collage is making one-of-a-kind pieces, and it's under the label of fine art. Music, though, is mass produced. It's pop culture. The monied interests are more involved and they make it into a whole new ball game," Hosler said. "Nobody cared when we were doing this back in the '80s. Only with hip-hop becoming a bigger part of music did things change. "The mentality has changed. We saw it happen with the `U2' single, and now it's happening with computers and the Internet. Napster is a front-page story on USA Today, and it's all about the issues we started dealing with in '90 and '91. Once it becomes digital, the concept of theft and property is turned on its head. The original and the copy are the same. And the way the music industry makes money is by having tight control over the distribution, so once that becomes endangered, they freak out. These threats against Napster are the terrified screams of a dying industry that wants to stop the future from happening." Hosler, in fact, sees virtually all art as collage art. In other words, every new idea is simply the recombination of other, old ideas into a new form. "That's the natural creative impulse — it's transformational more than purely creative, as in starting from nothing," he said. "We take chunks of actual things and recombine them. It's not outright counterfeit when you create something new. But now these businesses want to stop that, stop people from being creative. Time-Warner and all that — they want total control of everything and they want us to sit back and be passive consumers. If you follow that logic all the way through, it's the death of culture. It's mean-spirited, and it's just dumb." Negativland When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Other Side, 6906 S. Lewis Ave. Tickets: $15 at the door BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The Isley Brothers did OK with "Twist and Shout," but the Beatles made it a monster hit. Same story throughout the '60s with "Respectable" (the Yardbirds, the Outsiders), "Nobody But Me" (the Human Beinz) and "Shout" (Lulu). These other groups copied the Isleys' blueprint pretty closely and somehow scored bigger hits with the same songs. The Isleys eventually got their due — with R&B hits such as the shimmering "This Old Heart of Mine," "It's Your Thing" and "Who's That Lady?" — and they look back on those early days not as struggles but as a time when their influence helped direct the flow of modern music. "The Isley Brothers have always been there as some sort of reference point," said Ernie Isley in an interview this week. "We're in the fine print, in the details of rock 'n' roll. Our name may not be called out first, but you always see us in connection with many of the greats. People talk about Hendrix blah blah blah — and the Isleys are there. People talk about the Beatles blah blah blah — and the Isleys are there ... Now with rap and hip-hop, we're the most sampled of anybody. We're still in the mix." Indeed, the Isley Brothers have been there from the beginning, when the first trio of Isley siblings — Ronald, Rudolph and O'Kelly — traveled from Cincinnati to New York City to record a string of doo-wop singles in the '50s. These first songs didn't take the group far at all, but during a 1959 performance in Washington, D.C., they added a line to their spirited cover of "Lonely Teardrops." The ad lib: "You know you make me want to shout." The audience went wild. An RCA executive saw the show, and when he signed the Isleys soon after, he told them to build their first RCA single around that catch phrase. The song "Shout" was born, and though the Isleys' debut of it never cracked the Top 40, "Shout" would become an oft-covered classic, becoming a hit all over again with Lloyd Williams' version in the 1978 movie "Animal House." "We show up in movies all the time," Ernie said. "That movie 'Out of Sight' with George Clooney uses (Public Enemy's Isley-sampling hit) 'Fight the Power' and 'It's Your Thing' running throughout. I didn't know that when I went to see the movie. I felt proud and humbled at the same time. I thought, 'Lord, have mercy. Did we do this music that keeps pushing these buttons?' " Ernie Isley joined his older brothers in the family business just as the group was hitting it big. His first job was playing bass on the Isleys' No. 2 1969 hit, "It's Your Thing." He backed up his brothers with bass, guitar and vocals until he and two other family members — brother Marvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper — joined the older three on 1973's "3 + 3" album, featuring the next huge Isleys hit, "Who's That Lady?" "That was my official coming-out party," Ernie said. The inclusion of Ernie added a new dimension to the Isleys' lite funk. Trained originally as a drummer, Ernie found his way to guitar, largely inspired by Jose Feliciano's cover of the Doors' "Light My Fire." Not that he didn't have one of the greatest living guitarists living in his house. During the Isleys' 1964 tour, they recruited a young guitarist from Seattle named Jimmy James. He played on "Testify," the Isleys' first single for their independent record label, T-Neck. A couple of years later, at the Monterrey Pop Festival, the world was introduced to this guitarist under a modified name: Jimi Hendrix. "I was 12 years old when Jimmy came around," Ernie recalled. "All I saw was a very talented musician. I couldn't understand why he practiced all the time, because he was already so good. But the thing I saw was more real than the thing everybody else saw. I saw the unsimonized, unhyped, real, living, breathing person living in my house. My brothers bought him his first Stratocaster. "People used to have conversations where they'd ask, 'Who's the better guitarist: Clapton or Hendrix?' I was never popular, because I'd say Jose Feliciano. I mean, he took this song by the Doors and showed how melodious it is -- and he was playing acoustic, and he was blind. I thought Hendrix was great, too, but not because of 'Purple Haze' or 'Foxey Lady' but because of what I heard him play without an amp. Nobody wanted to hear that, though." The Isley Brothers and Jimi Hendrix both were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. During the ceremony, Ernie joined the all-star band to sing "Purple Haze," even playing the guitar behind his back. The Isleys have found new life in the era of hip-hop, too. As Ernie mentioned, more rappers sample Isley Brothers songs than even James Brown. "It started with Public Enemy doing 'Fight the Power.' That was one of the first samples. That was before there were any ground rules as to how the songwriters and publishers were going to deal with this. After that, it seemed we started getting about a dozen requests for different songs out of our catalogs on a daily basis. We still do." The current Isley Brothers lineup includes Ronald, Ernie and Marvin, the same trio that recorded the group's latest album in 1996, "Mission to Please." That record was the group's first gold album since 1983's "Between the Sheets." "We're working on another CD," Ernie said. "We gotta keep going. This Isley Brothers banner has been flying for more than 40 years, and I get the feeling there are some people who are just now starting to pay attention. I mean, what these guys do seems to dictate which way the wind is going to blow against the flag. You know, people know what Britney Spears is doing and what the Backstreet Boys are doing. But what are the Isleys doing?" The Isley Brothers When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady Tickets: $40.50 on the floor, $36.50 in the balcony, available at the Brady box office and all Dillard's outlets BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Hanson "This Time Around" (Island Def Jam) Anyone here heard Mitch Ryder? OK, let me rephrase: has anyone under 40 heard Mitch Ryder? He and his quintet, the Detroit Wheels, did for soul music in the '60s what Elvis did for rock 'n' roll in the '50s: introduced it to a white audience. Ryder, the Spencer Davis Group, the Animals — these groups comprised the bridge from the underlying groove of Temptations and Four Tops hits to the soul influences that showed up at the turn of the '70s in groups ranging from Joe Cocker, Traffic (featuring Steve Winwood, the engine in the Spencer Davis Group), all the way to Springsteen. Ryder, in particular, was an indispensable shaman. With his frayed, dizzying wail, Ryder led the Wheels' piston-pumping backbeat through a string of tightly wound hits in '66 and '67 — "Jenny Take a Ride," "Sock It to Me, Baby," "Devil With the Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly" -- all of which evoked the pioneers of soul before him while laying down his own tread on the music. Without Ryder's shot of energy, it's questionable whether fellow Detroit rockers like Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, the MC5 and even the Stooges would have had enough gunpowder to explode out of Motor City. The Hanson brothers know a lot about Ryder. They covered a few of his hits in concert and on the resulting live album largely because they were raised on that music. Living abroad and being home-schooled here in Tulsa throughout their youth (which ain't over yet), they enjoyed a unique isolation with those old rock and soul collections and fed on that same high energy — so much so that when they themselves finally emerged into the musical world, their own unique gifts transmitted the same power. On the trio's eagerly anticipated follow-up to its multi-platinum debut, they finally seize that opportunity, like Ryder, to divine the hidden glories of American soul music to a new generation — a new, white, affluent generation — as well as to define their own sights, synergies and sound. In summary, it RRRocks. "This Time Around" could have been a wreck. Early reports were not good — initial