RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Houston Rock and Blues Musician Guy Schwartz and Band

Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer, left, with Billy Bourbon and Guy Schwartz in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, July 5, 2013. Photo by Marlo Blue / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Houston rock and blues artist
Guy Schwartz with band

Houston's Guy Schwartz -- whose bands have included Relayer, Z-Rocks, the New Jack Hippies, and the Austin-based Guy Schwartz & the Affordables -- was called the 'Godfather of the local music scene' by the Houston Press.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2013

See video of the show below.

Houston rock and blues musician Guy Schwartz was Thorne Dreyer's guest -- in interview and performance -- on Rag Radio, Friday, July 5, 2013. Schwartz was joined on the show by Marlo Blue of Houston's KPFT-FM and was backed by musicians Billy Bourbon, Roger Tausz, and Rick Lyon.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download this episode of Rag Radio here:


Guy Schwartz is a musician, songwriter, producer, videographer, music journalist and archivist, and a political activist. In his appearance on Rag Radio, he is backed on rhythm guitar and vocals by singer-songwriter and bandleader Billy Bourbon (The Billy Bourbon Band) who also plays guitar in Guy's Austin-based Affordables, bassist Roger Tausz of the New Jack Hippies, and percussionist Rick Lyon. Also featured on the show is Schwartz collaborator Marlo Blue, an audio-video producer and a news anchor at KPFT-FM in Houston.

Guy Schwartz has played with music legends ranging from Lightnin' Hopkins and B.W. Stevenson to Lionel Hampton and The Monkees. and his groups have included the progressive underground band, Relayer, formed in 1977; the power-pop band Z-Rocks, started in 1980; the New Jack Hippies, which toured the U.S. and Western Europe from 1999-2004 and still perform regionally in Texas; and the Austin-based Guy Schwartz and the Affordables.

Noting his continuing work on behalf of Houston musicians, the Houston Press called Schwartz "the Godfather of the local music scene."

Schwartz also produces a cable-television show on Texas music and musicians, and is producer and creator -- with Marlo Blue -- of the annual Houston indie music and video festival, South By Due East. Schwartz and Billy Bourbon recently recorded the album, Weed at Walmart.

Guy Schwartz and crew on Rag Radio, Friday, July 5, 2013. Video by Guy Schwartz and Marlo Blue.
Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, July 19, 2013: Sociologist, media critic, and author Todd Gitlin.

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'Love Goes to Buildings on Fire'

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire:
New York City, just like I pictured it

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes (2012: Faber and Faber); Paperback (Reprint Edition); 384 pp; $16.

My stated reason for being in New York in 1973 was to go to school, but my real intent was to immerse myself in leftist politics and rock and roll culture. Almost every weekend I headed to the Village and Lower East Side in search of weed and music or politics.

There were plenty of protests even after the heyday of 1968-1972 and the issues were still the same. Imperialism, war, poverty, racism, and police brutality. The music, however, was starting to change. There were rumblings of something new in the dives and occasional street fair.

I remember seeing a band (I think it was the New York Dolls or their predecessor) near St. Mark’s Place one Saturday afternoon. I was not into the poor quality of the music, but found the presentation fascinating and unlike anything I had seen before. Still, though, my primary musical preferences were Bob Dylan, the Stones, the Grateful Dead and the Beatles.

One weekend a friend and I saw a poster for a rock show at the Hotel Diplomat near Times Square. The show featured a woman whose book of poetry I had just bought on the Lower East Side. The book was called Witt and the poet's name was Patti Smith. The show I remember I remember because of Smith. The hotel I remember because it’s where Abbie Hoffmann got busted for coke and then went underground.

I was a scholarship student at Fordham University in the Bronx. So was almost everyone else on the floor of my dorm. There were only a couple of us white-skinned guys on that floor. The rest were Puerto Rican and African-American. I heard more salsa than I knew existed. Smoking pot, discussing Marxism and Eddie Palmieri was how I spent many Saturday nights.

Sometimes, nobody in the dorm would go home for the weekend. On those weekends, the music leaking under the dorm room doors with the pot smoke included the Allman Brothers, the aforementioned Palmieri, Earth, Wind and Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, the Dead, and Bob Dylan.

I left New York after seven short months. A floormate from Teaneck, New Jersey, had just introduced me to a new band on the scene known as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. I saw him in Maryland a few months later.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire.

The changes I felt were soon to rule the world of popular music. This is the story rock music writer Will Hermes tells in his 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever. Recently released for the first time in paperback, Hermes’ text is more than a look at music in New York. It is a history of the city during the period covered that rarely mentions economics and politics yet ekes them.

From the steamy streets of the South Bronx and the future that would become hip-hop to the steamier bathhouses and clubs in lower Manhattan that became world-famous dens of disco, Hermes relates his tale. Like his namesake, he carries the message that punk rock shouted and salsa sang. The period herein may have been the last time New York mattered as much as it did in the world of popular culture.

Jay-Z may still be there, but there is no creative center any more. In fact, the dispersion of that center into the global world may have been the unforeseen result of the bands, beats, and jazzmen Hermes writes about so wonderfully.

Lurking behind Hermes’ tales of Patti Smith and Richard Hell; Afrika Bambaata and David Murray; and the multitude of others that star in this book is the spectre of corporate greed destroying culture and pretty much anything else it touched. Indeed, this included an attempt by Gerald Ford and Donald Rumsfeld to make Manhattan default. Yet, while this attempt to force austerity on the world’s cultural capital ultimately succeeded only partially, the mélange of cultural mixes did create what became termed world music.

This is a book about Debbie Harry and Eddie Palmieri; Bruce Springsteen and Grandmaster Flash; Abe Beame and CBGBs; Miles Davis and Anthony Braxton. It’s a book about the clubbers and the brothers and sisters attending the DJ contests in the Bronx and the punkers bleeding in the Bowery. The names are so familiar that some are forgotten.

The cover art is by Mark Stamaty, formerly of the Village Voice (back before Murdoch destroyed it). He is also the author and illustrator of one of my favorite children’s books, Who Needs Donuts? The drawings he does are cartoonish, encompassing and busy, as if he was on stimulants. They are the artistic representation of the story Hermes has written down.

In a nutshell, that story is about the birth of hip hop via the transition of the beat; the C-section that was punk and the future of rock and roll that was Bruce Springsteen. Love Goes to Buildings On Fire isn’t about passing a torch. It’s about that torch enveloping the past and the future of popular music in its flames.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up will be republished by Fomite in April 2013 along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Ron Jacobs : Punk, Politics, and the 1980s

Patti Smith, New York, circa 1976. Photo © Stephanie Chernikowski.
Punk, Politics, and the 1980s

Rock music historians and critics generally agree that punk was a reaction to the gaudiness of 1970s stadium rock and the creation of rock royalty like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / January 7, 2013

My introduction to punk rock shows was less than auspicious. I did see the Clash on their first U.S. tour in 1977, yet the venue for that show was a rock festival in Monterey that attempted to bring together punk, reggae, and psychedelic music. The endeavor failed financially but did afford those who attended with the opportunity to hear plenty of great music: Country Joe and the Fish, Peter Tosh, The Clash, just to name a few.

