BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World There's so much to do before leaving home to tour the nation in a rock 'n' roll band. "I gotta bet batteries, strings, a foot pedal. There's hotel rooms to square away. Orders from the web site have to go out. A magazine wants a photo to go with an interview I just did. And who's gonna feed the turtles?" This is an exasperated but excited Dwight Twilley. The Tulsa-based rocker hits the road this weekend — after a Saturday night appearance at Uncle Buddy's Roadshow in Claremore — for the first time in 15 years — since touring with Greg Khin. Not only is he returning to the road — to support last year's CD release, "The Luck" — but he's heading out as the Dwight Twilley Band. The group heads through the Midwest before planning East and West coast legs. Why is he touring again after all this time? It's business. "We got roasted on 'The Luck,' " he said this week. "It's the first record on a label I own (Big Oak Recordings), we had a really good record to release, and we get it out there two weeks before 9-11. We'd done lots of prep work for it, but after that we were all just a bunch of zombies. So this tour is us going out to wave the flag and say, 'Hey, remember this record we put out?' " The slimmed-down Dwight Twilley Band for this jaunt includes original guitarist Bill Pitcock IV, early drummer Jerry Naifeh and longtime bassist (and Nashville Rebel) Dave White. The origin of the smaller ensemble has its roots in the recording sessions for Twilley's '99 "Tulsa" album. "We've been doing the big show for so long, with the double drummers and everything, but there was a point during 'Tulsa' when just me and Jerry and Pitcock, no bassist, were goofing around and tracking it, and everyone looked at each other and thought it was pretty cool," he said. "So we thought we'd do the stripped-down thing for the tour — get rid of the bells and whistles and just leave the train." The band is also rehearsing what Twilley called "the unthinkable" — a cover. He would not, however, tell us what song it is. "I was thinking about Leon (Russell) doing that Rolling Stones song ('Jumpin' Jack Flash'), how he took a really standard song and really made it a Leon original. We've taken a standard like that and made it totally Twilley. I don't think I want to tell you what it is. I don't think it'll even be that noticeable. It'll probably sound like another Twilley song. Carl Perkins wrote it, as far as I know. "I once did 'Money.' It's the only cover I ever recorded — the B-side to 'Somebody to Love.' It got massive airplay for a while, back in '79, and we loved playing it in the set because, for a while, people actually threw money onstage during the song. I remember Pitcock playing a solo that he couldn't tear his hands away from, and he was keeping this 20-dollar bill on his shoe. Some people threw checks — and they were good." Twilley had Top 10 hits in '75 with "I'm on Fire" and '84 with "Girls." He was voted Artist of the Year at the first Spot Music Awards in '99. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World If you don't recognize the name Steve Young, he's got an impressive list of references. "Steve Young is the second-greatest country music singer behind George Jones. He has no idea how great he is," said Waylon Jennings. "Steve is in a league with Dylan and Hank Williams, and he sings like an angel." That's from Lucinda Williams. "For that voice, that guitar and those songs to come together in one person is a wonder," mused the late Townes Van Zandt. Gram Parsons played on his first album, "Rock, Salt and Nails" on A&M in 1969. Van Dyke Parks plays on his latest, "Primal Young" on Appleseed in 1999. Young's song "Lonesome, Orn'ry and Mean" became Waylon's signature tune. Hank Williams Jr. covered Young's "Montgomery in the Rain." And, boy, everybody's covered "Seven Bridges Road" -- from Dolly Parton to the Eagles. But Young -- take a minute to sweep up all those dropped names -- is one of those musician's musicians, a songwriter's songwriter. They know him well even though you might not. Darkly Southern and musically restive, Young is a visceral poet of the backwaters -- or, as he likes to consider himself, a wandering troubadour in the old tradition. He lives part of the year in the Barrio in Los Angeles, the other part in glitzy Nashville, and he spends every possible moment on the road. His travels fortify his songs with lyrical and musical colloquialisms that makes listeners cock an ear and say, "Hey, that's my turf in that song." That's what makes him one of the last great folk singers. We caught up with him this week in Nashville to chat about wanderlust, Greenwich Village and the odd opportunity to play the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. You're too good a country singer to be in Nashville. What are you doing there? It's not my favorite city, but I got rooted here years ago. My son's here. But yeah, I'm too diverse to be in Nashville. That's the problem. I don't consider myself a country singer, either. I'm more in the ancient tradition of the troubadour. I do folk, country and blues with a touch of rock. That pretty much makes it modern-day folk music. I'm fascinated by folk music. For instance, it's fascinating to me that the song "Streets of Laredo" originated in Ireland. An Irish balladeer pining for the lone pray-ree? It's originally about a sailor dying of venereal disease. But the same melody and sentiment evolved into a song about a cowboy dying in Laredo. That's folk music -- when it moves like that. You must be a folk singer then, because you seem to be constantly on the move. Is a restless soul a necessity to be a folk singer? It's the blessing and the curse, yes. Years ago, I tried to write in Nashville, tried to co-write and see if I could do it. One of these guys asked me one day -- and this just astounded me -- he said, "What's it like to be on the road and travel?" I assumed musicians and writers knew all about that. This guy just stayed in Nashville and wrote. He wasn't a troubadour, he was one of those Nashville craftsmen. I can't stay put like that. What would I write about? The folk music process involves travel. It involves seeing different things, exchanging ideas, exchanging stories. I have fantasies of settling down and all that, but at this age I realize that's not gonna happen. How old are you? I'll be 60 on July 12. Is your mix of styles endemic to that wandering, or does that spring from growing up in the South? It's largely a product of growing up in the South. I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians. The music of the mountains and its Celtic influence fascinated me. I was lucky to hear street singers in Gadsden (Ala.). There was music in church, too, from guitars to some pretty wild gospel. I heard all of that, plus the pop of the day, the standards. I even encountered flamenco guitarist Carlos Montoya when I was a teen, and I was blown away by that. I was open to music period, and I stayed open. On "Primal Young," you seem to be quite open to folk music from Scotland. What inspired that exploration? Well, there's that Scottish influence underneath all that music in Appalachia, but in high school, in a literature class, I completely fell in love with the writing of Robert Burns. He collected folk songs, you know. In fact, that's a lot of what he did. I studied that stuff for hours, reading the footnotes, trying the dialect, trying to understand completely what he was saying. So what brings you to the Woody Guthrie festival? I've always admired Woody Guthrie. When I was a teenager and starting to play guitar and absorbing music around me, I encountered Sing Out! magazine. I learned all about the New England hierarchy of folk singers, Pete Seeger and all that, and through them I encountered Woody Guthrie. I identified with him and what he had to say. I had grown up with similar people who were very poor and rural, down-to-earth people. My father was part Cherokee, and he was a sharecropper when he was 13 years old. The fact that Woody was willing to speak out against the wealthy powers that be and tell the truth about these kinds of people was very inspiring. It was unusual. The country people I liked were great musicians, but they didn't have the same attitude. Indirectly they represented these poor as whatever, the common man, but they weren't saying it like Woody was saying it. They didn't want to get too deep into the dark truth of things. Do you find it as easy as Woody to probe those deep, dark truths? I live there. It's difficult to get me out of the deep, dark truth. It's healing to me, but I guess the masses see it as depressing. Did you run into Seeger or any of those Sing Out! folkies when you hit Greenwich Village in the early '60s? I ran into Phil Ochs, saw Dylan from a distance. I'd never been outside of the South when I moved to New York. New York completely blew my mind. I'd never heard people talk to each other that way unless they wanted to kill each other. It took some time to adjust. I did some auditions, and they said, "Yeah, we'll give you a job, but we're booked for three months." I couldn't wait three months for a job. I was using an apartment loaned to me by Dick Weissman of the Journeymen, so I was there long enough to absorb some things. Then I went back home to digest it all, but the South