sessions with former Cars frontman and producer extraordinaire Ric Ocasek had been scrapped for murky reasons (translation: the record label didn't hear another "MMMBop"), and Hanson had been shoved back into the studio with Stephen Lironi, the producer of Hanson's smash debut, "Middle of Nowhere." The debut was certainly a good record, but had Hanson merely retreaded it for the follow-up, they'd be destroyed. Too many eyes were on them, too many ears — too many expectations for a great leap forward. What a leap they've made. Lironi's presence on "This Time Around" can be heard in the pitiful scratching sounds that dumb down otherwise solid tracks like "If Only," but the new record is clearly a committed assertion by three willful youngsters determined to avoid being written off amid the boy-band craze they helped to create. There's still not another "MMMBop" here. One wonders how much they had to fight the corporate money-changers to take the steps evident here — the unabashed soul, the high-octane rock 'n' roll — and whether the marketing department at Island Def Jam is stymied as to how they'll push the record. They certainly can't be worried about the record's potential. "This Time Around" could play on virtually any radio station — that is, within any confining format. Send "Dying to Be Alive" to a classic R&B station. Drop "Save Me" among the silly modern rock balladry of Kid Rock and Third Eye Blind, or at least send it to adult contemporary. Make sure to twist the arm of mainstream rock moguls so they play "This Time Around." Heck, they don't even have to back-announce it — run it up against a Black Crowes song and your average KMOD listener probably wouldn't even blink. The worry is whether or not those other radio stations will deign to give Hanson a chance this time around. After all, Hanson's a kiddie band, right? They're like the Backstreet Boys, they don't belong at the table with the adults. That attitude is pretty prevalent (especially among the audience this record could hit the hardest — people my age, on either side of 30), and "This Time Around" likely will be a slow burn compared to "Middle of Nowhere." There's plenty of fuel for the fire, though. The tunefulness and the hooks they mastered the first time around are still here, but the tunes are more complex, the hooks more skillfully cast. The title-track single tip-toes out of the gate with a soft piano introduction, but by the chorus it's chugging with a 300-horsepower riff and see-sawing between the contrary powers of Journey and Stevie Wonder. "Dying to Be Alive" draws heavily on the boys' soul influences and features a small gospel choir led by Rose Stone (of Sly and the Family Stone). On "In the City," Hanson dances on the edge of accessibility, bleeding off the sunshine from the arrangement and singing a pretty desperate plea to an adulterous partner. "You Never Know" opens the record as if the boys have gone to War, brightening a heavy groove and singing, perhaps portentously, "You never know, baby / You never know, baby / You judge the song by a lie that was told." Or he could be singing "soul." As with all great soul singers, it's hard to discern the words accurately. Taylor, the middle Hanson boy and its forthright lead vocalist, is certainly a great soul singer, possibly one day to be hailed among the best of Generation Y (though Macy Gray is going to give him one hell of a fight for that title). His voice is immensely powerful and dynamic — if that come-back line "Do you know why I died?" at the end of the title track doesn't stop your heart, double-check that you're still actually alive — and when, as he grows older, it becomes a partner to his passions, he might rewrite the story of Jericho. It's a SOULFUL voice, too, full of chewy inflections and gritty, guttural wails. It seems to come from an unspoken inner drive, a burgeoning catharsis, more than a heady desire to convey a literate message. Granted, soul music is virtually dead today — replaced by slick, machine-driven R&B, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the rhythm and blues that created the acronym in the first place — but Taylor's pipes and his brothers' developing rhythmic chops on this CD could be cracking open the coffin. (And to the credit of Isaac's and Zac's instrumental talents, this album's guest players like Jonny Lang and Blues Traveler's John Popper wholeheartedly fail to steal the show.) Ryder & Co. translated the music across lines of color; Hanson could transfer the music across lines of age and experience. Either way, "This Time Around" is one teeth-rattling, high-energy rock fest. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World In 1971, Willis Alan Ramsey cut his first record. The self-titled debut, released through Leon Russell's Tulsa-based Shelter Records, sold modestly, but it packed an influential wallop in Ramsey's adopted home state of Texas. That one record, it has been claimed, single-handedly spawned the alternative-Nashville stance that has made Austin, Texas, the so-called live music capital of the world. Just don't ask Ramsey when his next record will appear. "That's an area I really don't want to go to," he says, dodging the requisite inquiries about his work since that first — and, thus far, only — album ("Have you been writing all this time?" "Has anything been recorded?" "Will we ever see a second album?"). "Willis Alan Ramsey" remains the songwriter's one-hit wonder, and nearly 30 years later many musicians still invoke it as the fountainhead of their inspiration. A Ramsey show was the first concert a young Lyle Lovett ever attended, and he has reported that it inspired him to start writing songs. Lovett also has covered songs from that "Ramsey" album, as have such artists as Jimmy Buffett, America, Waylon Jennings, Sam Bush, Shawn Colvin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kate Wolf, Jerry Jeff Walker and, of course, the Captain and Tenille, who made Ramsey's "Muskrat Love" a Top 5 hit in 1976. Indeed, never has one batch of 11 songs had such stamina, and rarely does one find a songwriter so humble -- almost insecure — about such influence. While remaining enigmatic about his affairs during the last 29 years, Ramsey frequently writes off his initial experience to the pure luck of youth and happenstance. "I was just a kid knocking around," he said, in a rare interview last week, in which Ramsey eked out a tale of time, Tulsa and tenacity. Seeking Shelter Born in Birmingham, Ala., and raised in Dallas by his Georgia-native parents, Ramsey graduated high school and "got away as quick as I could." He dropped south to Austin where he explored some of the guitar-picking he'd been tinkering with. Ray Wylie Hubbard's fledgling band took notice of his skills and asked Ramsey to open some of its shows in 1969. "I was playing the UT coffee house, and I heard that Leon (Russell) and Gregg Allman were in town playing a festival and staying at the same hotel. So I walked in, knocked on both their doors and told them I thought they should give me a listen," Ramsey said. "It was a pretty asinine thing to do back then, and I guess they thought I was so cocky they gave me the chance. I played my songs for Leon and his roadie, and then for Gregg and (Allman Brothers guitarist) Dickey Betts, right there in their rooms." Both musicians heard promise in Ramsey's material, and both offered him contracts on their record labels — Allman's Atlanta-based Capricorn Records and Russell's Shelter, based then in Los Angeles. Ramsey sought Shelter — with possibly purely personal motives. "I've never really thought about this," Ramsey chuckled, "but I guess since my whole family was from Georgia I liked the idea of going to L.A. better than being closer to Atlanta." Mad dogs and Southerners Ramsey headed to L.A. to cut his record in Russell's home studio, "probably the first professional home studio anyone had in the world," he said. He was largely left to his own devices, as Russell had decided to move back to Tulsa. "At that point, Leon decided he'd had enough of North Hollywood and wanted to move back to Tulsa," Ramsey said. "He and Denny (Cordell, Russell's and Ramsey's producer and manager) had good luck with Shelter, so they took it home. Leon bought that whole block with a church on it and put in a studio . . . He left me in his L.A. place, so I got to learn how to work in a studio — by myself. I learned how to write in the studio. That's something Leon taught me: how to use the studio as a writing tool." Most of Ramsey's record was completed in L.A., with Russell helping out and adding piano to one track, "Goodbye Old Missoula." It was that work directly with Russell that made Ramsey feel every bit the lucky kid just knocking around. "I was a kid musically, and I was stretched and stretched to the point where I was way past my musical abilities," he said. "Leon would put you in a studio with Jim Keltner on drums, Carl Radle on bass and Don Preston on electric guitar, and he'd sit at the piano. He'd say, `Well, this song needs an acoustic guitar solo. Willis, why don't you just play a solo here.' I was 20 and not in the space where I could just do that on the spot yet. I was definitely over my head." Ramsey's record came out in 1972 and sold moderately -- not well enough to give Ramsey the escape he needed. Ramsey -- like nearly all Shelter artists, from Russell to Phoebe Snow — fell out with Cordell, but without big profits he couldn't get out of his Shelter contract. "I didn't have enough sales to be able to just leave and tell my lawyers to clean it up. Tom Petty did, Phoebe Snow did, I couldn't afford to," he said. So he sat out his contract — all eight years of it. By the time it ran out, it was 1980, Ramsey was in the doldrums of a divorce and had been all but forgotten by non-musicians. He bought some synthesizers and "fooled around