ND #7, January-February 1997
Rob Miller, the third partner of the Bloodshot Records triumvirate, just comes right out with it: “The Waco Brothers are fucking Limey socialists.” This summation of the band’s world view nicely illustrates a distinction between the character of Bloodshot’s country-punk stable and that of their counterparts in the alternative-country world.
As if to underscore Miller’s point, Jon Langford bellows good-naturedly from the stage of the Lounge Ax: “Yeah, we like your milk and honey! We’ll take your milk and honey and spit it right back at you!” Langford has just been holding forth on the subject of capital punishment: “In Europe, we all think you’re barbaric!” Capital punishment is the focus of this night’s fund-raising concert, one of many the Wacos perform over the course of a year to support a wide range of progressive causes. The band then rips into “25 Minutes To Go” in a manner to raise the dead.
— LINDA RAY
ND #8, March-April 1997
Songwriter Danny Barnes (banjo, primarily) will identify himself as a Christian, though his Jewish comrade Mark Rubin (bass and tuba), who punctuates the conversation with “amen” and no irony, is quick to point out that Danny also practices tai-chi and meditates.
Straight lines rarely happen in nature, and it’s the colliding arcs that are responsible for most of what’s worth looking at or listening to.
Anyway, that’s what good music does: It sweeps you off somewhere and drops you, unexpected, splat in the middle of an idea you didn’t know you had. And that’s what the Bad Livers — Danny and Mark and Ralph White (fiddle and accordion) — have been up to these last seven years, which amounts to 1,500-plus shows and four full-length releases.
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #9, May-June 1997
“John Anderson was the woodpile,” Brian Henneman says, struggling to get the Bottle Rockets’ history in order, “and Jason & the Scorchers was the gasoline and the match on the woodpile. I’ve always been lucky with MTV, seeing the one video that they might play once, and I saw them doing ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’. And then, just by fate, I was driving somewhere and I heard on the radio that Jason & the Scorchers were coming to Mississippi Nights, which is the big club here in St. Louis. So it cost $4 and they were great, just totally great.” Connect that to an early fondness for ZZ Top, Lynyrd Skynyrd and a binge of Kinks, and you get the picture.– GRANT ALDEN
ND #10, July-August 1997
Despite Whiskeytown’s clear grounding in no-bullshit rock ‘n’ roll and country, however, Strangers Almanac is perhaps most notable for its pop songs. “16 Days”, the fourth track in and likely the album’s first single, is a mostly midtempo number, opening with Cary’s sweet fiddle drifting over acoustic guitars and gradually building to a sure-fire sing-along chorus. “Everything I Do (Miss You)” shimmers with a pop-soul richness that recalls classic Motown and Muscle Shoals recordings. “Turn Around” is spooky, cloaked in sonic layers and recalling nothing so much as mid-late-’70s-era Fleetwood Mac (an influence Whiskeytown has readily acknowledged with their cover of the Mac smash “Dreams” at recent live shows). “Losering” is a masterful mood piece, nonlinear lyrics wrapped around an initially unassuming melody that slowly reveals itself like a sunlight-shy flower, a few more petals opening up each time it spins back around.
— PETER BLACKSTOCK
ND #11, September-October 1997
At a time when Music Row takes its cues from ’70s rock and pop acts such as the Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Dan Fogelberg, Fulks’ material shares more with the catalogs of Harlan Howard and Hank Thompson, writers who’ve penned songs for the ages. Fulks also draws inspiration from the people he calls “the day laborers of the ’50s and ’60s of Nashville songwriting like Bobby Braddock, Dallas Frazier, Roger Miller and Leon Payne….They’re the classic country songwriters you have to measure up to.”
“Of all the things said about how to write a country song, most of them are the same now as they were 40 years ago,” he continued. “You know, the platitudes like ‘Tell a story that people can relate to,’ ‘Make one line flow into the next line,’ ‘Keep the language simple,’ ‘Make the melody go up high on the chorus’ — all of those things are absolutely intact from 40 years ago.”
— BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
ND #12, November-December 1997
“Two or three years ago, Doc Watson invited me to Merlefest, and I asked if I could bring a bluegrass band,” Skaggs recalls….Though Skaggs had been wandering in the general direction of bluegrass for a while, the death of Bill Monroe last year kicked the process into a higher gear. “A lot of this I couldn’t have done while Bill Monroe was alive,” he says, “because I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to usurp his position.” In Monroe’s last months, however, after a stroke in the spring of 1996, Skaggs spent many hours with Monroe, and, he says, “I made a promise: I’m going to play bluegrass. I may do some country dates, but I’m going to do bluegrass from now on.”
— JON WEISBERGER
ND #13, January-February 1998
To the left, rising toward the high desert where wind and rock and patient Joshua trees remind of a peace and endurance that politics can never fashion, up that road, not far from where Gram Parsons’ ashes were once spread, is where Victoria Williams and Mark Olson live.
Damp-haired Victoria offers a short prayer before lunch, a reminder to their secular guest that religion need not be a caricature of itself. She speaks and laughs and sings in such a way that her surroundings are decorated with exquisite grace. Though she is 38 now, Victoria’s voice, her eyes, her smile, they all retain a gloriously childlike charm. She sings high and sometimes uncertain (“wobbly,” she’s called it) in a register that links her to occasional duet partner Julie Miller; mostly, though, it’s an exceptional mix of innocence and wisdom that radiates through her songs: peace.
— GRANT ALDEN
ND #14, March-April 1998
“The songs get mutated and abused by so many different bands and configurations that they’re never the same night to night. Which I like,” Alejandro Escovedo says. “It makes it interesting for us as a band, as musicians. I’ve always felt like I’ve given those guys a lot of freedom to express themselves — within the confines of the song, of course. I mean, the song comes first, but I’m not against stretching them out to give them some room to really say something.”
The most blatant example of such stretching out on More Miles Than Money is the first 35 seconds of “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, which opens as a virtual free-form noisefest of classical strings, clashical guitars and a crashing rhythm section before finally fading into form as Escovedo screeches out, “So messed up, I want you here…” over three gloriously crunching power chords delivered in thundering unison.
Still, perhaps the most memorable moment on the album is the other cover selection, “Sway”, which features lilting violin pushing and pulling against ringing, shimmering guitar leads as Escovedo recites, with a weary but poignant sense of resignation, words that clearly mean the world to him. Indeed, he admits, when it comes to choosing cover songs, “it’s all about lyrics for me. Like ‘Sway’ — just that chorus, ‘It’s just that demon life that’s got you in its sway’ — it says so much about my life, and the way that I know a lot of us feel, who fall in love with this thing called music.”
— PETER BLACKSTOCK