was harder to live with after New York. The South was never tasteful to me again. But you mined it for so many great songs. The "Seven Bridges Road" is a real road, right? It's an old road in the countryside outside of Montgomery. It turns into a dirt road and crosses seven bridges. It became this enchanted place, with moss hanging from ancient oak trees -- a beautiful setting, like something out of Disney. I thought my friends had made up the name, but it's actually the folk name for this road; it's not official. People have just been calling it Seven Bridges Road for over a hundred years. There's a longing that that song comes out of. A myth has sprung up around it, that it's about going to Hank Williams' grave. That's not entirely true. Sometimes we'd go out Seven Bridges Road, then go back to Hank's grave and sing songs and drink at 3 a.m., which used to you could do. It's just part of the nostalgia for those times and that road. It's such an innocent little song, really. I thought nobody would ever understand it. Shows you how wrong I am. What: Woody Guthrie Folk Festival benefit concert featuring Steve Young with Luke Reed When: 8 p.m. Wednesday Where: Crystal Theater, on Main Street in Okemah Admission: $20 plus service charge at the door or through www.okctickets.com BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World There's been a lot of ink poured around the Tulsa World, trying to define and describe Red Dirt music, the elusive mix of country, rock, blues and folk native to Oklahoma and centered around Stillwater. It's like nailing smoke to a wall. You can see it, you can smell it, but how do you grab hold of it? In all the interviews with musicians classified as Red Dirt players, a lot of names come up as influences. A lot of folks hearken back to the Tulsa Sound days of Leon Russell and J.J. Cale. Some trace their sound back to Merle Haggard, others tell stories about Garth Brooks' days in the Stillwater bars. Songwriter Bob Childers is pretty universally hailed as the genre's godfather. But one name comes up more than all the others. In a recent search of the Tulsa World's electronic archives (stories back to 1989), 176 stories mentioned Red Dirt music, and 143 of those mentioned Woody Guthrie. If Red Dirt is the great consolidation of American music, especially south of the Mason-Dixon, then surely its crucible can be found in the tangled woods around Guthrie's old Okemah home site. Guthrie was famous for a certain slice of his music — frank, topical folk songs — but he wrote and performed every conceivable genre of music in the decades he wandered this land with his guitar slung over his shoulder on a rope. The comprehensive four-CD, boxed set from Smithsonian Folkways Records, "The Asch Recordings," covers most of this -- his cowboy music, his Tex-Mex, his kids songs, his blues. Guthrie respected differences in people and in music. "The unifying theme in Woody's music is that he wrote about the land he loved," says Tulsa scholar Guy Logsdon. "He played the melodies and music that came from the land he loved, from Oklahoma, one of the most culturally diverse places in America. Let's also say he modified it. He used the music he heard as a foundation and built upon it. "That's what these Red Dirt guys are doing. The Garth Brookses and Jimmy LaFaves and Tom Skinners and there's a guy in Bristow named Brett Graham — they use their heritage as a foundation and build their own sound on top of it. It just happens to be a very broad foundation," Logsdon said. LaFave, who grew up in Stillwater but relocated to Austin to make his career, is considered one of the principal standard-bearers of the Red Dirt ideal. He cites Guthrie's influence consistently and has become a pillar of the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah. Another expatriate Stillwater son, Bruce Henderson now in New York City, cites Guthrie among the lathes that shaped his easy-going, country-rock songwriting. Regional singer-songwriter Brandon Jenkins said in a '98 interview, "I've been real involved with Woody Guthrie music lately, and it got me back to writing music for my own reasons, not to have a hit." "It's about finding your identity," Logsdon said. "Often we search for ourselves and discover we're part of something greater." "Where is Woody Guthrie in Red Dirt music? In the truth," said John Cooper of the Red Dirt Rangers this week. The Rangers are probably the ultimate example of Red Dirt's nebulous but potent mixture of styles. "It's in the lyrics, in trying to tell the absolute truth as you see it. Woody said you can only write what you know about, and it's true," Cooper said. The Rangers themselves have struggled throughout their 11-year existence to explain to folks what they do, what their music is. Someone once called them "Woody Guthrie gone South." In '95, Cooper told the Tulsa World, "A lot of people think we're a country band, which is true, but we do a lot more than that. It shows in the kinds of gigs we do. We've done kids shows, bluegrass festivals, rock 'n' roll events, city festivals, prison shows and private parties." The broad base of their sound and influences allows them to be that versatile. But it's that element of truth that separates them from most style classifications based purely on musical form. It's almost like Christian music, a musical category containing every possible style of music but segregated purely because of its message. Red Dirt places a higher importance on truth in the lyrics than most other genres, certainly pure country. "Like a song on our upcoming record, ‘Leave This World a Better Place.' I'm serious about that," Cooper said this week. "I didn't write that just to be catchy. I want people to hear that and believe as much as I do that that's what we should do." That does not imply that Red Dirt music is protest music. "It's not necessarily political like Woody got sometimes and like he's so well-known for being. You can't take the politics away from Woody, and really from us either, but we're more about the politics of love, if that's not too corny. "Our connection to Woody is through that desire to tell the truth and to lift people up no matter what kind of stories you're telling them," Cooper said. "Woody was the voice of all people who struggle," added Ranger singer Brad Piccolo, "but people struggle in many different ways, not just political stuff. There has to be honesty in every area of playing music, because people come to music for a lot of different reasons." Even Guthrie himself didn't know what to call his music. In 1940, a reviewer included a discussion of Guthrie's "Dust Bowl Ballads" under the heading "Americana." In his scrapbook, Guthrie scribbled his response: "Americana is a new one on me, but when these fellers hire out to write a column every day they ain't no telling what kinds of words they'll fall back on to make a living." Guilty as charged. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World The Woody Guthrie Archives isn't anything fancy, which is in keeping with the lifestyle of the archives' namesake. The collection is not under heavy guard, under glass or even — thanks to Nora Guthrie's efforts — under wraps. The archives is really just a bunch of filing cabinets in a cramped, stuffy two-room office in midtown Manhattan, open for public perusal as long as you make an appointment. Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, runs the place, and she's not too fancy, either. She's about as open and honest and casual a professional as you can find. Of course, there again the terminology doesn't do the situation justice. Nora doesn't run anything at all — she inspires, enthralls, educates, grounds and delights all visitors and staff members. A remarkably engaging, uplifting woman, she oversees the use of Guthrie's backlog of songs, poetry and prose. Those cabinets are stuffed to overflowing with pages of Woody's work — some of it intended for public consumption, a lot of it scribbled down just to get it out of his ever-bubbling brain. Nora already has guided British folk-rocker Billy Bragg and American roots band Wilco through the stacks; the results were the two "Mermaid Avenue" albums, featuring tuneless, old Woody lyrics with new music. Many more such projects are in the pipeline. The exhibition that soon will be showing at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City, "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," was culled from this resource. The show has been touring museums across the country for more than two years; its Oklahoma stop — in Guthrie's home state — is likely its last. Bringing the show here was a challenge, though. I talked with Nora last week about the exhibit, its challenges, and why Oklahoma has been so resistant for so long to welcoming home its most talented native son: Let me start with my basic question right now: was Woody an Oklahoman? With an accent like that — are you kidding? What's always fascinated me about Woody is that he left the state as a teenager, yet everything he wrote, said and sang for the rest of his life was clearly influenced by his Oklahoma roots. That's always interested me, too. To be honest, I've always felt like we were his step-family, in a way — that we were kind of holding onto him until Oklahoma finally takes him back. Everything he did and fought for had to do with the basic values