with those," but he quickly found that there was no place for a shy, sensitive songwriter in the "Urban Cowboy" '80s. "I just didn't want to play in a place with a mechanical bull in it," Ramsey said. I will survive Since then, Ramsey says, cryptically, he's been writing. He wants to record again, but he's not sure he'll ever get to do it on his terms — which is the only way it'll happen, he said. "My No. 1 goal right now is to have more kids. No. 2 is to make more records," he said. "But making records these days requires a record label, and label budgets are small these days. That record of mine cost $80,000 to make, which would be about $300,000 in today's dollars. It was a pretty expensive first-time record in 1972. I'm not the kind of guy who can make a $30,000 record. It takes me longer. There's too much I want to do." He still performs around the region — "some old songs, some new" — drawing a sizeable cult following. He's even appeared on a record recently, coming out of the woodwork to sing on two Lovett records in the '90s, "Joshua Judges Ruth" and "I Love Everybody." Last year, Koch Records reissued "Willis Alan Ramsey" on CD, and the record has begun to find a fresh audience. "It still gets around," Ramsey said. "It's been a real work-horse all this time." Ramsey on Oklahoma Willis Alan Ramsey recorded his one and only record for Shelter Records back in Leon Russell's heyday. That meant hanging out in Tulsa at Russell's many area studios, where "you'd go to pick up the phone, and it would be George Harrison or someone," Ramsey said. Here are a few of his recollections and praise of his Okie counterparts: "I was in the process of finishing up my record and got to work with people like Leon and Jamie Oldaker. J.J. Cale took me in the studio. I was hanging out with guys like Gary Gilmore and Jesse Davis, both of whom played with Taj Mahal. Chuck Blackwell, too. Some pretty serious musicians came out of Tulsa. I mean, Jimmy Lee Keltner — he and Oldecker . . . if Tulsa can produce two drummers like that, well, they're the best, in my opinion. Those Tulsa boys raised me in the studio." "When I was playing the Cellar Door Club in (Washington) D.C., this long-haired kid would come sit on the back steps, and I'd get him in for free. He was going to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. When he finally got up enough nerve to play the acoustic guitar for me, he turned out this amazing stuff. He said, 'What should I do with this?' and I said, 'I dunno, but you'd better do something.' It was Michael Hedges." "I still say this, and most people I know say it, too: Leon Russell is a musical genius. He still is. He's so incredibly talented, and he's a free thinker. Lots of Tulsans are . . . But I don't think he ever really scratched the surface of his ability." "It was in the '60s when I figured out I wanted to write and say some things. In New York, I found a book called Born to Win, a compilation of Woody Guthrie's songs, stories, poems, letters and drawings. It was this fabulous direct hit from his pen, with his own unique voice. Even when I think about that book today, it still really does motivate me. He was another free-thinking Okie. There was something about the way he could connect with the thought and deliver it to you totally unvarnished. So visceral, but so elegant . . . (My song) 'Boy From Oklahoma' is sort of a romanticized version of Woody." Three short years ago, Hanson put Tulsa on the pop music map. Boy, oh boy, how things change.4/23/2000
By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World OK, yes, Hanson is comprised of three boys. This does not, however, make them a boy band. At least not in the strict sense of that new colloquialism. The Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, 98 Degrees -- these are "boy bands." They're pretty, preened and packaged for ready sale. They hire European professionals to write their songs, and they sweat through vigorous choreography onstage. The Hanson brothers might be young and fresh-faced, but they have no time for synchronized dancing because they're actually playing instruments. They also write their own songs and even co-produced their new album. They are boys, for now, but they are definitely a band. "From the very beginning, we tried hard to do our own thing, to write our own songs and to be as involved in the whole thing as any other real musician would be," said Isaac Hanson, the eldest member of the brotherly trio. In two weeks, the world will see what happens when three brothers — Isaac, Taylor and Zac — stop being polite and start getting real. "This Time Around," the Tulsa band's follow-up album to the '97 multi-platinum hit debut "Middle of Nowhere," hits record store shelves on May 9. The new record pumps up the volume a bit, leaning more heavily toward guitar-driven rock and featuring some high-profile guest appearances. In person, the differences between Hanson old and new would be quite apparent. Isaac's braces are gone, and he's now the middle child height-wise; Taylor tops him by an inch. On record, the contrast is almost as clear. Where the hit single "MMMBop" hearkened back to the sweet grooves of the Jackson 5, the new single — the title track — is a piano-driven shot of Southern soul that could land Hanson a slot on a new H.O.R.D.E. tour. "When you're the one evolving, of course, you don't notice it much. To us, it feels like a natural change," Taylor said during this week's conversation from the band's promotional duties in Tokyo. "Those changes you do hear right away are, OK, the voices are lower, so there's a slightly different sound to accommodate that, and in that sense it has more of an edge to it." The increased soul quotient is no surprise, really. Before the Hanson family — now seven children strong -- settled in Tulsa, they followed father Walker Hanson's work transfers around South America. In their home-schooled foreign isolation, the Hanson brothers soaked up Mom and Dad's collections of '60s soul music. "When you hear Aretha Franklin sing 'Respect,' that's like an undeniable sense of musicality that can't help strike you, no matter who you are or what you want to do," Taylor said. This time around, Hanson hooked up with one of those early soul icons. One track on the new album, called "Dying to Be Alive," features a gospel choir led by Rose Stone of Sly and the Family Stone. Working with her was a humbling experience for the Hansons, Isaac said. "She does that scatting thing on the end, and she was very sheepish about doing it. The 10 people in there said, `Rose, what are you talking about? You should do it.' So she wailed. She's this little lady, too, and this huge sound came out. It was just amazing. We were standing in the studio, looking at her in the tracking room, and she belted it. All of us looked at each other like, `Wow!' We thought, `We're just going to retire right now.' All that singing we thought we were doing — we realized how far we have to go," he said. Blues guitarist Jonny Lang — who's Isaac's age — plays three solos on "This Time Around," and Blues Traveler frontman John Popper does some wailing of his own on harmonica. The resulting sound is indeed miles distant from the boy-band clique, which often flies under the banner of R&B (an acronym whose antecedents have been somewhat forgotten -- it's rhythm and blues. "The early R&B had a big influence on us," Isaac said. "Aretha Franklin is R&B. But Lauryn Hill is great, and she's R&B. The Backstreet stuff is closer to what I call rhythm pop. It's just pop, really. We're pop, too, in a sense, but this is more rock 'n' roll in its essence." "The (new R&B) is more drastically different," Taylor said. "Now you're layering loops and it's a completely different style of music. It's not even the same thing anymore. The only thing (today) that touches on original soul is someone like Lauryn Hill, who is still vocally in that real R&B sense. She's one of those people who really goes there." The key to "This Time Around," if you haven't yet noticed, is that it's an album that might finally be discussed for its musical offerings rather than generating mere useless gossip about three cute pinups and their dating prospects. The fans of the first album are older now, a little less prone to hysterics and probably listening to music more than simply reacting to it. That doesn't mean the gossip mongers have lost any work. The boys are still amazed at how quickly the minutiae of their daily lives is reported on someone's Hanson web site. "Sometimes you wonder who's telling people all this stuff," Zac said. "We got a dog at one point. I mean, we'd just gotten it. We hadn't told anyone, and the next day what kind it was and how old it was was out there (on the web). There's not much you can do about it." Some personal information is sought after just to check the status of the band, though. Two waves of rumors about Isaac quitting the band to go to college palpitated the hearts of local fans last year. A home-schooled student like all of his siblings, he is technically finished with high school now and is auditing a few college courses (physics and, go figure, music theory). He said college plans are on the table for the future, and he has looked at some schools. What that would mean for Hanson's future remains unclear. Isaac himself said probably very little, because the music is the driving force for the family. "I think we all want to continue this as long as we can," he said. "I saw Les Paul two months ago in a little jazz club in New York City. He's 83 now and still playing guitar. He invented the solid-body guitar and multi-track recording, and he's still playing, still doing it. I hope we can do that." Hanson brothers ready for another busy year BY THOMAS CONNER © Tulsa World Children seem distracted? Are they having trouble focusing on schoolwork? Newly shellacked