It’s not that the festival was a bad idea. It was just ahead of its time.

Anyhow, back to that first genuine punk show experience. The Stranglers were playing at a UC Berkeley housing coop down the street from where I lived. I think The Mutants opened. During the opening set I somehow ended up in the mosh pit and got hit pretty hard. I moved away and my spot was taken over by a couple friends who had transitioned from hippie to punk a few months earlier. They beat the shit out of some guy they knew from previous mosh pits who hated hippies.

That was the consciousness back then. Hippies were supposed to hate punks and punks were supposed to hate hippies. Even though we got harassed by the same cops for different reasons (punks didn’t smoke much weed), we were supposed to hate each other.

For those of us who lived on the street -- sharing seedy hotel rooms and couches, squatting in buildings, and just living in general -- we couldn’t afford the same media-induced feud the suburban members of either subculture could.

Fortunately, that quarrel went the way of most media-induced music feuds; Beatles vs. the Stones, soul vs. rock, mod vs. rocker, etc. The result, at least in the Bay Area, was an understanding that the music was bigger than any particular person or subculture.

Punk could not have existed without what came before it in rock and roll. Likewise, anything that came later would be influenced by the attitude and the musical qualities that punk brought to the dance floor. This understanding came about in no small part because of two bands in particular. Those bands were the Patti Smith Group and The Clash.

Patti Smith was already a punk demigod by 1980 -- and this in a culture that destroyed gods and goddesses. Her legend was greater than her music and her charisma outdid them both. Politically, she stood with the anarchism of the Yippies. Artistically, she wrote verses that brought to mind the Song of Solomon, Howl, The Mask of Anarchy and more.

All of that was matched to a three-chord progression, a voice that borrowed from Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Robert Plant, and a swagger that put Mick Jagger to shame. In addition, she just plain emanated an attitude that said fuck you -- an essential part of rock and crucial to the format known as punk.

I have to share a couple experiences involving Patti Smith. I was a college freshman in 1973 in New York City. Somehow -- not because I was that hip -- I ended up at a poetry reading in St. Mark’s Church. Patti Smith was one of the poets. She took the stage with a guitarist and a drummer in between a couple other poets and proceeded to blow my mind with a rendition of her song Piss Factory.

Once I saw that, I can honestly say my definition of rock expanded beyond the boundaries that had already been stretched innumerable times. I wanted a recording and I wanted to see and hear her more. Unfortunately, I would have to wait until 1975 when she released her first album on Arista. Titled Horses, it changed the meaning of rock.

Like Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, or the Beatles' Revolver (to name a mere three of rock’s boundary-expanding recordings), after one listened to Horses, everything else would be compared to that experience.

I saw her at Georgetown University’s McDonough Arena a few months later. She writhed onstage in a worn t-shirt and kept the crowd on its feet for the entire show. I don’t know if it was punk, but it was definitely rock and roll. (The Patti Smith Group would be one of those bands that, despite being originally labeled as punk, would transcend that label and, like The Clash, ultimately become a great rock band.)

The Clash, Live at the Paladium, September 21, 1979. Image from The Soundboard.
Then there is The Clash. Their music was always overtly political. Their version of  “Police on Our Backs” was the theme song for those of us who hung out on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and drank beer in People’s Park. Their working class anger against the system that intentionally ignored youth without money and used the police to keep them on the run hit a chord with anyone the police harassed. Plus, just like Patti Smith, they knew how to create good rock and roll. I wrote in a piece published a year or two ago about the album London Calling:

A few days before Christmas, while the sounds of Pink Floyd’s The Wall reverberated in our apartment on Berkeley’s Dwight Way from the building next door a friend walked in the door with a double album from the Clash titled London Calling. This album was not only the best punk album of the year. It was the best album, period. From the first cut called "London Calling" to the final cut "Train In Vain," this work had everything a rock album could hope to contain. Rebellion, reggae, and straight-out rock and roll. Armageddon, the street, and the essence of love. When our friends who didn’t really like punk took a listen to this album, it changed their minds.

In other words, The Clash kicked ass. They celebrated revolution and did what they could to foment one of their own. Their concerts were an anarchic celebration of the passion and power rock and roll can create.

Anyhow, back to San Francisco. The band that set the tone for all San Francisco punkers was the Dead Kennedys. In a town filled with great music and plenty of places to enjoy it in, DK shows were among the best. Raucous, political and crowded.

Their first single was called California Uber Alles. A satirical poke at the bullshit liberalism of then Governor Jerry Brown and his sophistry, the song laid bare the viciousness that lay behind the smiley face of California’s pseudo-hip establishment. In the remake of the song a year later, the title was changed to “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now.” This version revised the lyrics to fit the new political mood in the United States after Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House.

The transition from gentle smiley-face fascism to the great communicator channeling Josef Goebbel’s lessons in propaganda meant the shit was about to hit the fan, especially for those not with the program. The Dead Kennedys were definitely a necessary part of the soundtrack.

Indeed, 1984 brought the Democratic Party to San Francisco for their quadrennial convention. This was the year that Jesse Jackson made a serious run at the nomination, running on a fairly radical platform. His campaign was knocked off its pace when Zionists in the party leaked evidence that Jackson had once called New York “Hymietown.” The Zionists were afraid of Jackson’s Palestinian-friendly statements and wanted him out of the running. The ticket ended up being composed of the washed-up liberal Walter Mondale and the first female on a national ticket, Geraldine Ferraro.

This convention also saw the first use of “free speech zones” created for public protest. That’s where the Dead Kennedys came in. On the third or fourth day of the convention, a number of anti-authoritarian groups staged a series of sit-ins and street blockades to protest the complicity between banks, the war industry, the Democratic Party, and the ongoing low-intensity conflicts taking place in Central America, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world.

The San Francisco police and other law enforcement agencies, who had been hoping for some action all week long, let loose and busted a few hundred people. While the cops finished up their operation, the Dead Kennedys played a set in the free speech zone. Someone notified them about the arrests and they rallied the crowd to march to the city jail after the show.

Before that, however, a small number of Nazi skinheads jumped on the stage and tried to attack the band. Without missing a beat, Jello Biafra and the band jumped into their song “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” Soon, the members of the mosh pit were onstage and dealing with the Nazi skinheads, who left rather quickly.