he learned in Oklahoma. When I lecture in Oklahoma, I tell people, "You think he's talking about other people's rights and other people's problems, but he was talking about your grandfather" — and I point at them — "and your aunt and your cousin." These were his people. "Everything he wrote, especially the early songs, was about your family." He wasn't that expanded back then. What did he know from America? All he knew was that someone's grandmother lost the farm or someone's cousin was done wrong. Everything he cared about came from his love for Oklahoma and then became explained and justified by the rest of his life. When he finally traveled to other places, he found that they were having the same problems, so he could become this spokesperson for America — the people, not the land or the landscape. Why did he return home so rarely? Well, there were family and political problems that were a big part of that, but the biggest part was the Huntington's disease. There was this cosmic understanding that took place between him and my mother (Marjorie Guthrie) that she was his caretaker because he couldn't go home. He was in exile. I don't think he ever used that word, but there was definitely an emotional exile that he felt — and was bewildered by, to be quite honest. He was always from Oklahoma and always wrote about it and put it in context. When he wrote about New York, it was in the context of "look at me, I'm a big hick, and I'm getting on this crazy underground train." He always contextualized himself. But he couldn't go home. Until now. The annual folk festival in Okemah has welcomed his spirit home, and perhaps the exhibition will, too. It almost didn't happen, though. It was my wish that this touring show open in Oklahoma two years ago. When I first put it together, that was the only thought I ever had. I was innocent and naive, I'm confessing, but I thought, "Great, we'll have this show, and it'll open in Oklahoma." I mean, where else would you open it? This is the place. If Walt Whitman or any other major American figure had a major exhibit, wouldn't you think it would be welcomed in their hometown? Isn't that why Salinas (Calif.) has that huge thing for Steinbeck? Everyone wants to cheer their homeboy. But not in Oklahoma, not for a long time, anyway. So what went wrong? We had it booked in the Cowboy Hall of Fame (in Oklahoma City). We were planning things — a big concert, some other events. It was going to have this kind of reborn feeling, like he's back and let's finally give birth to Woody in Oklahoma and say, "Yes, he's from here." A couple of months before it was supposed to open, we got a call from the museum backing out. They gave some vague reasons about scheduling conflicts and then about funding, but I didn't even listen to it because I knew it was politics. I just thought, gosh, I'm fiftysomething now, hasn't anything changed out there in all this time? Isn't there a new generation there who can stand up and recognize that this guy was from Oklahoma and he doesn't have to be the star of the state, but you could at least say, "I might not like his politics, but what a great writer"? Where did the exhibition open? In California, at the Steinbeck museum. And it turned out to be really special there, after all. Lefty Lou (Crisman, Woody's former radio show partner) came, and she said to me, "How did you know to open it in L.A.?" I didn't understand her, and she told me this story. She said, "When we had the radio show at KFVD, every afternoon for lunch Woody and I would come out to that rock over there" — we were standing outside the Steinbeck center — "and eat. We would hike up there every single day for lunch, walk around the hills, then go back and do the afternoon show." So the exhibition opened on that site where they spent so many afternoons, and she thought I'd done that on purpose. It wound up having its own significance. Still, I always hoped it would make it to Oklahoma. Like most of Woody's stuff, this exhibition has been a sleeper. We had trouble getting it started, and we had to put up the money ourselves to get it into New York. It turned out to be such a huge success there that the director of the museum came up to me one evening and said, "Nora, I was so skeptical. I didn't think this show was going to be that good. That's why we didn't push to raise the funds for it. But the public response has been so amazing, we've had more attendance for this than anything else this year. If I could do it again, I'd double-book it. I just didn't get it." You know, these people study charts and financial reports, and they don't get the people. They're not connected, and this was maybe a good lesson in that regard. What turned the tide to allow the show to come here? Once it caught on elsewhere, we found some friends in the Oklahoma Historical Society and the state arts council there. It just took a couple of years. It was about that amount of time that the festival in Okemah really took off, too, so I guess it just takes time. It' so typical of Woody's personality, you know. He was always a sleeper. He'd slip into a room and say something, and two people would pay attention, then a few more, then a few more, until he had the whole place in the palm of his hand. Woody Guthrie exhibit to open Friday The Smithsonian Institution's acclaimed exhibition, "This Land Is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," opens Friday at the Oklahoma Museum of History in Oklahoma City. The exhibit explores the life of the native Oklahoman songwriter, author of such well-known tunes as "Union Maid," "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and "This Land Is Your Land." The show offers material from the Woody Guthrie Archives and the Smithsonian Institution, including original manuscripts, drawings, sound recordings and some film. The show — organized by Nora Guthrie, his daughter and executive director of the archives, and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) — has been ramblin' round the country for two years. This stop in Guthrie's home state will be its last. Guthrie was born in the town of Okemah in 1912. He traveled the country writing songs much of his life, many of those journeys with dispossessed Okies in the 1930s. He lived in New York City in the last years of his life, many of which were in hospitals before he died in 1967 of complications from Huntington's disease. He wrote thousands of songs before he died, most of which remain collected in the Woody Guthrie Archives. The exhibit will remain on view through May 4. The museum is located in the Wiley Post Building, just SE of the state capitol at 2100 N. Lincoln Boulevard in Oklahoma City. For more information, contact the museum at (405) 522-5248 or email statemuseum@ok-history.mus.ok.us. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World We could clear the dictionary of superlatives discussing the colossal talent of B.B. King and his indelible mark on blues, rock 'n' roll, even jazz. A singer, a songwriter and a guitarist beyond compare, King has been a forceful presence in music for more than half a century, and at 76 years young the old master is still recording, still touring — despite occasional injuries, like the fractured leg he suffered two weeks ago falling from his tour bus steps — even hawking Whoppers in TV commercials, somehow without sacrificing an ounce of his legendary dignity and respect. We might also assume that King achieved such legendary status by learning from the right people. Growing up in Mississippi, King heard certain blues guitarists who fired him up, and the excitement encouraged him to step out of his street-corner gospel quartets and pick up an old guitar. But even though he has been described by Rolling Stone magazine as "a great consolidator of styles," King, with his trademark humility in an interview this week, said he couldn't then and still can't play as good as his heroes. "I could never play like my idols. I wanted to. But I couldn't do what they did, so I couldn't really take that and do something else with it. People say I borrowed this and I borrowed that and then made it all into my own thing. All I ever had was my own thing to begin with," King said. Indeed, in interviewing an artist the most cliched question to ask is, "Who influenced you?" But when approaching a legend as large as King, in a career that has become its own undeniable influence, we couldn't help but come back to that discussion. Where, indeed, did this franchise begin, and are these the same roots sprouting bluesmen today? "Well, it wasn't Robert Johnson, let me say," King said. "A lot of kids think Robert Johnson was the greatest blues guitarist ever. I don't agree. Lonnie Johnson was much better. And there was a guy born in Texas, born blind, called Lemon Jefferson. People called him Blind Lemon Jefferson. He was another idol. I liked jazz, too. Charlie Christian — born right there in Oklahoma — he was great, another favorite. Barney Kessel (another Oklahoman) said he was the greatest jazz guitarist ever, and I trust him because he's the greatest ever. I heard a French gypsy named Django Reinhardt, and then T-Bone Walker playing electric guitar. We called what he did single-string. This is the stuff that made me fall in love with the guitar." He paused. "Lookie here, I've got a lot of these records right here in my room today." Another