nails already bitten to the nub? Relax, it's probably nothing to worry about. They're just anxious for the new Hanson album, "This Time Around," which is due in record stores May 9. The three Tulsa-native Hanson brothers — Isaac, Taylor and Zac — took time out from promotional duties in Tokyo this week to phone home and chat with the Tulsa World about the new record and its amplified rock 'n' roll chops. The boys are ready for another busy year of circling the globe to promote the record. "I hope it's a crazy year," Zac said. "That's a good thing. That means somebody likes it." "This Time Around," on the reorganized Island Def Jam record label, is the trio's fourth album, but it's the real follow-up to 1997's multimillion-selling "Middle of Nowhere" disc, which featured the hit single "MMMBop." After the debut record came a Christmas album ("Snowed In") and a live set ("Live From Albertane"), but "This Time Around" is the first full-length recording of all-new material since Hanson opened the Top 40 floodgates for bright teen pop. It's a bit overdue. The new record was scheduled for release last fall, but original recording sessions with noted producer and former Cars singer Ric Ocasek were scrapped for still-murky reasons. The boys rehired "Middle of Nowhere" producer Stephen Lironi and tried again. "We actually did take longer than we thought to make this record, and that's just the way the dice fell," Isaac said. "We felt confident about it, though." Most of the songs were written and demoed in the Hansons' home studio in Tulsa, and three more were created in the California recording studio. No touring plans have yet been set to support the new album. Hanson leaves Japan on Sunday for more promotional events in South America, and they said they look forward to coming home again — whenever that might be. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Tulsa's own Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey is about to launch an exhaustive national tour, circling the continent in a few months and headlining some of the country's premier improvisational music venues. Again. "Two nights ago, Eric (Gerber, the band's new Los Angeles manager) read me just the confirmed stuff. It's unbelievable," said JFJO bassist Reed Mathis this week. The band's summer tour — it's fifth national go-round -- will consist of 52 concerts, taking them to headlining gigs in New York City and Boston, south to Memphis, through Tulsa ("We might actually get one day off here at home," Mathis said) on their way to a week of shows in Colorado and points west. They'll return in time to play the Greenwood Jazz Festival in August. The band is still riding the acclaim of its third album -- the first to reach a national audience — "Welcome Home" on Massachusetts-based Accurate Records. The May issue of Jazz Times hit the streets this week with a story about the nation's improvisational music scene focuses on seven bands, including Phish, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey and Medeski, Martin and Wood. "Things have really started changing," Mathis said. "I did a Web search of radio playlists the other day. We're getting played alongside Zappa; Medeski, Martin and Wood; and Mingus. These people haven't seen us live. They just assume we're huge because they can get our record now. ... Plus, people are recognizing the music now. At a recent show in Chicago, Matt (Edwards, drummer) started the beat to `Seven Inch Six' from `Welcome Home,' and people started clapping and cheering." Fans have begun to tape shows, too — just like Deadheads. "And that's fine, 'cause we're an improvisational band. If you have 'Welcome Home' and three bootlegs of our shows, you've got four completely different records, really." This weekend's all-ages show will feature some of the band's newest material, which Mathis said is on a new level from the band's work thus far. "Like Mingus or Ellington, we've begun to write for the band we're in, instead of just creating music and making each guy fit it and not the other way around," he said. "We're able now to conceptualize the parts for the people, to give each player the chance to show his strengths." Like most Odyssey members, Mathis has plenty of extra work on the side. In addition to playing in the Jacob Fred Trio (each Wednesday night at the Bowery), he plays in the Neighbors with local blues legend and Spot Music Award winner Steve Pryor. Expect to see a Neighbors CD released within the next month, featuring Pryor chiefly on pedal steel and some very un-blues music, including covers of John Coltrane and Eddie Harris. Catch Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey while they're home, playing at 8 p.m. Saturday at The Delaware, 1511 S. Delaware Ave. It's an all-ages show, and the Western Champs — an eight-member band featuring some former Blue Collars — open the show. Tickets are $5 at the door. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Nearly 15 years ago, I took a date to a great date show. Brave Combo was playing on the lawn at an art museum in Oklahoma City. We took a picnic, we languished through the warm evening on the cool grass, and later, as I laid back on our blanket, the band started playing "The Bunny Hop." Lead singer-accordionist Carl Finch stepped into the crowd and picked up a long line of children behind him. They meandered around the grounds doing "The Bunny Hop," and Finch led the entire processional stepping right over my head. So it was really no surprise when we caught up with Finch this week as he and the band are working on their next record — a children's album. "It's definitely a natural step for us," Finch said from his Denton, Texas studio. "People have told us for years how much their kids liked our music, and these were all albums not (solely) intended for kids." The children's album will be a typically quick follow-up to Brave Combo's current CD, "The Process," which was just released and is itself a significant departure from the band's norm. Brave Combo, you see, is a polka band. Polka is their musical base, anyway. In the last two decades — for they just celebrated a 20th anniversary — Brave Combo has served as a freewheeling crash course in world dance music, creating new songs based on old forms and turning rock 'n' roll classics into something you could dance to cheek-to-cheek — those being literal cheeks or the, um, other body part. Their early polka remake of the Doors' "People Are Strange" definitely raised their profile, and "The Process" turns Foreigner's "Double Vision" into a smoky, seductive mambo. Brave Combo, however, is not a novelty act. Twenty years later, Finch is still having to defend himself and his band — though not as much as he used to — and this week he talked about that, about the overlooked genius of polka music and about winning his first Grammy award. Thomas: If someone had promised you, back in 1980, that you'd still be making records and even winning Grammys in 20 years, how would you have reacted? Carl: With great disbelief. I knew I dug the music, but I had no idea how large the polka world really was. I thought I was kind of onto something, but I realized a lot of other people were thinking along these same lines. For me, it's been a process of figuring out that I fit into a picture already, not that I have to paint my own ... So I've been able to get swept up in it. I like the power of polka, the tension and release. I like how polka musicians are aware of the power of this formula, how this happens technically within the polka and how they work to maximize that impact of the tension and release. A lot of music does that but not to the degree polka does it, and so many cultures have latched onto that power — Tejano, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, German. Thomas: Some people out there are laughing at this by now — polka music. Why does polka get that derision? Carl: Well, it's changing. The youngest generation with any listening and buying power now don't have as many preconceived ideas, and a lot of younger musicians don't have the old connections with squareness. It's a dying concept leftover from square TV and perceptions of polka as this bland, Lawrence Welk thing — though even he, when he was younger, was hopping on buses and going from town to town. There was mission behind what he did ... People who think polka is square are the most square and uninformed people around. The hippest people know it. Thomas: Just a month ago, you won the Grammy for Best Polka Album for your record that came out last year, "Polkasonic." Has that helped your own mission to nationalize modern polka? Carl: Actually, our challenge now that we won that Grammy is to not be considered ungrateful outsiders within the polka world. We have to make sure that those in the trenches know we're serious and committed. Thomas: Being somewhat irreverent and pop-oriented, it's probably harder to play for a polka-loving crowd than a rock club. Carl: Some of the polka fans get livid about us, saying we shouldn't even exist. They don't think we're serious. They also usually come from the belief that polka should be played only one way: their way — in a certain style like Slovenian or Czech, etc. We're a weird mixture of all the styles, and we've been around doing this for 20 years, so our (musical) vocabulary is pretty good. Thomas: About five years ago, Brave Combo issued a collaboration album with the late Tiny Tim — certainly a mixture of new attitudes and old. Your band is pretty well-armed with irony, while Tiny took his music very seriously. The album is fantastic, but how did that pairing work? Carl: There's a lot more irony there than you would imagine from him, and we in turn were a lot more serious. The record took a long time to do, but we were conscious throughout that we didn't want this to throw us further into the novelty