Dead Kennedys. Image from last.fm.
The best punk was political punk. Whether the lyrics themselves were political or the musicians involved made clear their political positions via statements they made or by rallies they played at. Some musicians actually formed organizations to promote certain agendas. Perhaps the best known of these was Rock Against Racism (RAR).

Originating in Britain as a reaction to the growth in racist Oi bands and other such elements in the punk scene, and various racist attacks and statements by some public figures attacking immigrants, this movement eventually came to the United States, which has its own well-documented problems with racism. In the U.S., RAR teamed up with the Yippies in some parts of the country (mostly urban) to put on shows and organize rallies. Mark Huddle describes it like this in the March 10, 2009, issue of Verbicide:

In the U.S., Rock Against Racism was always a decidedly local affair -- a true grassroots “movement.” There were dozens of benefits across the country but no national organization. Anyone who hated the violence and mindless hatred evinced by too many young kids floating around the margins of punk could organize a show; shows which almost always became sites for political networking and community building. From Anti-Racist Action in Minneapolis to the Ska Against Racism tours in the ‘90s, the punk scene became a laboratory for those who understood that every once in a while you have to police your space.

By this time, the Yippies had moved far away from their hippie roots (although a number of them still liked to smoke weed and eat acid) and were well into showcasing politically charged punk bands and working with punk street kids. The first indication of this shift could be seen in the Smoke-Ins on July 4th in DC in the late 1970s and in the comparable Pot Parades in Manhattan.

Their newspaper, Yipster Times (later Overthrow), featured a manifesto for freedom and free speech written by Patti Smith and titled “you can’t say fuck in radio free America.” This was published after a New York FM radio station refused to air a concert of hers precisely because she wanted to say “fuck.”

Rock music historians and critics generally agree that punk was a reaction to the gaudiness of 1970s stadium rock and the creation of rock royalty like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. In San Francisco, it was also understood to be a reaction to the longhair drug culture represented by the Grateful Dead. This didn’t mean that punkers didn’t do drugs, but that their consumption was not a requirement.

Other musical reasons for punk would most certainly be the 1970s popularity of bands like Journey, Kansas, and Foreigner that played a particular inconsequential type of rock that strayed into schlock all too often. Then there was disco; an extension of the music known as funk (which had its own roots and street credibility), disco quickly became the equivalent to the 1960s music known as bubblegum.

In other words, it was easy to ignore but still catchy with about as much substance as the inside of a ping pong ball. From its roots in the urban black ghetto, disco became the symbol of the rich cocaine-fueled subculture symbolized best by Manhattan’s Studio 54. The BeeGees were the masters of this beat in its worst incarnations. Vapidity defined.

I like to see punk as a phenomenon as old as rock and roll and kind of like street basketball. Instead of the extravagant overpriced stages of the Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd, punks brought their instruments to whatever dive they could get into. There were no soaring scales up and down the fretboard like Jimmy Page and no special orders for green M&Ms in the dressing room.

Like the garage bands of yore, punk rockers were without frills. Even the music was stripped down; sometimes it wasn’t even music except in a John Cage sort of way. Just like low-income street kids could afford to shoot hoops even though they had no cash, so could street kids start up a punk band. Plus, it kept them out of trouble.

I was never a punk rocker. My subcultural roots went back to the days when hippies became yippies and freaks. In other words, I was too political and angry to be a hippie, but liked their styles and their music. Yet, as soon as I heard the first few bars of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK,” I knew the times were a changin’.

My eardrums were battered by many a punk band in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I had lots of fun and rarely stood still at those shows. Punkers were some of the most energetic organizers I knew when we fought against gentrification and racism in the Bay Area. They were also, along with various older street people, the fiercest fighters against the police when the shit did hit the fan. Plus, punk beat the hell out of the fucking Bee Gees.

A version of this article appeared in Red Wedge Magazine.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael Simmons : I Was a Texas Jewboy!

Left to right: Larry Campbell, Michael Simmons, Jim Rider, and Kinky Friedman at the Lone Star Roadhouse, New York City, 1989. Photo by Cleveland Storrs.
Move over, Kinky:
I was a Texas Jewboy!

The Kinkster blew my still-growing mind and helped make me the disrespectful malcontent I am today.

By Michael Simmons / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2012

My first live sighting of Richard “Kinky” “Big Dick” Friedman was at Max’s Kansas City in New York in 1973. He was headlining Upstairs at Max’s with his band the Texas Jewboys and I was an 18-year old hometown Jewish country singer who revered both Hank Williams and Lenny Bruce. The Kinkster blew my still-growing mind and helped make me the disrespectful malcontent I am today.

Kinky practiced the freest of free speech, the kind guaranteed in the Constitution but relatively unused, particularly here in the 21st Century. He’s always insisted on telling the truth no matter how many people he pisses off.

Kinky’s songs satirized racism (“We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To You”), serial-killing Boy Scout/Marines (“The Ballad Of Charles Whitman”), rednecks (“Asshole From El Paso”), religion (“They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore”), and male chauvinism (“Get Your Biscuits In The Ovens And Your Buns In The Bed”). That proto-politically correct feminists failed to see the wit in the latter wasn’t Kinky’s fault and there were some ugly incidents including the storming of the stage in Buffalo, New York, where band and leader fled for their lives.

But Kink could also do poignant like nobody’s bidness in “Sold American,” ostensibly about a washed-up country star, but really about greed-American style, and “Ride ‘Em Jewboy,” a heartbreaking meditation on the Holocaust from his viewpoint as a Hebe from Kerrville, Texas. There’s a damn good reason the Kinkster is one of Bob Dylan’s favorite songwriters.

His tagline onstage was “Thank you for being an American!” Damn, he made this little hippie patriotic! I knew that night at Max’s that one of my goals in life was to be a Texas Jewboy. Me and my band Slewfoot were soon a popular act on the Northeastern country circuit, a crew of Yankee headnecks adept at Western Swing with a cannabinoided baditude.

In 1977 Slewfoot open-nighted a new honky-tonk on Fifth Avenue called the Lone Star Café where Kinky began regularly gigging, eventually settling in NYC. We were introduced and broke bread with a spoonful of irving. (Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” ...you do the math.) The Texas Jewboy invited me to sit in and I simply never left the stage. It wasn’t a stretch -- I knew all the songs!

The original Texas Jewboys had recently scattered and Kinky’s new band included, among others, Sweet Mary Hattersley on fiddle, Corky Laing (from Mountain) alternating with Howie Wyeth (Rolling Thunder Revue) on drums, Sredni Vollmer on harp, and a killer lead/pedal steel guitarist named Larry Campbell. Larry was bandleader, would later tour over six years with Dylan and became the late Levon Helm’s ringleader.