pause. "I still can't play like any of 'em. "I wish I could explain it. I wish I could say what they did that got me. Each one of them had something that seemed to go through me like a sword. I don't know how to explain it. It's something that happens and you just know, you know on some spiritual level, that this was meant for you to hear. It's like a person telling a story — each one of 'em had a punch line. You get it or you don't. And I got it. I still do." A lot of blues players have come along during the 54 years King has been recording and touring, but few of them, he said, have pierced him the way those original players did. King's ever-expanding influence has brought many of them to his throne. He's recorded with countless blues stars, frequently with his old buddy and current opening act Bobby "Blue" Bland, and with such figures as John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Mick Jagger, Robert Cray, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Albert Collins, even rapper Heavy D. "The young guys don't get me the same way," he said. "They're always playing something I wish I could play, and they play things I can't play. I learn from them, but I don't get that something I got from the other guys." He speaks wistfully of his collaborations with Eric Clapton, most recently the "Riding With the King" album. In fact, that's the only record of King's in the last few years that gets much airplay. "Blues isn't on the radio much," King said. "Every city has some station that plays the blues late at night. I met one fellow once who said, 'B.B., every Saturday night after 12 we play a whole hour of blues.' And I said, 'Well, what do you do with the other 23 hours?' ... Most of the time I hear blues on the radio it's on a college station." Ironically, maybe the most singular event in King's development as a guitarist was his landing a job as a disc jockey in the late '40s at WDIA in Memphis. He'd already begun to work as a musician — playing at a cafe in West Memphis, Ark., with the likes of Bobby Bland and pianist Johnny Ace — so as a DJ he gained a reputation for playing the hippest records around. As a bonus for listeners, King sometimes would play along with the records on the air, publicizing his own personal guitar lessons. Years later, at the dawn of the '90s, King attached his name and status to a nightclub on Beale Street in Memphis, largely as a way to buttress the legacy of Memphis blues that had set him so firmly on the path to stardom and consequence. "Beale Street was down to nothing, and some people wanted to help bring it back. I travel around the world, and people think Chicago is the home of the blues. Now Chicago did a lot to help blues players — they opened their doors and hearts to Muddy Waters and many like him — but personally I think Memphis is the home of the blues and always was," King said. "Most of the original blues players were born in Mississippi and moved to Memphis and then went many different ways. I was one of them. And people had started to forget." You wanna talk influence? King's regular gigs in the late '40s on Beale Street convinced Sam Phillips, then an engineer at another Memphis radio station and at the opulent Peabody Hotel, to open his first recording studio. King was one of his first clients in 1950, recording his first records. Phillips went on to be the most important producer in the history of rock and soul, starting Sun Records and launching Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. The B.B. King Blues Club is now the cornerstone of the gentrified Beale Street, and the success of the club has led to three more openings — in New York City; Universal City, Calif.; and in the Foxwood Indian casino in Connecticut — with plans to open a total of 10 across the country. "If I live long enough, maybe I'll see all 10. I'm really proud of them," King said. Then he sighed. "I've been pretty good through the years. I've lived a pretty good life. Someday they'll be blues without B.B. King around, and I doubt you'll miss me that much. But I've done OK." B.B. KING When: 8 p.m. Thursday Where: Brady Theater, 105 W. Brady St. Admission: Sold Out 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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." BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Scene One: Bailey's Bar and Grill, Round three of the Musician's Cup It's good to be out of the Oklahoma wind, though the club isn't exactly warm. A smattering of people — mostly band members who will play later — mill around the long room, Korn blaring from the sound system. The bright flash of the video trivia game is distracting. The refrigerator behind the bar has about seven Shiner Bocks in it. Long night ahead. First band up: Ester Drang. They're kids, or they look it. Greasy hair, ratty T-shirts, lots of grey and black. They set up — a xylophone? — take their places and begin playing without so much as a glance at the crowd. Great, more sad, shoe-gazing geeks. The set starts with a sample, someone talking, spitting out something and getting excited, though the sound is distorted, muffled. The sheepish red-head starts playing a light, dreamy melody on a Fender Rhodes piano. Drums burst in with a whack and a skitter. The shyest-looking kid in the world — black hair too short to hide his eyes, but still he tries — starts moaning into the microphone. A song has begun. Hasn't it? The drummer plays complex structure, the bass player, too, though the guitars, keyboards, eerie sounds flood the room, filling it instead of demanding their own space. It rocks, carefully. When the song seems to end, tinkling piano and more subtle samples keep the sound alive. A few people clap, then feel embarrassed. It's not that people don't want to applaud, it's just difficult to tell where one song ends and the next begins. It's thrilling confusion, and no one in the typically hard-rock bar knows what to make of it. Even the ones in back who started out giggling are now mesmerized. Several bands follow, great ones — grinding guitars, roaring vocals, good ol' modern rock. But when the last band folds and the four judges lean into the default contest director, the verdicts are swift. "No brainer. Ester Drang." "Ester Drang." "Yeah, me, too." "Who was the first band?" Scene Two: Bryce's room, one week later All five of Ester Drang are hanging out at the rehearsal pad, the bedroom of Bryce Chambers — the shy singer. It's an add-on to the front of a cookie-cutter shack in Broken Arrow, and it looks like an aging, decrepit set from a "VH-1 Storytellers" episode: orange carpet underneath the traditional, crumb-laden Oriental rug; gear stacked and piled everywhere, with cords underfoot; dusty toys on shelves; a couch standing on its end and leaning against a wall; a Teletubby doll, Po, perched on top of it; a box of Vivarin; the sole source of light a honey-pot lamp with no shade; and on the walls, other than peeling wallpaper — a bull-fighter on black velvet, a poster for "The Princess Bride" and a painting of Jesus with his arm around a young man, his head hung sad and low. The band, slumped in various seats, is talking about the reasons behind the mesmerized crowds at local bars. It's nothing, they say. "Around here, nobody's doing what we're doing. It's been done other places. We're just not copying what's going on around here," says David Motter. He says he plays keyboards, but he's the one who kept ducking under the decks at the Bailey's show, changing cords, twiddling knobs and plugging in new samples. "It's not that we're that good, we're just different here," says piano player James McAlister. They begin the requisite citing of influences, which is actually pertinent, for a change. They list a lot of bands from a wide variety of styles, the common threads being moody and ambient: Massive Attack, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and "emo" bands like Sunny Day Real Estate ("Although, it's getting cliche to say you're influenced by them," Motter says). McAlister even admits an admiration for the Beach Boys. (In the past, when he still went by J.J., he confessed to liking Toto.) Somehow, all these influences gel into Ester Drang's melancholy, down-tempo dreamscapes. "I don't think anything we've done to date is all that innovative," says McAlister, shamelessly modest. "We still have a lot more maturity to go through before we've created something truly unique. I'm just a product of what I think is cool. Any band is. Nothing you create is solely of yourself." Then bassist Kyle Winner nails it: "But it's not as much about creating a sound, it's more of a feel." Ester Drang is all about feeling. McAlister's right -- they're young and have a lot of growth ahead, and the band's current phase is very child-like. The music is purely emotional, concerned with sensory communication more than intellectual declaration. The band, in fact, is still learning how to control this subconscious exploration. The band's first gigs were on the local Christian rock circuit. With averted eyes, mumbled lyrics and no W.W.J.D. lanyards, Ester Drang was the Christian fish out of water. The members still consider Ester Drang a Christian band, but they try not to limit their expression. And they'll play absolutely anywhere, not just churches and sanctioned events. "Anywhere where the door's open and the electricity