bin people always channel us into. We didn't want this to be a cheap knock-off for him, either. That's why we had him go into his big songbook to get stuff from the turn of the century and the 19th century, in addition to, you know, the Beatles songs we did. Thomas: Like "Sly Cigarette," which is such a great old song. Carl: Exactly, it's my favorite of that batch. "Sly Cigarette" — how politically incorrect can you get? That's why we chose it. And we still play it. Thomas: The Grammy for "Polkasonic" was awarded in February, then your new record, "The Process," came out in March. Wasting no time, I see. Carl: "Polkasonic" was on another label, and we certainly didn't plan on the Grammy. But it was released by a label, Cleveland International, that got behind it and pushed it really hard. It made serious headway into the polka world, and it actually won the Grammy, beating some pretty heavy-duty guys. "The Process" came out the next month, which is both great and unfortunate at the same time. A little confusing. Thomas: "The Process" is your most accessible, pop-oriented album yet. Was this the plan or just the next evolutionary step? Carl: The total effort behind this record is to find more airplay. We were working on the songs and writing a group that fit us but reached out in different directions. We wanted to make a record that might confuse critics and our fans but open some new doors into radio. Thomas: Was it difficult to fit the polka elements into the pop songs? Carl: It's different than usual, different than putting the dance style first. For me, part of it was a catharsis, using music to help deal with some internal struggles. I made those the reason and meaning this time out. It's about a process not just of writing and expressing but of living and being human. The song "Golden Opportunity" sums it up: even the (bad) things are supposed to happen. Thomas: And you've finally written a song called "Denton, Texas," your home base. Why did it take you 20 years to do that? Carl: Just kind of time, I guess. We've been treated so well here. They've named it Brave Combo week here, and we've become sort of ambassadors for Denton. We're working on becoming the kings of Denton. We're very recognizable here. Thomas: How did Denton, Texas, come to be so supportive of a polka band? Carl: When we got together this was a big jazz and prog-rock town. So when we came around doing polkas, they kind of understood the sophistication of it. Thomas: Tell me about the children's record. Carl: We're doing it with a couple of kid album veterans, Marcy Marxer and Cathy Fink. We were doing a festival in southern California, and they were there. They saw our show and were staying at the same hotel. We hung out, and they said they'd like to do a record with us ... I'd never thought about it seriously until this. To be honest, the songs and content may be more for kids, but the songs sound like Brave Combo songs. Musically, it's just as sophisticated and adult, but the themes are for kids. We're doing an old Harry Belafonte song, "Real Simple Thing." It's concepts kids can relate to — mountains, water, valleys — but adults will be able to put their own meaning to it, as well. One song is about not wanting to clean up your room, and we've put it to a sinister cha-cha beat. Whatever it means, you know, it doesn't matter. It's just a song. This post contains my complete running coverage of this annual conference and festival ...
© Tulsa World Tulsa band Fanzine gets a chance to shine at SXSW showcase By Thomas Conner 03/19/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — The sound man at Opal Divine's Firehouse was filling the pre-show dead time with his own selection of classic-rock greatest hits: a couple of cuts from the Eagles' "Long Run" album, a smattering of Zeppelin, a lot of Journey. A few minutes before showtime, he played Cheap Trick's live cover of "Ain't That a Shame," and Fanzine drummer Don Jameson started air-drumming. "Oh, yes!" he said, tapping into the song's lengthy introductory groove. "This is what it's about, right here. It's not, 'Won't you step back from that ledge, my friend' " — making a face, making fun of the Third Eye Blind hit "Jumper" — "It's about the shaking of the booty. It's about being larger than life . . . There isn't an arena big enough to hold us." This weekend it wasn't arenas, just a small club patio on the edge of Austin's hottest nightclub scene and in the middle of its yearly music-industry lottery. On Wednesday night, Jameson and his Tulsa-based rock band, Fanzine, kicked off the South by Southwest music festival, an annual congregation of music-business talent scouts and international media all searching for the Next Big Thing. Nearly 1,000 bands — a record — from around the world were scheduled to play hourlong sets in clubs throughout Austin this weekend, and Fanzine had the daunting task of playing in the first showcase slot on the first night of the festival. In just a few hours, and certainly over the four days of the festival, these four players would learn what, indeed, it was all about. It's all about the gig South by Southwest is basically a live-music mall. "Buyers" from record labels, management companies and music magazines stroll up and down Austin's nightclub-lined Sixth Street and shop for the hottest new fashions in pop music. So when your band is fortunate enough to land a showcase here, you want everything to be perfect. For Fanzine, it very nearly was. "How lucky are we to be playing right before the Mayflies?" Jameson asked when the band finished sound check. The Mayflies, an up-and-coming pop band from Chapel Hill, N.C., were listed by many SXSW forecasters as one of the most interesting acts to see this year. They would thus be drawing a crowd of scouts and record company reps, and many of them would come early — and hear Fanzine. "We're blessed tonight. This feels good," Fanzine singer Adam said before the show. The band arrived in Austin on Tuesday and immediately went to work with staple guns and smiles, tacking up posters advertising the Wednesday night gig and thrusting handbills into the palms of any passers-by. "We came all this way, I just want someone to see us," Jameson said. "Tonight's all about being seen — eyes on us." And, of course, ears. It's not about the gig Still, Jameson and the other Fanzine players weren't expecting miracles. Their set coincided with the Austin Music Awards — a ceremony honoring the best of local talent, much like Tulsa's Spotniks — the big event of Wednesday night. The band's 24 hours in town wasn't a lot of time to spread the word about its showcase. Most music reps and media don't arrive until late Wednesday or Thursday, anyway. "I really expect very little tonight," Jameson said. "It's the first night, and this club's off the beaten path, but this sure is great to put (in the press kit). It means we've been chosen among some kind of selected upper crust." The World Wide Web was certainly an aid in advance promotion. Word of the showcase spread quickly on, oddly enough, Web sites and newsgroups for fans of the Toadies. Plus, Tulsa radio music directors e-mailed their record company contacts en masse, advising them of the Fanzine show. One of them, KMYZ 104.5-FM music director Ray Seggern, attended Wednesday's show. Seggern is an Austin native, having worked with the city's popular modern rock station for several years. He knows people, and he dragged as many as he could with him to see the Tulsa band. But even Seggern was realistic. "It's not about the gig," he said. "The gig is the least important part. (What's important) is the networking, the experience, the mindset. Just being here and wearing a badge is important." Case in point: Hanson. The young Tulsa trio spent several days at SXSW early in the '90s. Too young to even play in the local bars, they strolled the streets and softball-park bleachers, singing for anyone who would listen. An astute music manager did, and the rest is history. It's about support For Fanzine's show, though, Opal Divine's was packed. Most importantly, the crowd stayed and stared. Many SXSW showcase audiences often are indifferent groups of jaded music-industry mavens concentrating on wheeling and dealing with other industry folk rather than listening to the bands. Fanzine's crowd, though, stopped, looked and listened. The band was on point, too. Tighter than they've been in many months — and fueled by more adreneline, no doubt — they tore through 40 minutes of their groove-stuffed, flashy and unrelenting rock 'n' roll. Adam threw off his bright orange jacket ("You like me mack?") by the third song and was soon shaking his tambourine all over the club's outdoor wooden deck and dancing with Beatle Bob, an eccentric music-industry analyst who came to the show and danced his trademark swingin' dance. Many in Wednesday night's crowd were Tulsans, checking out their hometown band on Austin's turf. Tim Kassen, a Williams Company agent who also books bands for Tulsa's Bourbon Street Cafe on 15th Street, was in town and said he made a beeline to Fanzine's show. "Nobody performs like Adam, with all that energy," he said. "Heck, if I had the money, I'd sign them." Also looking on were T.J. Green and Angie Devore, the husband-and-wife team at the helm of new Tulsa band Ultrafix. They weren't scheduled to play in Austin this weekend; they came down just to attend the conference and meet music-business folks and other musicians. They had planned to arrive in Austin on Thursday but came a day early to be present for the Fanzine show. "It's all about support, man," Green said. By George, we got us a rock show By Thomas Conner 03/19/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — When South by Southwest occurs each March, the Texas capital is literally overrun by music businesspeople and musicians. How invasive is the