I played rhythm and, with mandolinist Jim Rider, sidekicked with the Kinkster, singing harmonies and staging semi-elaborate dance routines. Although technically we weren’t the original Jewboys -- names like the Entire Polish Army and the Exxon Bros. came and went -- people still referred to us as such, satisfying at least one of my life’s goals. (I’ve yet to do the hucklebuck with Catherine Deneuve.)

Kinky was (and remains) a celebrity magnet. He’s got an authentic and peculiar genius that can’t be duplicated and the talented and famous like to get close. In the Lone Star days, a partial list included my heroes Mike Bloomfield and Abbie Hoffman, as well as John Belushi, Hunter Thompson, Keith Richards, The Band, Dr. John, Robin Williams, of course Dylan, and a lot of others who are dead or ought to be.

There were fringe bohemians like JFK impersonator Vaughn Meader, who’d lost his job on November 22, 1963. I also met my best friend, author Larry “Ratso” Sloman, in that menagerie. And there were many women, so many that Kinky and I had a running joke that involved him inadvertently acting as my pimp.

We did some strange gigs, including a bar mitzvah in New Jersey that was more like a coronation. And in 1985, Kinky, Ratso, and I flew to Toronto for a three-night engagement, the surreal highlight of which was meeting Grand Ole Opry star Little Jimmy Dickens in full-dress Nudie Suit at Pearson International Airport.

But by the mid-‘80s, Kinky was burning out on rock ‘n’ roll and irving, not necessarily in that order. “I need a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence,” he told me. He loved Agatha Christie and began scribing mystery novels with himself as the Sherlock, Ratso as the Watson, and our friends as other characters, real names and all.

I’m a hard-drinkin’, Hank-singin’ murder suspect in A Case Of Lone Star and am described as engaging in all kinds of debasement. (It may have been what did my late mother in when she read it.) The books became best-sellers and Kinky became hugely famous in your household definition and Bill Clinton’s favorite author. Some were appalled when he likewise palled around with George W. Bush, but Kinky’s World is a big one, as anyone who followed his noble -- albeit failed -- 2006 run for Governor of Texas knows.

No matter how many books he autographs, the Kinkster has always identified with outsiders – particularly musicians. You can take the Texas Jewboy out of music, but you cannot take the melody out of Kinky. He and guitar are currently out on his Bi-Polar Tour -- 28 shows in 27 days. “It’s a much higher calling being a musician than being a politician,” he says.

It’s been (almost) 40 years since that night at Max’s Kansas City and there are few public figures who’ve consistently entertained me and even fewer friends who are as loyal as Kinky Friedman. Thank you, Kinky, for being an American.

Kinky Friedman performs two shows at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California, Friday, December 7 at 8 and 10 p.m. Brian Molnar -- and maybe even Michael Simmons -- will open up.

A version of this article appeared in the July 29, 2010, issue of the LA Weekly.

[As leader of the band Slewfoot, Michael Simmons was dubbed "The Father Of Country Punk" by Creem magazine in the 1970s. He was an editor at the National Lampoon in the '80s where he wrote the popular column "Drinking Tips And Other War Stories." He won a Los Angeles Press Club Award in the '90s for investigative journalism and has written for MOJO, LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, High Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, CounterPunch, and The Progressive. Currently wrapping a solo album, Michael can be reached at guydebord@sbcglobal.net.]

• Also see Thorne Dreyer's Oct. 25, 2012, Rag Blog article about Kinky Friedman based on his Oct. 19, 2012, Rag Radio interview with the Kinkster.

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Papa Had a Brand New Bag

Papa had a brand new bag:
James Brown was 'The One'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 3, 2012

[The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, by RJ Smith (2012: Gotham); Hardcover; 464 pp.; $27.50l.]

When I was in junior high back in 1967-68, many of my Saturday afternoons were spent at the outdoor basketball courts across the highway from my house. These courts were where I learned about many things besides basketball, which I was never very good at.

Sex, beer, and music were the three favorite subjects of conversation. By music, I mean everything from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin, Joe Tex to James Brown.

The blacktop courts were midway between the lily-white suburban development I lived in and the so-called “colored” section of town. That asphalt served as a neutral zone for anyone who wanted to play ball.

Like I said before, I was never very good at basketball (or any other sport for that matter) but was appreciated for my smart ass banter and musical knowledge. These were the days before iPods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio.

In the Baltimore-Washington, D.C.area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening too. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than 10 kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise).

Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn't dance like Mr. Brown. That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the King of Soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it.

When he released his single "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)", Brown was making it clear: he didn't really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money, and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA.

A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, S.C. beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and 20 whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping-off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown's insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business.

Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with this bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully duplicated.

It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond.

His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000-seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much -- I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling him and other black males in as negative of a light as possible.

I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me. Part of that is saying "Hi" to my neighbors even if they won't say"Hi" to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me.

James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise -- all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust, and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s best-known people -- his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told in as captivating a manner as Brown lived it. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story, but with a twist: it's Alger's "Ragged Dick" as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence -- its franticness, its passion, and its sheer jubilation -- into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever.

In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Bill Kirchen is a 'Titan of the Telecaster'

Bill Kirchen performs at the KOOP Surfin' 17-A-Go-Go benefit at Antone's in Austin, Feb. 4, 2012. Photo courtesy Ted and Linda Branson / KOOP / The Rag Blog.
Rag Radio:
Commander Cody's Bill Kirchen
is a 'Titan of the Telecaster'

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / February 23, 2012

Bill Kirchen is "a devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky..." -- Nick Lowe

Grammy nominated guitarist, singer, and songwriter Bill Kirchen was named a “Titan of the Telecaster” by Guitar Player Magazine and The Washington Post's Mike Joyce said, "The folks who make Fender Telecasters ought to stop what they're doing and cut Bill Kirchen a fat check."

Bill Kirchen was the guitarist with the legendary Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen from 1967 to the mid 1970s. The band "mixed country music, rockabilly, and blues, on a foundation of boogie-woogie piano," and Kirchen's signature licks drove the group's classic single, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” into the Top Ten.

Kirchen, who is now based in Austin and tours internationally, headlined a rousing benefit for community radio station KOOP at Antone's nightclub in Austin on Saturday, February 4, 2012, playing to a packed and enthusiastic crowd. Bill Kirchen was also Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, February 17. He discussed his historic and colorful career and sang four songs, backing himself on the acoustic guitar. Listen to it all here:

Commander Cody Guitarist Bill Kirchen
on Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer, Friday, Feb 17, 2012

Bill Kirchen's career has spanned more than 40 years during which time he has worked with an all-star cast, including Nick Lowe, Emmylou Harris, Doug Sahm, and Elvis Costello. His work has fused rock 'n' roll and country music, drawing on blues and bluegrass, Western swing from Texas, and California honky-tonk.