works," Williams says. Scene Three: Bryce's room, a knock at the door Bryce Chambers hops up, steps outside. Moments later he trudges back into the room. "That was a cop," he says. "Somebody complained about the noise." Everyone chuckles. "Man, we stopped playing an hour ago," Winner says. "Yeah, but you guys were playing metal. I could hear it. It was ungodly loud," Motter says, laughing. McAlister, typically stoic, seems vaguely perplexed. "We've been practicing here for five years, and that's our first noise complaint. Then someone adds, "People are taking notice." BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Woody Guthrie "The Asch Recordings, Vols. 1-4" (Smithsonian Folkways) Like Little Richard was to rock 'n' roll, or Louis Armstrong was to jazz, Woody Guthrie is to American folk music — the clearest, deepest source. Humble, frank and amazingly prolific, Guthrie churned out more music in a 17-year period than some whole subgenres of pop, and the imprint of these tunes and these lyrics is still being felt. Smithsonian Folkways continues to enshrine America's roots music in valuable boxed sets and CD releases, and the label reaches its apex with this four-CD collection that, as a whole, sums up Guthrie's entire vibrant statement to humanity. Such a summation is no easy task, but Moses Asch was destined for it. The idealistic, workaholic record company owner could usually be found in his small office/studio at all hours of the day or night, and he had enormous respect for truly creative artists — whether or not they were commercially viable. In his lifetime, Asch was responsible for recording and releasing the songs of more than 2,000 artists, including Guthrie cohorts Leadbelly and Pete Seeger, as well as singers like Josh White and Burl Ives. In the spring of 1944, Asch met Guthrie — an Okie who'd been wandering the country much of his young adulthood — and was taken by his political convictions and creative spirit. For the next six years, Asch recorded Woody singing his songs and those of other songwriters. The sessions that survive comprise the bulk of Woody's recorded legacy, and this digitally remastered set may be the definitive Woody collection. "Oh yes, it's definitely definitive," said Guy Logsdon, a Tulsa resident and probably the pre-eminent Guthrie scholar. With sound archivist Jeff Place, Logsdon compiled and annotated these four discs, which were released separately in the last few years and are just now collected in one boxed set. "I read in a music catalog a while back, someone wrote about this that 'anyone interested in American music must have this collection,'" Logsdon said. "That's because Woody was such an influence — not just on folk but on rock 'n' roll, pop music, all the way down the line. He gave us children's songs that people sing and don't even know Woody wrote them. This is the collection." Asch became the source of Guthrie recordings because of his lengthy relationship with him. Guthrie's Library of Congress recordings were made during a two week period in 1940. After that, he put down the "Dust Bowl Ballads" for RCA, plus a few records for small labels. He took a hiatus from recording while he was in the Merchant Marines, and then began his most productive period with Asch. Those six years are expertly compiled on this set, each disc with its own theme. Volume 1, "This Land Is Your Land," presents many of Guthrie's best-known and best-loved songs, from the child-like fun of "Car Song" and "Talking Fishing Blues" to serious issues tackled in "Do-Re-Mi" and "Jesus Christ." Volume 2, "Muleskinner Blues," is a selection of the more traditional folk repertory Guthrie had learned and adopted as his own throughout his life, from "Stackolee" to the "Worried Man Blues." Volume 3, "Hard Travelin'," culls together the best of Guthrie's current-events songs, swinging between the World War II version of "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" and amusing cultural trendspotting like "Howdjadoo." Volume 4, "Buffalo Skinners," looks at a side of Guthrie many might not have seen before. While compiling a complete discography of Guthrie's songs during a 1990 post-doctoral fellowship, Logsdon explored Woody's unheralded cowboy songs. In Logsdon's extensive liner notes for this set, he traces the development of Guthrie as a cowboy songwriter, starting with "Oklahoma Hills." The eventual recording of that song became a country-and-western hit in 1945, sung by Woody's cousin, Jack Guthrie. The success of that song inspired him to write more, and he enjoyed another hit in 1949 when the Maddox Brothers recorded "Philadelphia Lawyer." "Most people don't associate Woody with cowboy songs," Logsdon said. "Woody's father came to the Creek Nation as a cowboy, though. He worked on a ranch east of Okmulgee. He and his granddad were ranchers in Texas. In Michael Wallis' book about the 101 Ranch, he refers to Gid Guthrie, Woody's great uncle. So this fourth volume may come as a bit of a surprise to some folks." Guthrie's body of work is full of surprises. Those of us who grew up singing "This Land Is Your Land" in grade school and hearing about Woody the serious, hard travelin' folk singer are always taken aback by the depths to which his convictions plumbed, as well as his underappreciated playful side. Both are on parade throughout "The Asch Recordings." Guthrie even wrote songs to accompany Omar Khayyam's ancient "Rubaiyat" poem. Only a few copies of the recordings exist, and Logsdon said no one's sure yet how to sequence them. One of these tracks is featured on Volume 3, and it's a textbook example of Guthrie taking time-worn philosophies and trying to apply them to the events of his day. This set is, indeed, a must-have for anyone with even a passing interest in American music or American history. No other artist in the mid-20th century put down the issues, the angst and the joy more accurately and frankly than Woody. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World Brad Mitcho's a tad edgy. Not that Mitcho isn't always edgy, but today he's unusually tense. His eyes are darting back and forth with that kind of caged-animal, cramming-for-a-life-altering-test panic. He only makes eye contact when it surprises you. The waitress at the Brook is wary of him. He's tripped her fidgeting alarm, and it's clear he hasn't seen the sun in a few days. "I'm freaking out," he mutters during our conversation last week. "I'm trying to get it all done. I come from a theater background, so I tend to go overboard when getting ready for a show." This show, especially. The pressure's on this weekend as Molly's Yes unveils itself as a major-label pop band. The Tulsa quartet actually will play two shows — Oklahoma City on Friday, here at home Saturday — to celebrate the international release of "Wonderworld," the band's first shot on Universal's Republic Records. The CD was due on shelves across the country this week. "Wonderworld" is a spiffed-up version of the band's debut CD, "Paper Judas," which was released locally early this year. In the hands of Republic, the album's sound got a shot of steroids and added an extra track. But the umpteen thousands of copies still read, "Produced by Brad Mitcho." Molly's Yes — the name comes from Molly Bloom's life-affirming monologue at the end of James Joyce's "Ulysses" — consists of Mitcho, bassist and what critics like to call "sonic architect"; Ed Goggin, a powerful singer with an unruffled eye on Bono's white flag; Mac Ross, a gifted guitarist with an ear for tone and texture; and Scott Taylor, drummer and, like Mitcho, a former resident of another Tulsa musical mainstay, Glass House. In three short years, these four have blazed a trail of glory that defines the phrase "meteoric rise." How high they will go remains to be seen. One thing is clear to Molly's Yes, though. The next phase of their promising recording career starts this weekend. Back home. Making connections Mitcho's been up nights working on "incidental music." That's a phrase that usually sends serious rock fans scurrying for the beer tent, but it sheds light on the way Molly's Yes makes music. They don't just make music. They make an experience. "The whole vibe of this band has been to take slick songwriting and apply the electronic element," Mitcho says. "The artists who have inspired us are people like U2, Kate Bush — people who are aware of the audio, video and theatrical element of a show." Indeed, when Mitcho refers to the "electronic element," he's talking about sight and sound. Saturday's hometown show will be a festival of carefully orchestrated music and video, thanks to the work and talent of multimedia designers like Chris White at Tulsa's Winner Communications. It'll be cool, Mitcho assures, but it's made a lot of extra work for him. "Computers can't jam," he says. "I have to create a lot of music to bridge the songs, and I have to represent the songs as finished products." Molly's Yes is not an electronic band, though they are certainly electronically enhanced. Goggin's emotional songs and plaintive wails are melodic, accessible and moving, and he says he writes on an acoustic guitar like any other rock musician. Once the song gets its legs, Goggin hands it over to Mitcho, who slinks into his electronic lair. "The most exciting part is when I write a song and give it to Brad, and then he goes and does his ... thing," Goggin says. "I can't wait to come back and see where it's gone and get to see this Frankenstein thing come out." "The first time Ed and I were working together," Mitcho says, "we were talking about all these things we wanted to do with our music, and we had the same ideas for loops and stuff. He kept asking, `Do we have the technology to do that?' Well, yeah, we do!" So began a year-long journey for Molly's Yes: the creation of "Paper Judas." Mitcho maintained his intense focus on the album every step of the way — sometimes to the point of obsession. Goggin is quoted in the band's new Republic bio as saying, "He would not settle for anything less than the best to the point where he almost needed psychiatric help." The result of the labors, though, helped the band score three nominations at next month's Spot Music Awards, considerable radio exposure throughout the state (no small feat) and a contract with one of the music industry's most enterprising record labels. 