conference? Just ask presidential hopeful George W. Bush. When the Texas governor realized he was going to sweep Tuesday's second big round of Republican presidential primaries, his campaign staff decided to book a local ballroom to host the celebration and inevitable victory speech. But they couldn't find one. Every ballroom, theater and public venue in town was booked up with SXSW events. Bush and his supporters wound up in far northwest Austin, patting themselves on the back in a gymnasium at the Dell Jewish Community Campus. Talk about rocking the vote. Rangers in command Storms raked the Texas hill country late Thursday afternoon. The Ray Price show in the park surely was doomed, so we headed for indoor shelter. The fact that it had tortillas, margaritas and the Red Dirt Rangers made it downright heaven. The Oklahoma roots-music band played the first of its five SXSW-week gigs ("Six," Ranger John Cooper said later — "We actually got one that pays!") at Jovita's, an authentic Mexican restaurant south of downtown Austin. And I mean authentic. The walls were arrayed with rich, colorful murals, mostly depicting masked rebels in olive drab, including a giant portrait of Che Guevera. The tables were so sticky we had to paper them over with copies from a stack of someone's Spanish-English poem entitled "Crossroads." Our waitress had two breathtaking parrots tattooed on her shoulder blades. As the storm pelted Jovita's corrugated skylight, the Rangers blasted through their typically invigorating set of Okie rock 'n' soul, opening the show with two Woody Guthrie covers, "Rangers' Command" (the title track to the Rangers' latest CD, recorded in Austin) and "California Stars" (one of the Woody lyrics put to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco) — a nod to Woody's younger sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, sitting in the audience. Also watching the Rangers was fellow Stillwater native, now Austin-based songwriter Jimmy Lafave. The Rangers also played his song "Red Dirt Roads," rocking it more than Lafave probably ever envisioned and using it as a sparring match between electric guitarist Ben Han and new steel guitarist Roger Ray, also of Stillwater's Jason Boland and the Stranglers. Whoops and yelps all around. This ... is Wanda Conversation overheard on the sidewalk outside the Continental Club, Thursday night in the freezing cold, waiting in vain to get inside and hear Oklahoma City rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson: She: "We'll never get in." He: "They're full? At eight o'clock? Who is this woman?" She: "I don't know. She looks like Loretta Lynn." He: "Loretta Lynn never had a stand-up bass player like that." She: "Can you see her hair?" He: "That's all I can see. I could be back at the hotel and still see that hair." She: "It's not that big." He: "What?" She: "Nothing. I was wrong." Talking 'bout Tulsa Tulsans protested the derogatory mention of the city in a recent Best Western ad campaign, but our hometown creeps into the world's consciousness in strange and mysterious ways. Take, for example, a song by Astrid, a spunky and tuneful guitar band from Scotland. Near the end of the band's hard-hitting showcase, they played a song called "Cybersex," which the singer was good enough to point out "is about cybersex." The refrain, from the point of view of the narrative's libidinous web surfer: "It's 3 p.m. in Idlewild / Kansas, Tulsa, Arkansas." Minty sweet Norman band Starlight Mints were lucky enough to land a SXSW showcase this year, but it was nearly ruined by equipment problems that delayed them 20 minutes — nearly half of their allotted playing time. (And SXSW showcases begin and end on time, or else.) Still, the embryonic rock band impressed a capacity crowd at the intimate Copper Tank North club with its herky-jerky melodies and noises. My notes include this absurd but revealing description of the band's music: "Gordon Gano (Violent Femmes) singing, Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) on guitar, chick from the Rentals (Maya Rudolph) on keys, all aboard a carousel at Wayne Coyne's (Flaming Lips) fun park." For the record While SXSW takes over Austin with live music, another of the country's biggest musical events occurs here at the same time. This one involves recorded music: the annual Austin Record Convention, the largest new-and-used record sale in the country. Hundreds of record dealers from all over the country huddle over tables in the Palmer Municipal Auditorium and hawk more than a million CDs, LPs, 45s and even 78s. With the world's music business leaders in town, these dealers have to face a particular and knowledgeable clientele. "This is the reissue, though. See, it's dated '92. You don't have the '84 original with the six extra versions?" That's pretty standard discussion fare at the convention. One dealer from Minnesota boasted a pristine, still-wrapped copy of former Tulsan Leon Russell's "The Wedding Album." Asking price: $100. A C-note? Has he heard it? "No, but my books tell me that's a steal." A rose by any other name ... Part of the fun of perusing the SXSW schedule is the humor and daring of some of the band names. The chucklers on this year's list: Alabama Thunder Pussy, ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, Betty Blowtorch, Camaro Hair, Del the Funky Homosapien, the Dino Martinis, Fatal Flying Guilloteens, I Am the World Trade Center, Man Scouts of America, Maximum Coherence During Flying, the Psychedelic Kinky Fellows, Roar! Lion, Sci-Fi Uterus and the Tremolo Beer Gut. Food for the soul If you want music media to come see your band, set up a free buffet. A table of sumptuous Texas barbecue and an absence of cash registers filled La Zona Rosa with SXSW registrants Thursday afternoon to see the Nixons open for Texas guitar hero Ian Moore. Greasy hands clapped for the Nixons' timeless (as in, stuck in 1993) grunge rock. The band sported a new record label (the showcase sponsor, Koch Records), new songs ("P.O.V." and the wildly cheery "Blackout") and, well, a new band. Singer Zac Malloy is the only original Norman-native member left, having jettisoned the rest of the crew for a new batch of Dallas-based throw-backs. The Nixons started in Norman as a cover band, scored a modern rock hit early in the '90s with "Sister" and now are based in Dallas. A new album is due April 11. 'What about the amps?' Austin is full of colorful, sometimes downright eccentric, characters, so when we noticed the guy talking to himself on Fourth Street, it was no big shock. He stood in the hot afternoon sun, pacing in circles, gesturing wildly and talking, talking, talking — by himself. "What about the amps?" he kept asking. "Where are the amps?" We skirted him just off the curb, thinking to ourselves, "So young, and already so nuts." Then we noticed it. The earpiece, the hidden microphone — a hands-free cell phone. SXSW snapshots: The high, mighty and downright loony go wild in Austin By Thomas Conner 03/22/2000 AUSTIN, Texas — More than 30 years after his death, musicians — and, indeed, Americans — are just now figuring out what Woody Guthrie was about. Greg Johnson, owner of Oklahoma City's revered Blue Door nightclub, summed it up ably during a South by Southwest panel discussion entitled "Made for You and Me: Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Legacy." "Woody was about freedom and community," Johnson said. "He was about propping people up. Bruce Springsteen used to say it this way: 'Woody was about the next guy in line.' " Veteran music journalist Dave Marsh led the panel, which also included Austin-based songwriters Jimmy Lafave and Michael Fracasso. The star of the panel, though, was Guthrie's youngest sister, Mary Jo Edgmon, who regaled the crowd with homespun tales of her proud father, her misunderstood mother and her iconic older brother. "I was reared on music all the way up to here," Edgmon said, pointing over her head. "Woody taught me chords on the guitar. I got really good at that C chord, I guess it was." Edgmon spoke proudly of the "1,000 percent turnaround" in America's perception of Woody, particularly in his Green Country hometown of Okemah. She said she's thrilled to see the misunderstandings about Woody's political and spiritual beliefs clearing up. "I want the world to understand that the Guthrie family was not trash, that Woody was as good a man as there is," she said. Lafave and Fracasso both punctuated the panel session with performances. Fracasso sang Guthrie's "1913 Massacre" and one of his own songs directly inspired by Woody's songwriting (Fracasso's chorus: "From the mountains to the valleys / from the prairies to the sea / If you ain't got love, you ain't got a nickel"). Lafave sang a song about Woody called "Woody's Road," written by acclaimed Oklahoma songwriter Bob Childers, and then closed the afternoon event with a rendition of Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills," joined by members of the Red Dirt Rangers and Edgmon herself. Paint the town Redd Austin's Top of the Marc is a clean, classy place — not your usual SXSW mosh pit. The clientele shows the proper amount of cuff, and the bar has drambuie. Festival organizers couldn't just stick another all-girl Japanese punk band in here. They needed class. So they called upon Charlie Redd and his boys. Decked out and dynamic, the Full Flava Kings brought Redd back home in style. "Bring it on home, y'all!" Redd would shout in a song's closing jam, though it was unclear which home he was referring to — his native Austin or his new Tulsa HQ. Either way, his Austin friends and fans saw a new Redd on Saturday night: more groovy, more gravy and drizzling a more honeyed baritone over the band's dense rhythm-and-funk. In addition to charter Kings Dave Kelly on guitar, Brian Lee on keyboards and Stanley Fary beating the drums mercilessly, the