He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Commander Cody was formed in 1967, spent time on the West Coast, lived in Washington, D.C. for 20 years, and now lives and performs in, and tours out of Austin.

Kirchen started playing the banjo "during the great folk scare of the Sixties," but soon turned to the acoustic guitar, "fingerpicking to Mississippi John Hurt." "I wanted to play acoustic blues," he told the Rag Radio audience, "but got seduced by the electric guitar." He obtained his first Telecaster in an impulsive trade with a co-worker when he was working as a motorcycle messenger -- and he played that same guitar for 40 years, "until I wore it down to the nub."

He liked the Telecaster "because it's real simple. It's a slab on a stick, with two pickups, two knobs, one switch. It couldn't be simpler." But it was one of the original electric guitar styles and was used by several of Kirchen's favorite players at the time. "I wrote a love song to the Telecaster when I was here in Austin a couple of years ago," he said. "It was called 'The Hammer of the Honky Tonk Gods.'"

Kirchen went to high school in Ann Arbor with Bob Seger and Iggy Pop. He didn't know Seger but says that "Jim Osterberg became Iggy Pop right before my very eyes." When Iggy was playing with a blues band called the Prime Movers, he was known for singing the blues song, "I'm a Man" ("That's spelled M-A-N"). But suddenly Pop instead started singing, "I'm a Tricycle" ("That's spelled T-R-I..."). That's when, according to Kirchen, "We knew something was afoot."

"John Sinclair got me my first gig with my first band," Kirchen said. Sinclair, a "mover and shaker" in the Detroit and Ann Arbor music scenes, was the leader of the White Panther Party and manager of the revolutionary rockers, the MC5.

Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen was founded in 1967 in Ann Arbor and the band, which was a pioneer in the country rock genre, went on to become one of the iconic bands of the era.

In the beginning, “it was an art school kind of a wacky, admittedly stoned, local Ann Arbor thing. Initially it had a floating cast,” he said. They assigned George Frayne the role of “Commander Cody,” a name that was inspired by a 1950’s film serial. “He had a lot of charisma,” Kirchner says. “He was a big lantern-jawed, barrel-chested, Nick Fury-type of guy. And he played great boogie-woogie piano.”

(George Frayne later became an art professor and a widely-exhibited painter, and another original member of Commander Cody, John Tichy, earned a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering and became a respected scholar.)

Kirchen says that Commander Cody “turned on a whole generation of people to country music, to hard core blood and guts country music and Western swing that they did not have access to.” They were joined in the country rock/Western swing genre by bands like the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Austin's Asleep at the Wheel, with whom they frequently worked.

Bill Kirchen says he was attracted to country music because "it had adult themes and, to me, a deeper emotional content. But don’t get me wrong," he adds. "I’m a big fan of mindless, slack-jawed, ham-fisted rock and roll. It’s a beautiful thing. Seriously, I love it."

Kirchen is often referred to as a “rockabilly” guitarist. “We certainly did play a bunch of rockabilly,” he says “and I certainly was informed by that, and I know a few rockabilly licks... But I always thought that [term] was a little bit limiting... Especially when rockabilly became in America a kind of... dress-up gig.”

But he definitely is the “self-crowned, self-annointed 'King of Dieselbilly.'" "I can play anything I want," he told us, "because I invented the genre.”

When he was touring as noted British musician Nick Lowe’s guitar player, “he’d have me do one song a night, and I’d do 'Tombstone Every Mile,' a truck-driving song. And he’d introduce me with this fantastic, aristocratic British accent: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now Bill Kirchen, the King of Dieselbilly.' And it just stuck with me. I am the King of Dieselbilly.”

Lowe, incidentally, has called Bill Kirchen "a devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth."

Kirchen played at least twice a year at Austin’s vintage Armadillo World Headquarters with Commander Cody. Calling the Armadillo one of the great music venues, Kirchen said, "That was a cool scene, man. If you couldn't have fun at the Armadillo, go home!"

They played the Armadillo with Greezy Wheels and Maria Muldaur, and Waylon Jennings opened for them "right before he blew up and became huge." They recorded a live album at the Armadillo, and were featured at the famed club’s legendary final show, the “Last Dance at the Dillo.”

Kirchen loves living and working in Austin. “It’s a very open environment. In many ways, not just music. It’s a very creative town. It’s a little oasis in the middle of Texas.” And it is packed with musicians: “You kick a can and three musicians, three guitar players, will rush out from under the can, clutching their Grammies and their Stratocasters.”

Living in Austin gives Kirchen a unique opportunity to work with musicians he respects. “I got to go and sit in a bunch with the great Alvin Crow who I knew back from his Pleasant Valley days, back when I played here with Cody.”

And “the Flatlanders live here: Jimmie Dale [Gilmore] and Butch [Hancock]... I used to get to play with them out in California. That’s a fantastic group of original Texans, what a bunch of characters.”

And he just did a gig with blues pianist Marcia Ball -- "who is a treasure" -- at the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar.

He has been touring regularly -- and all over the place. “We played Palestine, which was so cool... and we played up in Lapland, north of the Arctic circle. As you can imagine, less happens in Lapland than in Palestine.”

Kirchen’s latest CD, Word To The Wise on Proper American, features duets with many of the artists he's worked with over the years, including Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Maria Muldaur, and Dan Hicks.

Bill Kirchen closed the Rag Radio show with a song he wrote when he was living in nearby Buda, Texas, before moving to Austin. “I wrote this song when I was walking my dog,” he said. “And you know how dogs are, they’re just happy to be alive. So I wrote a 'good to be alive,' song, encouraged by his enthusiasm.”

In the song, Kirchen affirms that,

I’m gonna live each day like there’s no tomorrow
Crank up the love, turn down the sorrow
Get my ducks in a row... one more day...

But if living truly is a terminal disease
All I’m askin’ for is a brief reprise
And I can rattle and roll... one more day...

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Bill Kirchen in the studios of KOOP in Austin, Friday, Feb. 17, 2012. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio, which has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history.

Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and streamed live on the web. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.


Coming up on Rag Radio:

Feb. 24, 2012: Activism in Austin: Representatives of Occupy Austin, Million Musicians March for Peace & a new Austin workers' cooperative.
March 2, 2012: Music writer Margaret Moser and screen actor Sonny Carl Davis on the movie, Roadie, the Austin Music Awards, and SXSW.

March 9, 2012: Singer-songwriter & author Bobby Bridger on the lasting impact of Native-American culture on American society.

[Our show with journalist & labor activist David Bacon, originally scheduled for Feb. 4, 2012, has been rescheduled for March 16, 2012.]

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MUSIC / Jan Reid : The 'Old Mad Joy' of the Gourds

Image of The Gourds from thegourds.com.
Old Mad Joy:
No Last Waltz for the Gourds

'Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age,' Russell told me with a laugh. 'We've done everything kind of backward.'