'Sugar' coated Effects and cool sounds don't make a successful record, though, and they (usually) don't land your band a record contract. The Molly's Yes song "Sugar" — which was the single released locally and nationally — is impossible to eject from your head because, at the barest level, it's a solid song. " 'Sugar' was never meant to be 'Brain Salad Surgery' (Emerson, Lake and Palmer)," Mitcho says. "It's not hollow. It's basically three chords and the truth." "The title of it makes it sound like a confectionery thing, but the irony is that it's about drug abuse," Goggin says. "It's a beautiful tune wrapped up in a serious issue. 'Tell Me the Truth' gets into the complexity of a relationship. I mean, for the most part, this is pretty grown-up stuff. To me, that's more subversive than coming out with the angry thing right off. It's like, 'Yeah, we get it already. You're pissed off.' "Of course, people like to corner you into being this or that. We've already taken flack for different things. People who know me know I'm not this bookish guy thinking heavy things all the time. But, see, Molly's Yes is a great name because that last chapter (of Ulysses) is not just a daydream about flowers, it's about everything, a whole lifetime of experience, of sex, of love, everything. It's about all that we deal with as human beings. We, as a band, can be all those things. Starting slowly After this weekend's hometown kick-off, the band's plan -- surprisingly — is supposed to lie low. They recently hired a manager, Scott McCracken (Lauryn Hill, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Spacehog), but there are no plans for Molly's Yes to tour extensively until after the band's New Year's Eve gig with Caroline's Spine at the Brady Theater. "Once the record hits, we're going to party here but keep it pretty low-key until after the holidays," Goggin says. "Every artist and their dog is coming out with their Last Record of the Century this fall. We're not going to try and compete with that, with people like Beck. It would be too difficult for a new band to squeeze in." So for now, there's just the party. Not only has Mitcho been locked up in his home studio creating cartilage for the show's transitions, but the band has been working and rehearsing at a fever pitch. This is the hometown crowd, after all. It's homecoming weekend. "People in Tulsa are looking to see if we've moved to that next level," Goggin says, "and we have a certain amount of gratitude to all the people who helped us achieve this, from all the media to the people at Christopher Sound and Vision to basically all the people who came out to the Brink every weekend to see us. We owe them something big." Molly's Yes performs Saturday at the Cain's Ballroom, 423 N. Main St., with Shaking Tree. Doors open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. Tickets are $7, at the Ticket Office at Expo Square, Mohawk Music, Starship Records and Tapes and the Mark-It Shirt Shop. By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World Bob Newhart's inimitable bone-dry wit has tickled the funny bone of nearly every generation since his meteoric rise in the late 1950s. First came the hugely successful comedy records, including the Grammy-winning "Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart." He moved to TV in the '60s with "The Bob Newhart Variety Show" and "The Entertainers," the latter also featuring Carol Burnett. In 1972, he launched his television calling card, "The Bob Newhart Show," in which Bob played the ever-patient psychiatrist with an office and apartment full of oddballs. "Newhart" followed in 1982, moving Bob's deadpan delivery from urban Chicago to rural Vermont. Again, the kooks abounded, and Newhart's second series proved as successful as the first. TV Guide listed 1990's final episode of "Newhart" — in which Bob wakes up to find himself in bed with "Bob Newhart Show" wife Suzanne Pleschette, proving the whole second series to be a dream — in the top five most-memorable moments in television. The '90s saw a few more stabs at TV — the schedule-plagued "Bob" and the anticipated but short-lived "George and Leo" with Judd Hirsch — but Newhart's legacy manifested itself most brilliantly in a drinking game called "hi Bob" popular on college campuses. Every time someone on "The Bob Newhart Show" says, "Hi, Bob," you take a swig. He is, in other words, ground-breaking, pioneering, historic and responsible for numerous watermarks in American comedy. In recent years, Newhart has returned to his stand-up roots, taking his deadpan shtick to venues across the country. In conjunction with the homecoming celebration at the University of Tulsa this week, Newhart will be performing his old and new routines for a special show on campus. We caught up with Bob on the phone this week. Of course, conducting a phone interview with the comedian who made one-sided phone conversations high comedy raises interesting possibilities on its own. If you'd like, you can read only Bob's half. Thomas: You're at your office today? What kind of business do you have to tend to in an office? Bob: Oh, you know, signing autographs and returning phone calls and such. Thomas: Do you write material there? Bob: No, I've found that the best place to write is the bathroom. It's the least distracting place in the house. I imagine most of the world's greatest inventions came to people between the shower and the john. Orville probably sat right there and thought, "I wonder what would happen if we directed the air over the top ..." Thomas: So stand-up starts sitting down, eh? Are you enjoying taking your stand-up show on the road again? Bob: Oh, yes. I've always kept the stand-up side of things going. I can't imagine not ever doing stand-up again. Thomas: What can we expect to see in the show? Bob: Maybe one or two routines from the old albums, and generally my kind of observations on this crazy place we inhabit called the planet Earth. Thomas: You were a stand-up comic who landed a TV gig long before that was the established career path. What differences do you see in the way comedy finds its way from stage to screen today? Bob: Well, as this season has proven already, just being a stand-up comic isn't enough to guarantee the success of a TV show. Some comics have had great success with it — Ray Romano, Seinfeld, before them Roseanne — but simply putting a stage comic on TV isn't automatically the answer. You'd better be able to act also. The advantages to it, though, are that you already know how to time a joke. Secondly, you come with a persona that's already established; you don't have to spend five or six episodes explaining why this person is the way he or she is. Most importantly, though, you need to know the persona yourself. You have to be able to act as your own watchdog when writers try to make you say things you know your persona wouldn't say. Thomas: Do the old routines still knock 'em dead, or do '90s audiences have different expectations of a stand-up comic? Bob: Yeah, they still work. That's the weird thing. I've re-recorded some of the stuff from the first and second albums because I didn't have a hand in the editing of them, and they removed a lot of the silences in order to save time. In comedy, the silences are as important or more important than the words. I got to record them again the way I originally heard them as opposed to the way they were edited, and we recorded them in front of an audience whose average age was about 35. And they still worked the same way. The laughs were just as strong. Funny is funny. Thomas: Despite where you said you come up with your material, you've never had a potty mouth. Does that somehow date you among new comedians? Bob: When I started, there was a language barrier. That's been broken down. Some of the younger comics think that they'll be funnier if they use the strong language. I think they're confusing shock with funny. Seinfeld worked clean. Stephen Wright works clean. Jay (Leno) works clean when he does stand-up. I don't have a problem with the language, I just always have to look underneath it and ask, "Is it still funny?" Thomas: Much of your early routines are recognizable because of the phone conversations you act out on stage. That started between you and a friend, right? Bob: His name was Ed Gallagher, and he recently died, just two weeks ago. He was a smoker. We were both in a