Full Flava Kings debuted new guitarist and veteran Tulsa funkmeister Travis Fite (Phat Thumb) to the Austin crowd. Their response? Ask the female stranger who tried to start The Bump with me during the show. Here come the brides Tyson Meade, the colorful leader of the Norman-reared Chainsaw Kittens, used to wear dresses on stage as a rule. After his Friday night SXSW showcase, he took the fixation to a bold new level by getting married to another man in full white-gown fabulousness. Before the next band (the bizarro but like-minded Frogs) took the tent stage outside the Gallery Lombardi Lounge, Meade reappeared in a wedding processional that parted the crowd. The wedding party included several maids, matrons and misters of honor in various degrees of Mardi Gras-esque garb, all of whom surrounded the officiating Hindu priest for the brief ceremony. In a flurry of toasts and funny-but-heartfelt vows, Meade and Skip Handleman Werner — who was always preceded by the mysterious title "international pop star" — were pronounced unlawfully married. They smooched, and the wedding party bunny-hopped from the venue as "Y.M.C.A." blared. Reports of this high camp should not overshadow news of the Kittens' triumphant return. Still without a record deal after the sad demise of the Smashing Pumpkins' Scratchie Records, the Kittens blasted back into action Friday night with an explosive set of old and new glam-punk songs. Meade, juiced by pre-wedding jitters, took the stage in a royal blue feathery jacket and furiously belted and screamed his way through the serrated set of Kitty classics reaching all the way back to the band's debut album, "Violent Religion." I can't chaaange Billy Joe Winghead's lead singer, John Manson, took out his personal angst about Meade's marriage (he was distraught over not getting to, um, kiss the bride) through BJW's two sets of roadhouse rock. The OKC-Tulsa band blew into Austin late Saturday and played back-to-back shows at the Hole in the Wall, a University of Texas hangout, and Cheapo Discs. Shoppers at the latter venue were typically unfazed by the blaring band over in the corner — until they played "Free Bird." A cliche request that normally turns off young rock audiences always turns heads when its coming from the five-piece Billy Joe Winghead. Tulsa bassist Steve Jones sings over the guitar grind while Manson waves out the melody on his green theremin. Amid the band's repertoire of songs about rest-stop sex, doomed B-filmstars and car salesman lingo, "Free Bird" is practically the crown jewel and always a crowd pleaser. Hit me with your best shot Readers of the Austin Chronicle voted David Garza the city's second-best musician of the '90s. (Ask a blues fan who was first.) It's not simply because he writes well-rounded pop songs and executes them gracefully on record with his band; it's that he really doesn't need his band at all. On the Waterloo Park stage late Saturday afternoon, Garza held his own with only his pretty red Gibson guitar to keep him company. Songs that on record seem pieced together by clever arrangements of drum machines, acoustic guitar and Garza's versatile voice — like "Discoball World" -- evened out in frenetic and energetic solo jams. Near the end, he took requests, cheerfully tearing his fingernails off by barreling through "Take Another Shot." Thank you, sir, may I have another? The good, the bad, and the ugly Rumor of the week: That Neil Young was the mysterious "special guest" billed immediately before Steve Earle's Friday night set at Stubb's. Young was in Austin for South by Southwest, but not the music part. His latest concert film, "Silver and Gold," was premiering. The special guest was Whiskeytown singer Ryan Adams. Patron saint of the festival: Doug Sahm. The drive-train for the Sir Douglas Quartet may be dead but he hasn't left Austin. From two star-studded tributes to him — one at Wednesday night's Austin Music Awards (featuring Shawn and Shandon Sahm), another Friday at the legendary Antone's blues club (featuring former bandmate Augie Meyers and, straight from the where-is-he-now bins, Joe "King" Carassco) -- to posters in Mexican restaurants advertising prints of his portrait for sale, Sahm has edged out Townes Van Zandt as the bandwagon who bought the farm. Best TV footage no one could use: Steve Earle's Thursday morning keynote address. Earle delivered his words of wisdom wearing a T-shirt that read, "I'm from f—-ing outer space." Comeback of the week: Former Byrds icon Roger McGuinn, whose Friday night performance brought overplayed standards back down to earth with grace and style. Best T-shirt: "My lawyer can kick your lawyer's ass." Most shameless self-promotion: Dallas rap-rockers Pimpadelic not only drove around downtown blocks in its giant tour bus with the band's name emblazoned along the sides, the band also spent its free time walking around Austin with dancers it hired from the Yellow Rose strip club, all of whom, of course, sported tightly cropped T-shirts bearing the band's name. Watch for the band's debut on Tommy Boy Records. Most prominent foreign country: The Netherlands, buoyed by waning interest in the annual Japan Night and extensive lobbying by the Dutch Rock and Pop Institute. Best non-SXSW show: Austin's ear-splitting Hotwheels Jr. on Friday afternoon in a tiny CD shop way out in north Austin. They spell it r-a-w-k. Favorite new discovery: Scotland's newest guitar pop band Astrid, with a debut album, "Strange Weather Lately," out now on Fantastic Plastic Records. Best diversion on the way to another gig: The strolling horn band Crawdaddy-O, which braved the frigid cold Thursday night livening people's steps with funky Dixieland jams, including — at Adam of Fanzine's request — some sizzling James Brown. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Twenty years ago, "Star Wars" creator George Lucas would not have returned a phone call from a guy called "Weird Al" Yankovic. Packages bearing such a moniker likely would have been routed to Skywalker Ranch security. Today, though, everyone knows "Weird Al." He's famous. And infamous. "I've skewered enough famous people that they kind of know who I am now. Sometimes that helps, sometimes not," Yankovic said in a conversation this week. "At least now I get phone calls returned." Even with George Lucas, though, Yankovic was nervous. Just because he's sold more comedy albums than anyone else didn't mean Lucas would sign over permission to skewer the context of "The Phantom Menace," which Yankovic does in the first track on his latest album, "Running With Scissors." The song, "The Saga Begins," recounts the tale of young Anakin Skywalker to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie" ("So my, my, this poor Anakin guy / may be Vader someday later / now he's just a small fry"). Yankovic recorded the song, set a release date for the album and booked the tour. Then he sent Lucas a tape of the song. Fortunately, Lucas loved it. Song parodies are Yankovic's stock in trade, and over the last two decades his witty gag covers have established the largest and longest career for a musical humorist. From his first parody — turning the Knack's "My Sharona" into "My Bologna" — to his latest transubtatiation — turning the Offspring's "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" into "Pretty Fly for a Rabbi" — you haven't really made it big until "Weird Al" makes fun of you. "I've never made fun of the actual performers, though — I mean, nothing mean-spirited," Yankovic said. "It's all in fun, and most of the artists are very positive about it. It's not about them, really." Sometimes the fans of the artist being parodied don't think so, though. "Well, there's one letter in a hundred from someone who completely misses the point. They say, 'How can you make fun of Michael Jackson or Nirvana?' But they're the ones who gave me permission to do it, and they think it's very funny," Yankovic said. "Weird Al's" passion for parody began when, growing up in California, he discovered "The Dr. Demento Show," a popular weekly show of humorous music that just celebrated its 30th year on the air. Tuning in each week, Yankovic heard the musical wits of Spike Jones, Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg and Allan Sherman. He was hooked. "Comedy and music were the two driving forces in my life," he said. "To have them together, I thought, would, well, save a lot of time." Yankovic saw Dr. Demento as a "kindred spirit," and when he was 13, Dr. Demento spoke at his school. He was conducting a song contest at the time, and Yankovic gave him a tape of his recordings he'd begun at home with friends. "I didn't win — the stuff was awful — but it was the first thing I gave him, and I decided to keep sending him tapes. I got better over the years, and pretty soon we kind of had a relationship, and he played my songs," Yankovic said. The first "Weird Al" song Dr. Demento played on his show was "Belvedere Cruising," a pop song about the family Plymouth. It was driven by Yankovic's trademark accordion, and it received great feedback from listeners. The song that set him up, though, was "My Bologna" in 1979. Not only did listeners love it, the Knack themselves enjoyed it and persuaded their record company, Capitol Records, to release the song as a single. After that, all chart-toppers were targets. Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" became Yankovic's "Another One Rides the Bus." Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" became Yankovic's "I Love Rocky Road." Toni Basil's "Mickey" became "Ricky," satirizing both the hit song and the TV show "I Love Lucy." It was the latter song that ensured Yankovic's immense stardom. The humor of the song could now, in 1983, be amplified with visuals via the fledgling MTV music video network. Yankovic's relationship with MTV would become his main source of success — and excess. "We've had a symbiotic relationship," Yankovic said. "It's often difficult for me to get into radio playlists, but MTV loves to put my videos into rotation, so people have always known that I've had a new album out. Plus, you get more dimensions to the humor. Background gags and sight gags allow you to flesh out the humor a lot." Since then, Yankovic has resurfaced just in time to remind us that pop stars are not gods and can be taken down a peg or two. He's been rewarded for his efforts, too, winning Grammy awards for his note-for-note (and, in the videos, scene-for-scene) versions of Michael Jackson hits -- "Eat It" (Jackson's "Beat It") and "I'm Fat" (Jackson's "Bad"). "I've been lucky, but I think what I do is important on some level. We need satire in the culture to keep balanced and keep things in perspective." "Weird Al" Yankovic performs 8 p.m. Thursday at the Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady St. Tickets are $28 at the Brady box office and all Dillard outlets. Call 747-0001. Tulsans remember Al, filming of `UHF' Tulsans know "Weird Al" Yankovic a bit better than most Americans because, as his career took off, Yankovic wound up here filming his first — and, so far, only — feature film, "UHF." In 1988, Yankovic shot the bulk of the film in the then-vacant Kensington Mall on 71st Street (now the Southern Hills Marriott hotel). The film — about a TV station owner who tries to keep his UHF channel alive by programming very off-beat shows — co-starred quirky "Saturday Night Live" alum Victoria Jackson and was the film debut of future "Seinfeld" star Michael Richards. "We got a really good deal on the use of an empty mall there, so we were able to rent it and set up nearly all of our soundstages there," Yankovic said. "Almost all of the interior shots were filmed there, plus we did some exterior things around town." Other locations used throughout Tulsa included the former Joey's Home of the Blues club, where fans of the fictional station protested, and Woodward Park, where Yankovic was made up as Rambo for a slapstick fight, complete with bulging, latex muscles. The First Christian Church downtown was used as a city hall building. Tulsa songwriter Jerry Hawkins ("I'd Be in Heaven in a Truck") was one of the many local extras hired for several scenes in "UHF." He remembers some of the goofy fun on the sets. "They had the `Wheel of Fish,' a parody on the `Wheel of Fortune' (game show)," Hawkins said. "As the show host would ask the contestants, 'OK, now, which do you prefer — the box on the table containing some terrific prize or the fish on the spinning board on the wall?' We, as extras in the audience, would yell out ... 'The fish! The fish!' It was a blast." Hawkins also recalled the "incredible amounts of attention" Yankovic got around town, "and all without saying much at all and without doing much." "He was one funny dude," Hawkins said, and "definitely 'weird.' " Yankovic said he's been too busy with the current tour to think about making another film, but he enjoyed his Tulsa experience. "I loved it there," he said. "We spent the whole summer, despite that insane heat." By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World At the end of the interview, Carlton Pearson stood up and gave himself away. Throughout the conversation, Pearson gleamed, looking immaculate as ever — trimmed hair, silk paisley tie, a glittering ruby ring and a shirt so crisp you could strike a match on it. He looked every bit the well-to-do, business-like bishop of the multi-racial multitude at Tulsa's charismatic Higher Dimensions Family Church. As we chatted on our way out of the church office, though, I couldn't help but notice his worn, faded Levis and weather-beaten cowboy boots. "Well, I didn't know if you were going to take pictures today or not, so I put on a tie," Pearson said, smiling big and broadly. Pretty and professional on top, earthy and rooted down below — that's Carlton Pearson. It's this personal philosophy of staying rooted that has propelled Pearson into the top rank of his church and into the top slots of the gospel charts. Aside from leading one of this city's largest congregations, Pearson records highly successful gospel records with his church's crack band and choir. The latest, "Live at Azusa 3," is another huge hit. The boundary between Pearson the preacher and Pearson the entertainer is barely traceable, though. The "Live at Azusa" records are simply recordings of Pearson in action at his annual Azusa religious conference in Tulsa. He preaches a little, he sings a little, and he shares the stage with other gospel stars — such as Fred Hammond and Marvin Winans on the current album. "This is just church. It's what we do every Sunday morning," Pearson said. "I wanted to capitalize on it, and share it. When I started playing with recording things, people were writing songs for me and trying to mold me as they would any other gospel singer. But I said, 'Let me just do what I do. Let me tell stories and sing songs.' And it has touched people." Pearson's albums are reaching the audience at which they are aimed. Pearson unabashedly calls them "old folks." The subtitle of "Live at Azusa 3" is "Reminding the Saints of the Hope," and Pearson said this album in particular was tailored for the older members of the flock. "I'm trying to do what that title says: remind them that the hope is still alive," Pearson said. "The world is changing so fast — without their permission. These people, like the Bible, have come out of Egypt, but Egypt has not come out of them." "Live at Azusa 3" features Pearson and the immensely talented Higher Dimensions band and choir, directed by David Smith. While radical gospel stars like Hammond and Kirk Franklin have juiced-up the genre with hip-hop beats and loud sounds, Pearson's album captures a similar feeling of excitement — but by using old, traditional black hymns. No funky new stuff for Pearson, much to the dismay of his two children. "I try to play my stuff for my kids, and they say, `No, Daddy, play something cool!' They want (Franklin's) 'Revolution' or anything Hammond does. I have pictures of young people jumping up and down at my shows, so it's reaching them . . . but these songs are meant for the saints," Pearson said. "These old songs aren't written horizontally; they're written vertically. The new songs are evangelistic, taking a message to the people from God. These old songs are singing directly to God. They're church songs. "These old songs are the ones that really seemed to touch people the most, and they helped tear down those racial divisions that often separate us," Pearson said earlier. "They also remind us of the hope. I felt those old songs gave us a sense of stability and a sense of security and safe-keeping, because that's what kept us through the Jim Crow lines, civil rights riots and the assassinations of Dr. King and President Kennedy in the '60s." Crossing racial lines has always been the driving force behind Pearson's ministry. He's full of stories about people of all colors and creeds who have found inspiration through the songs he performs — the South African man who explained how popular Pearson's videos and music were there ("You sing old hymns that carried the church here," the man told Pearson) and the Muslim woman who attends Higher Dimensions because of her attraction to the message of a heavenly relationship. Pearson's music and ministry began at the same time, when as an eighth-grader in San Diego he was captivated by a performance of the visiting Oral Roberts World Action Singers. The group was recruiting students, and Pearson's mother said, "When you go to college, that's where I want you to go." Lacking the funds to pay for college, Pearson shut himself in his room for a week, emerging only to shower. During that time, he prayed to God to find a way to attend Oral Roberts University. At the end of the week, a family friend called and offered to pay not only the college tuition but a monthly allowance as well. In 1971, he enrolled at ORU. Soon he became a member of the World Action Singers with a full scholarship. By 1975, Pearson was hitting the road as an evangelist under the tutelage of Roberts himself. In 1981, he founded the Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center at a service of 75 people. The center's first building was a storefront in Jenks — which at the time still had a 6 p.m. curfew for blacks on the lawbooks. Within a year, the congregation neared 1,000 people of every race and color. Today, the church stands in a large building near 86th Street and Memorial Drive, along with an adoption agency, a home for unwed mothers, a preschool and a food pantry for the needy. "I never wanted to be known as the singing evangelist," Pearson said of his beginnings. "I wanted to be an evangelist who also sang." That's how he sounds on "Live at Azusa 3." He introduces songs sung by such gospel luminaries as Beverly Crawford, James Morton and Joshua Nelson. He talks a little bit, giving brief homilies with titles like "I Love Old Folks" and "Remind the Saints of the Hope." These are often elongated introductions to other songs, "I Know the Lord Will Make a Way Somehow," "Near the Cross," and so on. "These old songs — people just don't want to let go of them," Pearson said. "For some reason people just want to hold onto a good ol' piece of fried chicken, even though they're out there every day eating sushi . . . I mean, when I win an award for these albums, people aren't out there clapping for me. They're clapping for their grandmas and grandpas and all those saints that came before them and who were kept going by these songs. And they're still going, so we might as well keep these songs going, too." |
Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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