By Jan Reid / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2011

In the 40-odd years since Austin became more than a backwater of American music, none of its talents have been more rousing and enduring than the band called the Gourds.

The Gourds came out this fall with a highly praised and historically resonant Vanguard release, Old Mad Joy. They have four fine singers and songwriters and an astonishing facility with an array of instruments that include acoustic and bass and electric guitar, mandolin, accordion, violin, piano and organ, and drums. They blend strains and echoes of gospel, rock, blues, country, bluegrass, Cajun, even barbershop harmony -- sometimes all of that blended in one song.

I first encountered them about 10 years ago, and I thought, good lord, it was like seeing and hearing The Band. That first exposure led me to an album called Shinebox, which was recorded in the Netherlands, and that started with a pitch- and humor-perfect country-western take on Snoop Doggy Dogg's hip-hop classic, "Gin and Juice." The band's leader -- to the extent they have one -- is a large good-natured man named Kevin Russell. The cover was an Internet sensation, and reached the notice of Mr. Dogg, as the late Molly Ivins tagged him. An associate on his radio program reached Russell and asked the Gourds to roll on over and rap.

Russell hesitated and said they would have to make some travel arrangements. “The guy said, ‘You’re where?’ Like everybody in the world lives in Los Angeles. I guess if you live out there it seems like they do.” Shinebox also contained eclectic covers of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," Townes Van Zandt's "Two Girls," and Billy Joe Shaver's "Omaha." But now the Gourds seldom play any covers, because their own writing is so prolific and so good.

Jimmy Smith, the Gourds’ bass player and another star singer, has curly black hair and sideburns that are going a little gray now. In style and voice Smith reminded me of the late singer and piano player Richard Manuel, of The Band. David Langford, a rancher and nature photographer whose son Keith is the Gourds’ drummer, told me that I had it wrong. “Listen to him again,” he said. “He is Rick Danko” -- the late singer and bass player of The Band, which in the sixties and seventies, especially with the parting Martin Scorcese movie The Last Waltz, far transcended its origins as Bob Dylan’s backup group.

Smith nodded politely as I mentioned the similarities and perceived influences. “We’d never heard of them until people like you started telling us that we sound like them,” he said with a smile, perhaps putting me on. It was a gentle way of saying I was old enough to be his father.

Russell asked me one time, “You want to know why we became an acoustic band?” He laughed and said, “We didn’t want to haul around amps.

“Why the Gourds?” I asked about the name.

“When we came to Austin we were the Picket Line Coyotes,” he replied. “There was some history associated with that, and we just decided it was time to change. Jimmy wanted us to be the Sun-Dried Diegos. I guess he wanted us to play happy hours at Central Market.

He had this little house we called the Steamy Bowl. A shack, really, but he lived there 10 years. Off the road, 200 bucks a month, nobody we could bother much. It was the classic band house. We played, we crashed, we slept on the floor. And he had this little sculpture in the front yard. Broken guitar, various junk. Between its legs was a butternut squash.” Russell shrugged.

“That seemed to be us. The Gourds.”

Russell’s dad worked for an oil company. They lived first in Beaumont, where an uncle used to play Willis Alan Ramsey’s legendary only record and long for the old days at Armadillo World Headquarters, and then his dad’s work moved them to suburban Houston, and then Shreveport.

“I was into Southern rock,” Russell said. “Anything Southern. Lynnyrd Skynnyrd was my favorite.” Then punk bands from Minneapolis and the West Coast caught his ear, and punk was somewhat the tenor of the Picket Line Coyotes. “We sort of got run out of Shreveport,” Russell said. “We were just playing music, and drawing crowds, but fraternity guys were getting drunk and tearing up joints. The owners blamed us. We were blackballed.”

The evolving band moved to Dallas, and then Austin. Smith was from the Dallas suburb Plano. Max Johnston, the third lead singer, had come down from Kentucky and played banjo and acoustic guitar and the violin, which he plays like a violin, not a fiddle. He has a fine song on the new album called TK.

Red-bearded Claude Bernard joined the band blowing on a hooter and bought his first accordion for 35 bucks at a flea market; he’s also the keyboard player. The original drummer was the immigrant Welshman Charlie Llewellin, now Texas Monthly’s new media director and the band’s favorite photographer. Keith Langford, the drummer they settled on, is Russell’s brother-in-law. He’d been playing heavy metal in San Antonio.

Russell had a day job in Austin’s popular independent Book People. He thought an appearance by the band might lighten up employees who wanted to air their grievances at work. The Gourds were initially an in-crowd discovery of people who frequented the bookstore. “Lots of women dancing together,” said Bernard. “Wild dancers. They whipped up the crowd in a way we couldn’t possibly manage.”

They played for crowds of 20 at the Chicago House, then moved up to the Hole in the Wall, across the street from the University of Texas campus and KLRU studios but still far removed from Austin City Limits. “Alt-country” was a rubric of the nineties that began as a fanzine of Uncle Tupelo. The Gourds were uncomfortable about being branded alternative anything and lumped into a yuppie stampede to bib overalls and old swimming holes, but they were Austin’s foremost beneficiary of alt-country.

The Gourds in Austin, Texas, February 12, 2007. Photo by Steve Hopson / Wikimedia Commons.
The North Carolina independent Sugar Hill picked up the Gourds, but they paid their bills from their income on the road. The South by Southwest festival swirled around the Gourds in Austin, but Russell told me that if I’d come to Jovita’s I wouldn’t encounter anybody with plastic cards hanging around their necks. Smoke billowed back then, beers were handed back from a long line at the bar, and now and then a waitress would maneuver through the mass of bodies, holding a tray of enchiladas aloft.

The players were handing back and forth instruments that seemed to never need tuning, though the venue had problems; a clogged air conditioning duct poured a stream of water at their feet. “I think it’s gone beyond towels,” said Russell, blinking and thrown off stride. Smith walked over, spread his arms, and raised his face to the shower. The album they were pushing then was Cow Fish Fowl or Pig.

The title of the record was drawn from Smith's fanciful song about a vendor calling on William S. Burroughs, Henry Ford, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Muhammad Ali. Performing it, Langford was bearing down on his harmonica, Bernard hugging and swaying with his accordion, a chorus of voices singing genial nonsense, bop bop, bah dooh dah, bop bop. “My name is Jorge and I twist and I juke/ I roll into town on a wagon of fruit.”

The Gourds crowd presented a stunning array of young women. A blond whose face would fill up a movie screen looked at her boyfriend, raised her elbow with a grin of delight, and I watched them go swirling and stomping their heels in the ageless bacchanal.

