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Friday, September 19, 2008
Erykah Badu cancels Austin City Limits TV shoot, replaced with Drive-By Truckers
Erykah Badu has canceled her “Austin City Limits” TV show taping scheduled for Sept. 26, but she is still playing the festival in Zilker Park, ACL booker Terry Lickona said Friday.
“She said the band is not quite ready to tape a show for national television,” Lickona said. “We don’t really know what the details are.”
The Drive-By Truckers will be taking her slot that day, though the exact time of the taping is up in the air, Lickona added. “They’ve been on my list for some time themselves.”
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Notes from AMA #4: Westies representin’
NASHVILLE. “Thanks for coming out,” musician Tim O’Brien said Friday afternoon at the Country Music Hall of Fame’s Ford Theater. “We would be doing this anyway, but it’s much better with an audience.
West Virginia was in the house at a tribute concert to 1920s fiddler Blind Alfred Reed. From the opening three-part harmonies of Westies O’Brien, Kathy Mattea and Todd Burge on “There’ll Be No Distinction There” until Connie Smith’s show-stopping “Please Don’t Let Her Die,” the 90-minute program was a marvel of musicianship. The mid-show addition of drummer Kenny Malone, bassist Wayne Moss, Russ Hicks on steel and McCoy on harmonica and piano made for a virtual reunion of Barefoot Jerry, the southern rock pioneers.
The show was put together to help promote the Blind Alfred Reed tribute album “Always Lift Him Up,” featuring many of the performers. Paw Paw, West Virginia native Ray Benson is also on the album, doing “Black & Blue Blues.”
- “What is Texas Music?” Texas State University professor Gary Hartman opened Friday’s “Lone Star Legacy: The Role of Texas In Shaping Americana Music” panel with that broad question, then opened things up with a thumbnail history of Texas music. The question was then answered musically by songwriters Radney Foster from Del Rio, Rosie Flores of San Antonio, Bruce Robison from Bandera and New Braunfels resident Cody Canada, who’s originally from Oklahoma.
“Childhood Memories” by Flores was especially poignant, while Robison brought the garage rock on solo acoustic with “It Came From San Antonio,” the tale of Doug Sahm’s quintet trying to pass as British.
There’s another big difference between panels at the Americana confab vs. SXSW: much more live music. And the Texas quartet represented well.
- Best t-shirt: “Keep Lubbock Flat” using the same font as the “Keep Austin Weird” tees.
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Tonight at Emo’s: David Berman and Silver Jews
(Silver Jews with James Jackson Toth play tonight at Emo’s. Charles Potts Magic Windmill Band play Emo’s outside. $12 advance, $14 at the door. Doors at 9 p.m., show at 10. 603 Red River St. 477-3667, emosaustin.com.) (Photo of David Berman of Silver Jews by Stefano Giovannini.)
David Berman had good reason to believe he was unrealized potential personified. “Until age 38,” the Silver Jews frontman says by way of e-mail, “I thought I was doomed as a writer because I slept in and took naps.”
That was three years ago, around the time Berman woke up from a serious substance-abuse problem and released “Tanglewood Numbers.” The album, his fifth in 11 years, was a career breakthrough and finally granted the veteran indie rocker props on par with Stephen Malkmus, an original Silver Jew who went on to form Pavement.
Berman’s redemption song continues to be fleshed out with the recent release of “Tanglewood” followup “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.” Like David Carr’s frank drug-recovery memoir “The Night of the Gun,” it excavates a dark past in order to build a bright future. And it does so by drawing from a host of influences. As part of the media materials, Berman, who is also a cartoonist, sketched an indecipherable chart comprising sources of inspiration that include presidential campaign songs, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” and the Pet Shop Boys.
“It was all part of an attempt of mine to encourage critics to make connections,” Berman writes, “to put such an amount of information about the composition and recording that unique responses would result. Silver Jews: encouraging exegesis since 1993.” And so here is one critic’s interpretation of some of the songs. “What Is Not But Could Be If” is the equivalent of another foot forward in the 12-step program, wherein Berman’s baritone constructs a bridge between failure and success, risk and reward. On the country-cool cut “Suffering Jukebox,” featuring Berman’s wife Cassie on “Laurel Canyon” backing vocals, a “sad machine” shouldering other peoples’ problems is a metaphor for Berman in his former state of misery. Meanwhile, “Candy Jail” says that once you’re an addict, you’re always an addict, as Berman trades in his gluttonous drug habit for an equally perilous addiction to jelly beans and cookie dough.
“There’s a lot of food on the album,” Berman writes. “Maybe some couple will have a dinner where only food from the lyrics are served.”
Berman will recite his quirky, wordy confessionals Friday at Emo’s. Prior to “Tanglewood,” touring had always been out of the question. But a string of 47 consecutive sold-out shows in support of that album showed Berman what he’d been missing. Still, life on the road in the age of sobriety is forever paved with temptation. Has the close proximity to a little taste of his bygone junkie days ever been too hard to handle? Has the nightmare of relapse ever been a concern?
“A kid in Pittsburgh whispered, ‘Got some H, looking for some C,’ into my ear, and I just laughed,” Berman writes.
Translation: apparently not.
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Notes from AMA #3: Genesis of ‘Jesus’
NASHVILLE. Hayes Carll is touring in England so he couldn’t be on hand for his mildly surprising win as Song of the Year at Thursday’s American Music Awards at the Ryman, but “She Left Me For Jesus” co-writer Brian Keane was there to “thank God” at the podium.
Cormer Austinite Keane, who moved to Nashville with girlfriend Rachel Loy about nine months ago, detailed the inspiration for “Jesus” after the show. He had been seeing Loy, who still plays bass for 54 Seconds, for a few months when she decided she wanted to live a more Christian life. “She left me for Jesus,” Keane said. “It was an easy song to write.” Keane wrote the chorus of the hilariously sacriligeous song, but couldn’t finish it, so he brought it to Carll. The two kicked around ideas one day and Carll wrote down all the good ones. “I said, ‘OK, now we gotta make it rhyme,’” Keane recalled, “but then I looked on the paper and Hayes had already done that, as he was writing the ideas down.” A true collaboration, in other words.
One of the musical highlights of the awards show was when Joe Ely, who’s like Bono in this crowd, joined rising star Ryan Bingham on “South Side of Heaven.” Bingham, who is not to be missed at ACL, is a former bullrider who’s been called “the Tom Waits of West Texas” for his raspy delivery and pinpoint lyricism. He’s the guy you’ve heard on KGSR and asked, “wow, who is that?”
It’s admirable to see just how much younger bluegrass players come out and support each other. Thursday night at the Station Inn, a legendary picker’s palace, the audience was full of players- including members of Austin’s Belleville Outfit (who’ve just signed to powerhouse Nashville agent Bobby Cudd) - to cheer on Crooked Still. The Boston band’s ingenue looks belied a wild streak, that especially came out on a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Blues.”
Nashville has its own Erik Hokkanen in Casey Driessen, an incredibly instinctive violinist whose jazz trio set at the Station Inn Thursday floored everyone, including Tommy “Ramone” Erdeyli, the last surviving original member of the punk pioneers. In recent years, Erdeyli has switched to bluegrass, playing mandolin, banjo and singing in Uncle Monk. Driessen is also a member of Abigail Washburn’s Sparrow Quartet.
Will ACL Fest offer personal port-o-johns next year, or was Charlie Walker of C3 joking? Bet on door number two, as Walker was just trying to inject some life into Thursday’s touring and festivals panel. “The demand for VIP ammenities is going up faster than anything else,” Walker said.
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