My monthly bit of abject self-promotion: The next edition of "Grant Alden's Field Notes" airs Friday night, July 30, at 7 p.m. EST on
WMKY-FM. For various reasons involving lawyers (but not guns) and money, they can't podcast the show. Which is a pity, from my side of the...microphone.
Anyhow, this show (cut at the end of March, so it's all a dim memory and an iTunes file now) celebrates Patty Griffin's terrific
Downtown Church…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 29, 2010 at 5:06pm —
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Most of yesterday morning was spent staring at the arse end of a chicken -- actually, seven chickens; the last of two dozen ordered as the
barbeque special from Murry McMurray -- and contemplating the music of Gogol Bordello.
I did not then know a thing about Gogol Bordello, save that I'd heard the name, probably on NPR, intoned by one of their fine critics who know impossible things about a wide range of music…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 27, 2010 at 1:35pm —
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When I finish my coffee and our little girl wakes up so we can have breakfast together, I'll drive out to the farm and help my father-in-law harvest chickens. In the meantime, this morning's text comes from Merle Haggard, and is inspired by my trip down the baking isle of the local Kroger yesterday.
I wish Coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be.
It was back before Nixon lied to us all on TV.
Before Microwave ovens when a girl could still cook, and still would.
Is the best of t…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 20, 2010 at 3:51am —
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Let me clip publicist Martha Moore's official press release first, and then, below, I'll add a bit of my own.
Songwriting Legend Hank Cochran Passes Away
Last night, Jamey Johnson, Billy Ray Cyrus and Buddy Cannon dropped by to sing songs with Hank, and this morning the legendary songwriter was surrounded by family and friends when he passed away at his Hendersonville, Tennessee home. A private, family memorial will be held in the near future, and a public service will follow. Details will be…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 15, 2010 at 10:40am —
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It is, perhaps, unbecoming -- a sign of arrested development -- but even at 51 I remain an angry young man at heart. (Or else I was born a curmudgeon; or both.) Even with all the good things in my life, I remain proud of the banked fury within. This is my edge, it is my nature, it is the treasure from which I pay for each day's labors.
These times seem, now more than ever (yes, an echo of Richard Milhaus Nixon's re-election slogan), to call for carefully modulated rage.
We have 10 percent unem…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 6, 2010 at 9:50am —
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If memory doesn't over-serve, I ran onto Johnny Berry's music during production of the final print edition of
No Depression, too late to do much to...ahem...advance his career. That he lives across the state in Louisville is surprisingly irrelevant; I haven't been in Kentucky long enough to build such allegiances. But he is a kind man who remembers that I wrote something nice about his previous album online, and keeps inviting me to gigs that are too far away or at just the wrong time (us…
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Added by Grant Alden on July 5, 2010 at 11:55am —
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The twenty sides Ruby Johnson recorded for Stax/Volt in 1966-68 were finally released in something like album format in 1993, assembled under the title of the first track,
I'll Run Your Hurt Away. It appears to have been reissued subsequently -- somewhere -- with seven additional tracks performed by Pearl Reeves (about whom I know even less), only a single line of type updating the artwork.
I cannot speak for your downloading options, as I perform that magic only under the most extreme d…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 29, 2010 at 6:57pm —
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I wrote quickly an earlier version of this in the morning and posted it up on dailykos. Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I'll amend and publish here as well.
Paul Krugman's
editorial of the day argues that we in the U.S. are in the midst of our third depression.
To which my first cup of coffee response was: duh!
I mean not to make fun of a
much-decorated Nobel-prize-wining…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 28, 2010 at 12:58pm —
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This Friday (June 25), the next installment in the deftly named "Grant Alden's Field Notes" will air on WMKY-FM at 7 p.m. EST. The theme for this hour, recorded so many months ago that I can't even find the script so as to be sure what songs I played (so I'll fake it, from my iTunes folder), is the cowpunk ancestors of alt.country.
At the time I conceived these shows, I sort of imagined they'd run weekly. It hasn't worked out that way. I don't think WMKY has weekly time to air them, and I clear…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 24, 2010 at 10:42am —
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It has perhaps slipped through some of my typing here that we are building a new home. A green home, smaller than the sprawling ranch in which we now live, as energy efficient and self-sufficient as we can manage. Some months ago we settled on a round house which comes in kit form from a company in Asheville, North Carolina, called
DelTec. And though I added the link, I would caution curious readers that what we're building is not going t…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 23, 2010 at 12:33pm —
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In the shadows of memory I remain convinced that once I saw the Backsliders, of Raleigh, North Carolina, perform. This is probably not true, because generally I associate such things with specific venues and other oddments. In my memory, they were on the fateful bill with Whiskeytown at SXSW, that first year, must've been 1996. Only my contact sheet says Whiskeytown played with the Waco Brothers and the Bottle Rockets, and I can think of no other occasion on which I might have seen the Backslide…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 21, 2010 at 4:32pm —
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Twistable Turntable Man, a musical tribute to the songs of Shel Silverstein, was released by Sugar Hill last week, if my scratchy memory serves, and seems to have arrived without comment, best I can tell without thinking or looking too hard.