The Gourds have come a long way since then. The banjo and harmonica have mostly receded from the mix, and they're plugged in now -- more often than his mandolin, Russell plays lead electric guitar in a style that echoes Lynnyrd Skynnyrd, the Allman Brothers, and other Southern rock bands that influenced him as a kid. "Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age," Russell told me with a laugh. "We've done everything kind of backward."

One of the most impressive things about the Gourds is their longevity. They have persevered for 16 years, getting better all the time, and they’ve done it in a once laid-back city where the cost of living has skyrocketed. Smith’s Steam Bowl shack and the $200 rent is a fading memory. They have mortgages now, and Smith told me, "Between us we have five daughters and seven sons.”

They rehearse now in an un-airconditioned former nursing home in South Austin; the room they utilize, once the kitchen, has no windows, much musicians' equipment, and a homey pleasant clutter -- one wall sports a bumper sticker that reads, "My honors student has a career in the service industry." They get started by 11 a.m. and work no later than 1:30, and then they scatter to pick up their kids after school.

They’ve got devoted followings all over the country now, and they've escaped the European touring routine that sustains but also traps so many Texas bands. They've got no roadies -- for roadies expect a living wage and tend to be temperamental wannabe musicians. The Gourds don't have the star routine down in which all the instruments are in tune, the sound system is thoroughly checked, and they walk out and hit the chords of the first big hit. Their music is too intricate for that, and they dress like what they are -- onetime hippies who are in their forties now.

Gourds image from Facebook
They've been at this together since 1995 because they love and respect what they have going. And now they're no longer scuffling. After years of deserving it, the Gourds have hit the big time.

David Langford, the drummer's father, told me, "Keith grew up listening to our records of The Band, and that's how he plays the drums." Jimmy Smith flaps his elbows like The Band’s Rick Danko when he performs, but he's a better bass player. Danko played bass with a pick, as does Paul McCarthy.

Smith has the thick muscular hands of a blues guitarist, fingers up on the frets, working the thick strings with a callused thumb below, and with Keith Langford's drumming that's one of the reasons their sound is so tight. Smith's voice is an untethered tenor, and he does sound a lot like Danko. The legacy of The Band and the Gourds’ inheritance is now inescapable.

Through the efforts of their manager Joe Priesnitz, who once represented Stevie Ray Vaughn, they signed a Vanguard contract overseen by executive Bill Bentley, an Austin expat who saw Willie Nelson first captivate an Austin crowd of hippies and anti-war militants assembled for the campaign of George McGovern in 1972, and for a while worked as a publicist for the multicultural rocker Doug Sahm.

Bentley engaged as the Gourds’ producer Larry Campbell, a gifted studio musician who has recorded with Willie, Sheryl Crow, Little Feat, K.D. Lang, Cyndi Lauper, and Levon Helm; he was a member of Bob Dylan's road band from 1997 to 2004. Early last spring, when there was still snow and ice on the ground in upstate New York, the Gourds arrived for a dose of Campbell's breathless style in Helm's storied Barn Studio in Woodstock.

"It really is a barn, but a real nice barn," Russell told me. "Levon lives in an upper story of it." Did the legendary drummer and singer of The Band take part in the sessions? "No, he wandered through every so often in his house shoes. He was very friendly, and wanted to take particular care of Keith. 'Do you need anything? Some water, a soda pop?' Seems to be some kind of voodoo with drummers.'"

Of course that's reasonable. In the late summer rehearsal I observed in Austin, Langford was the one who came out of that fire in the kitchen soaked in sweat.

As in past records, the smooth baritone Max Johnston contributes one of the best cuts on Old Mad Joy, the melodic rocker “Haunted.” But Jimmy Smith and Russell again claim most of the lead singing and writing credits. Smith slurs his lines more than Russell, and as a result his singing is not as accessible as his longtime partner's. And that’s a shame; in wordplay and jitterbug of thought that’s as offbeat as Kerouac, his writing is remarkable.

His great song on this record is “Marginalized.” It’s a paean to a painful subject in our culture, fully in view amid Austin’s stream of BMW convertibles and Escalade SUVs. The hero of this song is the one standing out in the heat beside a stoplight with a message of his life’s misfortune scrawled on a cardboard sign, counting his fortune by the bills and coins dropped in a tin can, pushing all he owns in a cart heisted from a grocery store.

But elevated by Russell’s mandolin and the backup harmonies, the sorrowful song manages to soar. “Well, I’m taking it home on my tectonic plate/ crashed in a pyramid and claimed squatters’ rights/ shared a coop with a fellow wouldn’t shut up about a girl named Isis/ had to blend with the tourists when they came in the a.m…”

Earlier this year, Russell released an album called Shinyribs that was an instant favorite in Austin, singing only his songs and bringing just Keith Langford from the Gourds in a studio band that included one of the cosmic cowboy survivors, Ray Wylie Hubbard (the writer of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”)

Russell said it didn’t mean he was splitting off from the Gourds. “With a band like this you have to make a lot of compromises. Everybody’s got material they’d like to get out there. I’ve got boxes full of songs that I’ve never done anything with. Shinyribs is a break that allows it to be just me, with a terrific other band besides.”

Russell’s rock and roll high point on Old Mad Joy concerns that dreaded gig of road musicians, a dive in nowhere with a vile crowd that brings out the complaint: “My heart is black but in my sack/ I got a sammich and half a pack/ of vitriol and self-abuse/ who can I call to accuse and abuse/ for bringing me to … Peppermint City!” He said there is no such place, but then they’ve played them by the dozens. He laughed when I told him I’d never before heard a rock song with the word “vitriol.”

He also offers “Two Sparrows,” a song about Jesus that he wrote years ago. “His innocence held such clarity, Gethsemane still on his breath/ barefoot and burdened unjustly but love never leaving his breast/ from this began my wandering, my punishment for the crime/ of standing still among an angry mob, all of them friends of mine.”

Vanguard is pushing a rocker called “I Want It So Bad” as the single, but the best of it is Russell’s “Eyes of a Child.” “It’s true I am wicked, it’s true I am mean/ I must have lost my way chasing a dream/ It’s true I’ve done things that I’m ashamed of/ But I still need tenderness and the warmth of love/ I’ve come clean and I’m redeemed/ since I have seen through the eyes of a child.”

All of this may not sound entirely joyous. But turn it up. It’s some of the best music since "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

A few refrains in this piece previously appeared in the 30th anniversary edition of Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.

[Jan Reid is an author and music historian and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and his writing has also appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times. His books include Texas Tornado: The Life and Times of Doug Sahm, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (considered the definitive tale of Austin music in the 1970's), the novel Comanche Sundown, and books about Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. His, memoir The Bullet Meant for Me, was the story of his mental, psychological, and emotional recovery from a brutal 1998 robbery and shooting in Mexico City -- and his sustaining friendship with the two-time world champion boxer Jesus Chavez. Reid is now writing a biography of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's October 12, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Jan Reid.