suburban stock theater company, and I was an accountant at the time. Just as I was about to flip out at the end of the day, I'd give him a call and we'd improvise over the phone. I'd tell him I was someone famous, and he'd interview me. He suggested we record them. It was kind of a poor man's Bob and Ray, and it wasn't very successful. Ed was eventually offered a job in New York, and I decided to go it on my own. Out of that, the phone bits evolved. Thomas: Are there any comedians out there now you think resemble your dry wit? Bob: Stephen Wright and I are similar in our delivery. I was talking to someone the other day about him. They said he's like today's Henny Youngman. I said, "Yeah, Henny Youngman on acid." He's so surreal. When I did "Bob" — "the ill-fated `Bob' " as it's now known — he was on. He's very dedicated. At some point during "Newhart," I was asked who I thought the next Newhart would be, and I said Seinfeld. It's that same kind of easy-to-live-with, non-pressured, laid-back style, and all those terms people use to describe us. Thomas: "The Bob Newhart Show" has been running regularly on Nick at Nite, which advertises its line-up as "America's TV heritage." What do you think of the idea of us having a TV heritage, and how do you feel to be a part of it? Bob: I'm proud of TV and what it's accomplished, and I'm proud to have been a part of it. I've done a couple of movies, but I prefer TV because of its immediacy and especially because you can do it in front of a live audience. Not enough shows today are done in front of live audiences. Laugh tracks are so transparent. Thomas: Specifically, how does the live audience enrich the experience? Bob: The audience teaches you about your comedy. We were rehearsing one week on "The Bob Newhart Show," and there was one line that (made me say), "Guys, this is not going to work. It's not funny." (The writers) said, "Trust us. Just do it." So I did it, and sure enough, it didn't work. Nobody laughed. I looked over at them, and they kind of nodded. The next week, they knew their material would be tested against that audience, so they wrote harder and looked better. An audience tells you a lot of things you can't find out with a laugh track. One was Larry, Darryl and Darryl (from "Newhart"). Once they showed up, the audience went wild, and they were only planned for one show. So right away we put a couple of more scripts together working with them, and they were a huge success. Every time they would enter, we'd all have to pause for the roaring applause, and the same thing happened every time they left. We couldn't have found that out with a laugh track. Thomas: Your shows always seemed to pit you, the stable individual, against this sea of nutballs. Was that a conscious formula? Bob: I used to tell Mary Frann (who played Bob's wife in "Newhart"), "If we appear to be crazy, then the show isn't going to work. We have to be the glue that holds this together because everyone else is nuts." For a while, they talked about spinning off Stephanie and Michael, and I said, "It isn't going to work. They're cartoon characters. They only work within the framework of this sanity." Thomas: Any new series in the works for you? Bob: No. "Bob" and "George and Leo" were such disappointments for me. When something doesn't work, there comes a time when you have to admit that it's someone else's time. I'm happy with the huge success I had. Thomas: Finally, I have to tell you: they're planning a big game of "Hi Bob" on campus before your show here. Bob: (laughing) With all the success I've enjoyed, I'm going to go down in history for "Hi Bob." For some reason, I was told that game started at SMU, which I kind of hope is true because it seems like such a staid campus. It's a real compliment to the show that people have picked up on that. We weren't even aware when we were doing "The Bob Newhart Show" how many "Hi Bobs" there were. The only thing I hope is that the players stay on campus and don't drive anywhere afterward. Newhart by the numbers Bob Newhart's first career wasn't comedy. For many years, he was an accountant — which, as he said, drove him to comedy. In order to calculate his indelible success as a comedian, though, here's Newhart by the numbers, courtesy of bob-newhart.com: Number of TV shows in which Bob has starred: 6 Number of those shows which incorporate some element of his full name, George Robert Newhart: 5 Number of episodes in his four most recent series: 378 Number of U.S. viewers who tuned in for the final episode of "Newhart" on May 21, 1990: 29.5 million Number of U.S. viewers who tuned into the cameo episode on "George and Leo": 15.7 million Number of Newhart's former co-stars who appeared in that episode: 13 Number of "Hi Bob" greetings in all 142 episodes of "The Bob Newhart Show": 256 Most in a single episode: 7 Number of personal Emmy nominations for Newhart: 4 Number of Emmy wins: 1 Number of Grammy awards he's received: 2 Number of weeks "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" stayed on the Billboard magazine Top 100 albums chart: 108 (with 14 weeks at No. 1) Bob Newhart When: 8 p.m. Friday Where: Reynolds Center, University of Tulsa, Eighth Street and Harvard Avenue Tickets: $10 at the Reynolds Center box office or all Carson Attractions outlets; 584-2000 By Thomas Conner
© Tulsa World The star-studded Spot Music Awards show just added another stud. Dwight Twilley — premier pop-rocker behind such early hits as "I'm on Fire" and "Girls," — has been added to the bill of the Nov. 12 concert at the Cain's Ballroom. Twilley will headline the Tulsa-talent show along with the Tractors and Admiral Twin. The free concert that night follows a first-ever VIP awards ceremony honoring Tulsa musicians, presented by the Tulsa World and its Spot entertainment magazine. Twilley's performance at the Spotniks will reunite him with original Dwight Twilley Band guitarist Bill Pitcock IV, who hasn't played on stage with Twilley in nearly 15 years. Pitcock contributed some of his unique guitar work to Twilley's latest album — Twilley's first new material since 1986 — entitled "Tulsa." And "Tulsa" is beginning to get around. Recorded entirely in Twilley's converted garage studio in midtown and released this summer on the American indie label Copper Records, "Tulsa" was picked up just this week by Castle Music, one of the largest independent record companies in Europe. The company also has agreed to distribute "Between the Cracks," a CD collection of rarities and outtakes from Twilley's entire three-decade career, released in the United States last month on Not Lame Records. "We got the deal!" exclaimed Jan Allison, Twilley's wife, from the canned veggies aisle at the neighborhood supermarket. She and Twilley were huddled in conference. Big dinner plans were afoot to celebrate a record deal that could be the beginning not only of Twilley's long-overdue comeback but of the much-ballyhooed return of power pop in general. "Everyone's been talking about how power pop was going to make this big return, but it hasn't happened. These people at Castle are telling me they want my record to lead the charge," Twilley said. "They've picked up six other bands from these labels, too, with the intention of starting this pop revolution in Europe, where they're craving it. I mean, people are going crazy to get these records over there ... And if it happens in Europe, then it could more easily happen here. We tend to take our cues from Europe on what's cool." Twilley's been releasing occasional vinyl singles in Europe for about a year through a French label called Pop the Balloon Records. The label reports that Twilley's singles have been the most successful sellers in its history. Why is the Old World so mad about the boy? It may be the Elvis Factor: Twilley never toured in Europe. Like Elvis, Europeans have only heard the buzz about him and been able to buy records, but they've never gotten to actually see him. Thus, they clamor after the records with greater appetites. "From their standpoint, I'm just something they've heard about," Twilley said. "When I had big records here, the first thing the labels wanted to spend money on was a tour of the states. We just never got to tour over there. If someone had said, 'Go play over there,' I would have. It was only when we set up my web site that I realized how big my audience is over there ... The worldwide reaction to this record has made me go, 'Gah!' I guess I'd better get off my butt and make another one." Are there songs in the works for another record? He simply chuckled. "I always have songs," he said. "I could make probably two or three records without writing a single new song. 