By Don Jacobson

From The Australian: “I DON’T sound like nobody!” was Bo Diddley’s maxim in the 1950s but over the decades dozens have tried to sound like him.
Often imitated but not always acknowledged, the influence of the Bo Diddley beat – driving and relentless like the chant of a chain gang – is heard clearest and most famously on the Rolling Stones’ “Not Fade Away.”
But that sound, which Bo Diddley called his “tradesman’s knock”, is just as discernible on U2’s “Desire,” or versions of the garage classic “I Want Candy” recorded by the Strangeloves and Bow Wow Wow two decades apart, or on George Michael’s “Faith.”
Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry aside, arguably none of the first generation of American rock ‘n’ rollers had a greater impact on the subsequent course of popular music.”

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Posted on June 2, 2008

By Don Jacobson

If American radio had ever had a Wolfman Jack and an Alan Freed all rolled up into one person – someone who was also a crucial 1980’s punk rock pioneer as well – that DJ probably would have owned the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and half of Cleveland, to boot. While no one figure in U.S. music history can claim to be all that towering, the Philippines had just such a rock jock: Howlin’ Dave.

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Posted on June 2, 2008

By Don Jacobson

I’m not so much of a blind Canadaphile to be unaware of the fact that the country has its annoying quirks. Like the Progressive Conservative Party, eh? You cannot be both, I don’t care what country you’re from. And the fact that their Elvis is a figure skater. Weird, and pretty annoying. Still, it makes me wonder how they can come up with things like that and still be as cool as they are. Probably precisely because they think of themselves as so uncool compared to us. Hey, Canadians, wake up! Our Elvis died on the crapper!
Of course Canadian music is also like that. They fret endlessly about how American culture is overwhelming them, but at the same time, if you listen to CBC Radio for instance, it’s like you took one part NPR – so far so good – but then mixed in three parts Clear Channel. You can just feel how their love/hate towards us is pretty heavily weighted toward love, and that they hate themselves for it.

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Posted on April 10, 2008

By Don Jacobson

1. The last time we checked in with Chatham County Line, they were just coming down from a high they got from smoking high-grade bluegrass. The telltale smell of trad purism was all over them. And their skinny neckties were drawn so tight, it kind of hurt just to see it, although you got a vicarious thrill listening to them work through their obsessions. It was beautiful but scary, as well.
Now, however, the band seems to be loosening those cravats a bit, and switching their substance of choice from pure grass to boozy jam. The thing that really stands out in Chatham County Line’s new album, IV (to be released in March), is that Dave Wilson and company appear willing to relax their grip a bit on the tight strictures of the bluegrass song rulebook, kick back with a little Jameson’s and drift where the muse takes them. The result is a bit less Doc Watson and a little bit more “Country Honk.”

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Posted on February 4, 2008

By Don Jacobson

Listening to the upcoming Jason Ringenberg solo career retrospective Best Tracks and Side Tracks is like waking up in a land where the Bubble Up is free and there’s an all-day feast of rainbow stew: The music seems sparkling and too good to be true, and yet it’s still got one foot in a slow-moving freight running past a hobo jungle somewhere down around Carbondale. That combination of punk rock exuberance and social consciousness and deep country sorrow, which has marked Ringenberg’s career since the earliest Jason & the Scorchers tracks, is still abundantly evident on this Yep Roc Records compilation, which mostly covers his post-2000 solo records.

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Posted on December 24, 2007

By Don Jacobson

The other day I was listening to a great old album on WREK-FM, one of our better non-commercial, student-run stations, from Georgia Tech in Atlanta. The program was Stonehenge, WREK’s weekly “deep tracks” classic rock show, and the album was Humble Pie’s first effort, 1969’s “As Safe As Yesterday Is.” It was so good, it got me wondering, why didn’t Steve Marriott ever become the ultra-special hyperstar he should have been? What happened to him in the years between Humble Pie’s break-up in 1975 and his premature, accidental death in a 1991 house fire?

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Posted on November 26, 2007

By Steve Rhodes

Beachwood Bob, the co-owner with his brother of the Beachwood Inn, recently held a tag sale to clear out various items inside an old house they owned down the block from the bar. In after-sale scavenging, Bob gave me the pick of whatever records remained. This is what I grabbed.
*
1. All-Time Country & Western Hits/Nashville All Stars
A Dynagroove Recording as well as an RCA Victor Record Club Special. Produced by Bob Ferguson and Chet Atkins, 1965.
2. This Is Music From Nashville/Columbia Special Products
Includes Ray Price, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Marty Robbins, Mac Davis, and Johnny Cash.
3. Golden Hits/Roger Miller
“Years before Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson grew their hair long, Miller took country to the counterculture with these hipster twists on the Nashville sound,” writes Dan Cooper of All Music Guide. “No tunesmith in Music City had ever tossed off songs like ‘Dang Me,’ ‘King of the Road,’ ‘Chug-A-Lug,’ and ‘Engine Engine #9.’ No one has since.” From Smash Records.

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Posted on November 7, 2007

By Don Jacobson

Adriana from The Sopranos loves him, but radio programmers don’t. Personally, I’d take that trade-off anytime, but then again, I’m not carrying a name like Waylon Albright Jennings, and all the baggage that comes with it. As it is, “Shooter” Jennings, like his famous late father, is paying the price for daring to tread the still-unforgiving no-man’s land between rock and country. It’s really unbelievable, a generation after the genre first appeared in all its greasy-haired glory, that the transcendent, big-ass Southern rock of artists like Shooter Jennings still can’t catch a break from the music industry gatekeepers.

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Posted on October 24, 2007

By Don Jacobson

My favorite member of The Band was always Levon Helm. I was never a huge fan of their music, just as I was never much of a Bob Dylan fan compared to a lot of people I know. But for some reason, I liked the Band songs on which Helm took the vocal lead a lot more than the others. He just seemed so damn real – to me, his voice was the main connection that The Band had with the painful, soulful heritage of American roots music. Even though Robbie Robertson wrote the songs, he and the late Rick Danko and the other guys kind of seemed more like rock stars in comparison.
Helm, now 67, a cancer survivor and sometime movie actor, is getting set to release his first solo studio album in 25 years, and from the buzz, as well as from a few audio clips available pre-release, it seems to reinforce his role as the voice that perhaps most personified The Band’s current of proto-Americana, and is also a pretty amazing performance for a guy who, for years after his 1998 throat cancer diagnosis, could not speak, let along sing.

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Posted on September 19, 2007

By Don Jacobson

1. Billy Bob, Billy Bob. How much cooler can you get? In the mostly pathetic pantheon of movie types who grab a mike and a guitar, saunter onstage with an All-Star pick-up band and think they’re rock stars, Thornton rates highly – a near-miss. And that makes him the best member of that company I’ve ever heard. Way, way better than someone like Keanu Reeves, and not just because Billy Bob plays thoughtful alternative country instead of Keanu’s party-on alternative rock, although it helps. No, it’s more because he brings that same kind of barely un-ironic, effortless redneck intellectualism that I love from his best movie roles into his songs as well. Billy Bob’s the real deal – if he could sing just a little bit better he’d make a pretty good living out on the high-end country bar and festival circuit.

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Posted on August 15, 2007