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MUSIC / John Wilson : Houston Folk Legend Don Sanders is 'Heavy Word User'

Singer-songwriter and storyteller:
Don Sanders is still a 'Heavy Word User'

By John Wilson / The Rag Blog / September 14, 2011

Houston folk legend and children's entertainer Don Sanders will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 16, from 2-3 p.m. (CST), on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live here. To listen to earlier shows on Rag Radio, go to the Internet Archive.

I have often wondered how the angel of fame selects the musicians upon whom it bestows its gifts. I have no doubt Justin Bieber is a nice enough young man with a pleasant voice and engaging personality but does he really warrant the rewards flowing his way? And going back in time, what about such stars as Fabian in the 50s and the Archies in the 60s? It seems the fame angel is slightly tone deaf or at least blessed with a delicious sense of irony.

Of the artists with whom I have a personal relationship, Don Sanders is a case in point. He has yet to receive the adulation he so richly deserves. Granted, he is a featured artist with the Texas Commission on the Arts and an honorary board member of the Kerrville Folk Festival, but his music, which compares favorably with any of the recognized folk greats, still exists primarily as the soundtrack to the aging Houston folk crowd.

From the moment I first saw him perform in Houston in the early 70s, I knew he was the real deal. Lots of people agreed with me. He was profiled in depth in numerous articles -- from the Houston Chronicle and Houston Post to Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone. (Rolling Stone referred to Don as Houston's "spritely local folkie.") He was universally loved and respected by musicians of every stripe in Houston.

One of my favorite articles is by a young Lyle Lovett, writing for the Battalion at Texas A&M in 1978. (In a 1998 interview Lovett would refer to Don Sanders as a "big influence.")

Over a five year period from 1970 to 1975, Don wrote and performed a suite of songs that pretty much provided the soundtrack for that tumultuous and intensely musical period of Houston’s history. During this time Don expressed his commitment to social change by performing at countless peace rallies and Montrose street festivals, and was also involved with Pacifica's KPFT-FM in its early days, appearing as "Donnie Jo DJ."

Don's repertoire included such classics as "Third Eye," in which President Nixon and a parrot seek enlightenment; "Coffee Song" ("just waiting for my coffee to boil"), with its bubbling sound-effect chorus; "Roaches" (who are on the pathway down because they live with hippies); and "Heavy Word User," where he describes himself as a “greasy, sleazy information abuser.” There was ample evidence that Don had, as he claimed in the same song, “a jar of talent and the lid's unscrewed.”

Yet universal acceptance stayed away.

It wasn’t for lack of effort on Don’s part. During that period, pretty much on his own nickel, he produced a series of recordings (two LPs and one extended play 45) that highlighted the eclectic nature of his work, the strength of his writing, and the beauty of his voice and guitar work.

He was, however, swimming against the tide. The major labels had a lock on the music industry, and while local radio stations were willing to play local artists, getting exposure outside Houston, much less Texas, was really hard. It is much easier today to produce an album on the cheap, but doing it in the 70s was quite an undertaking.

When I broached the subject recently over lunch with Don he gave me a wane smile and said, “Big record companies really wanted an artist with a burning desire to succeed and make money. I had two problems, first I liked to experiment with different voices and ways of constructing songs.” Then he paused. “And, secondly at the time I just wanted to get laid.”

I didn’t really see the second part as a great impediment to fame, except that it might keep you from focusing on business, but the first could definitely cause problems, especially when it was coupled with the prevailing attitude of the day which focused on the idea of trying to avoid selling out your artistic vision for the chance at a quick buck.

Don Sanders in front of the Sam Houston statue in Houston's Hermann Park. Photo from the Houston Chronicle archives.
“Back around ’78,” said Don, “I was offered the opportunity to go to Nashville and write for Marty Robbins music. It was a pretty standard gig, they would pay a monthly draw and you had to write and pitch two songs a month, but I didn’t really want to write love songs so I turned them down.”

Still, Don kept on plugging through the rest of the decade and into the next, releasing the CD Tourist in 1984, until he decided to do something different. “I just got tired of the format, touring colleges and the bar circuit,” he said, “doing a fast song, slow song, and telling a story.”

It lead, almost naturally, to work in theater -- first at Houston's Main Street Theater and then later with Chocolate Bayou Theater, doing a one-man show of his songs and stories focusing on the troubles in Latin America that grew out of the story “Grunty Mind and the American Love Story” that appeared on the entire side two of one of his LPs.

He had some success touring through Texas. But again, the angel of fame played favorites.

“I just didn’t know how to get it into the larger theaters,” said Don. This once again proves that it’s not what you know but who you know.

In 1992 Don signed a deal with a manager who dealt in children’s music, and it was there that Don found the niche that he occupies to this day, performing for school children. His universally praised shows include:

• Cuentos y Canciones: Latin American folk tales and songs in Spanish and English;
• Gusher Times: based on the oral history project conducted at the University of Texas (Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Collection, 1952-1958); and
  
• Sourdough Cowboy: based on the oral history of the WPA workers and songs collected by the Lomax family.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he says “performing for children. You have to learn to compete with the distractions and the different developmental levels of the children. You surf the wave and you either stay on top or you get buried.”

So, in the end maybe the angel of fame knew what it was doing. I have to think that bringing the gift of music and song to school children is a pretty cool thing to do and may be of more lasting value than any of the things most of us will accomplish in our lives.

Of course what goes around comes around, and it was after a recent appearance at Houston's Anderson Fair with Sally Spring that Don and I started talking about re-releasing his vinyl work as a CD. (Incidentally, Don appears in For the Sake of the Song, the acclaimed 2010 documentary about Anderson Fair, the venerable Houston acoustic venue.) We embarked on the project and with the help of Rock Romano at Rock Romano’s Red Shack studio the songs were coaxed off their aging tapes and vinyl to be tweaked and mixed into digital format.

The new CD, Heavy Word User, which came out during the Kerrville Folk Festival, is available at Amazon, Itunes, CDBaby, and YourTexasMusic and recently was accepted by Pandora into the Music Genome Project. It is nice to hear songs by Dylan, the Band, Neil Young, Hoyt Axton and Townes Van Zandt, followed by a Don Sanders tune.

So, if the angel is still looking it has one last shot to help Don get this music to the larger audience it so richly deserves. Of course, if it continues to look away then Don still has the children and his digital music is out there and in the mix, standing shoulder to shoulder with the greats. Nice legacy.

[Music producer John Wilson, who is president of YourTexasMusic, was a music critic for the Houston Chronicle and a contributor to Space City!, Houston's late 60s/early 70s underground newspaper. He now lives in Johnson City, Texas.]



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