'Baby's Got the Blues Again' (a song on 'Tulsa') is an old one that was on the original demo Phil (Seymour) and I took to Shelter Records. I thought that was a quirky and bold thing to do, putting it on the new record. Funny thing is, that's the song that's been spotlighted in most of the press we've been getting. I look back and think, 'Well, hell, there's 13 or 14 boxes with more of those.' That's what I raided to fill up 'Between the Cracks' — which is titled `Volume One,' by the way. And, I mean, these songs seem to stand the test of time. I don't think anyone listens to 'Baby's Got the Blues Again' and says, 'Wow, that's a 20-year-old song.'" Twilley hopes to mount a European tour soon to capitalize on his new continental success, but it will take some work to put it together. He hadn't even planned on playing locally until the Spot Music Awards came along. "It was only because of this thing you guys did — paying some attention to Tulsa musicians — that I decided to play," he said. In addition to suiting up with Pitcock for the first time in a long time, Twilley said he's planning some other surprises for the Spotniks show. Namely, he said he'll probably sit down at a piano again, "which I haven't done in years on stage but actually did on this record." Mostly, Twilley said, he just wants to have a blast. "This thing is like a special occasion. It's almost a partyish atmosphere, I think. The key to the whole deal is just to have a gas so the audience is aware they can have a good time and see what these wacky Tulsa musicians are all about." Also on the bill for the Nov. 12 concert are the Red Dirt Rangers, Freak Show, the Full Flavor Kings, Brian Parton and the Nashville Rebels, and Republic Records recording artist Molly's Yes. Twilley's "Tulsa" album has been nominated for the Best National Album award, and Twilley himself is up for Artist of the Year. Ballots for the awards run each Friday inside the Spot magazine. The last chance to vote will be the Oct. 22 ballot. BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World The Norman club was a closet, anyway. The throng of collegiates, practically perspiring beer, willingly wriggled inch-by-inch through the door, compressing into the raunchy space and straining to see, to be seen, to hear what was going on. The typically laid-back Norman music fans were desperate, wild-eyed, clawing over each other's backs to see a band. A local band, no less. It was 1992, and the hometown Flaming Lips had recently signed to a major label, Warner Bros., and, to everyone's great relief, they hadn't sold out or lost their edge. In fact, they'd gotten tighter. Their Warner Bros. debut, "Hit to Death in the Future Head," focused and even magnified the band's off-kilter squeak-rock, its purposeful and orchestrated distortion, its kaleidoscopic lyrical visions. A bonus track even featured 29 minutes of stereo static. It was a Lips experience: enthralling, frightening, daring in its wizardry and sheer mass. When Steven Drozd's drums rolled and crashed on "Hold Your Head," it seemed that the world would end in that crummy little dive. The softest bullet ever shot Wayne Coyne, the Flaming Lips' de facto leader and chief sonic architect, finally got through on his cell phone last week. His voice was strained through the pixelized stops and starts of cross-continental cellular transmission. Somehow, it was an appropriate way to hear him. "We drove from Minneapolis to Seattle yesterday," he said. "I had some other interviews to do, and the cell phones wouldn't even work all the way across the Dakotas and Montana. I thought technology had invaded everywhere." The Lips are touring in support of their latest album, "The Soft Bulletin." It's their ninth full-length album, and it's the most fully realized, all-encompassing, masterful composition of the Oklahoma City-based band's 15-year career. The fumbling experiments in sound the Lips have conducted in the past three years pay off in breathtaking, sweeping rushes of sound — non-musical noises made not only musical but harmonious, delicate, emotional and enormous. Instead of the static guitars and loose-limbed rumble that supported the grade-A whimsy of the Lips' fluke 1993 hit, "She Don't Use Jelly," the songs on "The Soft Bulletin" strive for other sounds — plunky pianos, perky piccolos, nebulous noises. It's as if Coyne & Co. have mastered in music what poets have been striving for in print for centuries: the communication of the idea by invoking as many of the senses as possible. In modern music, though, Coyne said the range for that expression is quite narrow. "The music wants to limit itself," he said, crackling through the cellular relay towers. "Rock bands even limit themselves, saying, 'We'll play guitars and drums and that's all.' I've fallen into that myself in the past, and I kick myself. I use the analogy of painting. It's like a painter saying, 'I only use red and gray.' That's kind of limiting. Don't you want to use anything available to express your idea?" Gentlemen . . . press play Car Radio Orchestra was a Coyne experiment conducted in a parking garage during the 1997 South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. Up to 30 volunteered cars, including Coyne's, were led up to the fifth floor of the garage and arranged in a certain pattern. The drivers were instructed to open all doors and windows and crank their stereos up as loud as possible without distorting. They were each given a numbered cassette, and when Coyne shouted "Go!" through his megaphone, they all pressed play. The first piece was titled "That's the Crotch Calling the Devil Black," a swirl of white noise and high-pitched sounds — different parts coming from different cars — culminating in the breathy gasps and shouts of a lengthy female orgasm. A second composition followed, full of pounding drums that reverberated endlessly off the concrete ceilings and floors like the bouncing ball on a screen saver. Swelling synthesized music and crashing cymbals crescendoed into manic madness, and three cars blew fuses. Setting his sights on sound Later that year, the Flaming Lips released "Zaireeka," a set of four CDs designed to be played simultaneously — the fruits of the Car Radio Orchestra trials. Fans around the country set up four CD players around their living rooms to indulge in this new experience in sound. These projects were not simply the ravings of a madman with a big budget. (Major record labels — which are giant, profit-driven corporations — rarely release the whims of a mischievous employee.) Coyne said he was trying to funnel his boundless ideas into the medium in which he and he band work. "To be merely imaginative isn't the cure we're looking for," Coyne said last week, his voice distorting now like the aural equivalent of a television screen moire. "I think of a million ideas, but I have to have a reason as to why this idea applies now instead of later. The space we occupied with other bands eight or nine years ago — the distortion, effects, no boundaries — that's been absorbed in the mainstream culture." "The Soft Bulletin" features numerous environmental sounds that have been squeezed, pitched and distorted into musical elements. Coyne was personally taken with the sound his freezer door made when opening and closing — "this great thud and sucking sound, familiar to anyone who's spent a lifetime grabbing popsicles." So he recorded it and used it as a rhythmic element. "You can make music out of these!" he said, gleefully. "We're building sounds out of insects and refrigerators and using them in a sophisticated musical way. Brian Wilson said, `I just wasn't made for these times.' I say the opposite: these times were made for me." Is it live? This meticulous crafting of sounds in a recording studio is surely innovative; this, after all, is a rock band. Rock bands tour, play concerts. How will we hear these fantastic noises when the Flaming Lips are onstage? Enter the backup tape. For the current series of concerts, the Lips are playing to a pre-recorded tape of backing tracks and some rhythms. This is not karaoke, though; unlike the 'N Syncs and Britney Spearses, the Lips use the backing tracks for our benefit, not their own. In fact, the current live show is another experiment of Coyne's: the headphone concert. Upon entering the hall, most concertgoers will be given a portable radio and a pair of in-the-ear headphones. Using an FM transmitter, the band broadcasts the backing track inside the hall, so listeners can hear what's going in the room as well as enjoying the more detailed mix and stereo spread through the headphones. "Last Thanksgiving, (our manager) Scott Booker and I were sitting around thinking about what we were going to do to present this live," Coyne said. "We don't have Ronald Jones (a former Lips member) who was a master at rebuilding things, but even for him this would have been too much. So I finally sat down and said, 'I know what we're going to do. We'll play to a backup tape.' " Some practice runs were scheduled at the Boar's Head club in Oklahoma City, but Coyne said he didn't like the way the live music sounded with the tape. He started trying to think out of the box — how could the band present live sound in some other way than sending their amplifier signals through a bunch of speakers? The idea for headphones came to him at breakfast the next day. "It's worked, and it's something people really do like," he said. "The sort of thing we present, it just gives the songs more impact. There are so many things missing when you're standing a few feet from the stage hearing 120 decibels. We're one band you have to hear clearly to get the full range of the experience." Music Against Brain Degeneration Tour Featuring the Flaming Lips with Robyn Hitchcock, Sebadoh and Sonic Boom's E.A.R. When 7 p.m. Friday Where Will Rogers Theater, near 44th Street and Western Avenue in Oklahoma City Tickets $16; in Tulsa from Mohawk Music, 664-2951 |
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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