And so, bolstered by a fresh cup of iced coffee on an afternoon too hot for complete thought, here are some thoughts.
First, the iconic photograph of Shel Silverstein hisself -- bald and hirsute, sweaty -- has always seemed a better representation o…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 16, 2010 at 2:05pm —
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It's a bit like the old Prince Albert in the can thing, maybe, but this just came across the mojo wire and I had to share. In part because it includes yet another cover of "Ain't No Grave." One of these days I'm going to spend a day listening to every version I have and try to figure out what it all means.
Meanwhile, I'm transfixed by the rehabilitation of yet another tired icon of the 1960s whose voice may and may not (I've not heard) ever have been worth listening to.
Following, then, is the…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 15, 2010 at 2:15pm —
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of rock 'n' roll. If it has a future. Which is not to pile upon Chris Stapleton's new group any of the foolishness which Dave Marsh's breathless, glorious, joyous hyperbole racked up for Bruce Springsteen. This is not
Time magazine, and the Jompsons owe nothing to Springsteen.
(Indeed, it occurs to me just now, it is difficult to argue for Springsteen as a rocker. He's an electrified heir to Guthrie and Dylan, a songwriter with a very loud band -- Phil Ochs' revenge? -- but his lyrics ar…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 6, 2010 at 7:04am —
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To a chorus of Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes," reprising the notion of "Weeds" but not the weed of the series.
Once again, I seek to clean. My stacks of unlistened-to-CDs go back three years, to right about when the magazine shut down, and I began to shut down my career as a music critic. We are building a smaller, greener house, and it is incumbent upon me to winnow down the stacks. To make them disappear, one way or another. The problem I have with all these CDs I've never played is that I…
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Added by Grant Alden on June 1, 2010 at 1:00pm —
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Mysterious things have happened to my last two blogs. Which is to say that I hit "publish" and they vanished, except that the software here seems to remember their names. I am not competent to guess at such mysteries, but I am grateful that the source materials remain accessible. Depending on memory...not so good, eh?
Anyhow. I'd meant to post this the day
before the next segment of the deftly named "Grant Alden's Field Notes" aired on WMKY (and the first time I even put a link here, whi…
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Added by Grant Alden on May 31, 2010 at 11:27am —
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(Note: This appeared a few days back on dailykos, where it went the way of all my blogs there. I have amended it some. I tried to post it here a day or so back, and it seems to have gotten lost. My ineptitude knows no bounds.)
If memory serves, and it is an imperfect agent in these matters, I have purchased gas from an Exxon service station exactly twice since the Exxon Valdez began spewing oil all over Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989.
In both cases, I was at the end of a gas tank on sp…
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Added by Grant Alden on May 27, 2010 at 12:33pm —
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Without question Elizabeth Cook is one of the smartest musicians I've interviewed over the last 30 years.* Cook's fifth album,
Welder, came out last week, produced by Don Was. I do not wish to play the critic's game -- I wish no longer to be a critic, and type quickly here so as to pretend to have won my amateur status back -- but it is clearly her best work, and it's all good, even the country album
Hey Y'all that Atlantic reluctantly released in 2002, even the collection of demos…
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Added by Grant Alden on May 23, 2010 at 8:50am —
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This was, if memory serves, the national high school debate topic during the 1975-76 season: Resolved that the development and allocation of scarce world resources should be controlled by an international organization.
We have known what was coming.
Like my brother before me, I was a debate nerd. He was better at it than me, third in state two years running, and some kind of national title in college. I took home a few trophies and tried to make a living writing instead of talking.
We have kn…
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Added by Grant Alden on May 18, 2010 at 5:38pm —
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A digression, by way of scene and consciousness setting. Here in Eastern Kentucky we got our share of the sheer hell which descended upon my old home in Middle Tennessee. I mean not to complain -- a dear friend has posted photos of her home floating down the Harpeth River -- but the family bookstore/coffeeshop was two feet under water Sunday night two weeks ago.
We had seen the water coming, had taken precautions (moved books up a shelf or two, and such), and missed obvious things (next time ju…
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Added by Grant Alden on May 16, 2010 at 6:43pm —
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