I keep meaning to write this up, so as to share it with all my adoring fans, and I’m inspired by this post from The Pistolero.

All you faux purists who bitch and moan about Clear Channel can now just go ahead and shut the hell up. Because right now, they’re broadcasting, in San Antonio, the best radio station ever invented. It’s called 92.5 The Outlaw, and it’s nothing but OKOM. It’s very clearly experimental and low-powered, but their playlist is one that would make me go buy a satellite radio and spend the $15 per month to get it full time, all the time, just for this one channel. They’re also spending some change and have built up a high-def version of the station — in other words, putting corporate dollars to work on research to try to make radio good again. If I lived in San Antonio, I’d go buy one just to get the durn thing to come in clear all the time. It runs out at Bulverde, and is fairly staticy east of 281.

But never mind the CC connection…this is seriously one great station. I can regularly hear Charlie Robison, Billy Joe Shaver, Cross Canadian Ragweed, ZZ Top, Ray Wylie Hubbard all in the same hour…hell, it’s practically my iPod, with the bonus attraction of new artists that I didn’t know about. Their commercials are laugh-out-loud hilarious, too. Go ahead and stream it for a while, and see what I mean. They’re brash and ballsy and braggy. Just perfect for this Texan.

And anyway, Clear Channel, please please please export this to every major market in Texas. Or put it on XM? Please, for me, your pal, The Fat Guy?

“Brian Burns is an old fashioned Texas songwriter and storyteller. He’ll scare the crap out of you with tales of trains, lightning storms, and guns. He’ll also make you feel guilty for voting for or even watching American Idol”, talking about Brian Burns.

Well, that’s a lot to ask of one man. American Idol is probably the most depressing musical spectacle on continuous display today. But I second the nomination for Brian. Good, good stuff.

Brian was playing up in Minnesota, with Alex Whitmore, who’s a top hand, too. Cool to see those guys touring together.

Alex has a very talented daughter, Bonnie. I was lucky enough to see Alex, Bonnie, and his other daughter, Eleanor (who’s touring with Slaid Cleaves), all play an acoustic set together on the little stage down at the future home of Buck’s Icehouse. It’s very cool to see that kind of thing. That kinda makes me an old softie, huh?

Unfortunately, of all these great artists, only Slaid Cleaves can be found on iTunes. So buy from their sites and put some nickels in their pockets. And quit watching that American Idol. Go see a show somewhere in your town.

WSJ.com - Pop Goes the Ticket Price

Now ticket prices appear to be creeping — sometimes skyrocketing — upward. Madonna is charging up to $385 a head beginning this week. There’s also a Shakira tour charging up to $90, and Faith Hill and Tim McGraw are charging as much as $125.

[...]

This summer a dual bill by Def Leppard and Journey is generating much stronger-than-expected early sales, even though both bands’ commercial peak was at least 20 years ago. But this one-two punch of early ’80s pop rock and power balladry doesn’t come cheap — the best seats in some markets run as much as $98.75 each.

People are certifiably insane.

The public relations department for the Dixie Chicks deserves a squillion-dollar bonus. Those dumb broads and their fake-out music are inescapable. Not even on Sports Talk Radio.

Gee, just imagine what would happen if, say, the Thrift Store Cowboys or Macon Greyson had 1/100th of the money spent on them. That’s Trashville for you, though. Piss on ‘em all. The only good thing to come out of it is Charlie Robison gets some of that dough.

I click around on the TexasGigs blogroll about once a week, just to fill in the gaps on what the kids are talking about the music these days. One of those is Ken Shimamoto’s blog, Stash Dauber, and I was reading this post about a new group effort called Texamericana, designed to get Texas artists’ CDs into the hands of non-profit radio stations to generate more play and more recognition and (one would guess, anyway) more album sales for the artists. As I read along, I was thinking, “What a good idea…wonder if there’s anything I could do to help out?” Then this line* in the post smacked across the face like a wet mackerel:

Also, since she travels worldwide so often, she clearly sees how the US commercial media is a propaganda machine for Bush and his band of pirates.

[blink blink]

I guess musical pirates are the good pirates. Suddenly, I’m not so interested in helping out any more. Oh, I’d love to help out the musicians — I love my Texas artists, I think that’s perfectly plain. I’ll just have to find some other way to support them, like talking about them here and spurring you to buy their records with some of the booty you acquired on your last piratical raid of the payroll office.

Ironically, Texamericana’s tagline is Some folks still believe in the power of music. Too bad at least one of their promoters is a believer in the power of politicizing and demonizing. Good luck to ‘em, anyway…I’m a believer, just not one of theirs.

* To be crystal clear, that’s not Ken speaking, that’s Jim Yanaway being quoted. I have no idea how Ken feels about pirates, Bushian or otherwise.

[Personal note to Chuckles Austin: Life amongst the savages, my friend -- I, too, am depressed.]

This time with 21st Century Streaming Video:

To be sure, this is pure mid-80s-style MTV Music Video, complete with pink sportscoat-wearing bassist, caked-on eye makeup, and horrible syncing.

Jason and the Scorchers were an important “intersection” band for me, what with the crazed blitzkrieg guitars, the twangy vocals, and the fun-time cowpunk atmosphere. I still listen to these boys regular. Ringenberg is fun to sing along with when you’re crashing down the empty highway with all the windows rolled down and an illegal tallboy sweating in the console. Turn on your radar detector and keep an eagle eye peeled for the coppers, though, cuz you will be inexorably pressing down on the long, skinny pedal.

For more tunage, check out the bands MP3 page. Good times abound.

Slampo found a simply great interview with a crusty, cranky, curmudgeonly Merle Haggard:

I think it went south along with our whole country. See, the whole situation of life has changed. What they’re calling country is about as country as downtown New York! It’s got nothin’ to do with actual country music. Country’s supposed to be about people who find their way from the soil to the microphone — instead of bein’ shaped into some kind of phony perfection with computers like they do nowadays. I mean, who can sing and who can’t? You really can’t tell anymore.

But Merle’s got a bad case of the Good Old Days Syndrome, complicated by Hermititis:

Connect Savannah: Well, these Dylan shows start in the early evening, so I guess it’s the best of both worlds.

Merle Haggard: You’re right. We seem to draw a cross-section of both age groups. For example, I played in Miami, Oklahoma last night. We had a full house by ourselves. But the show started at 7:30 in the evening! Now, some years ago, I’m here to tell you that nobody would have been at a show at 7:30 at night! But now, with the terror alerts and the lack of freedom and the scare tactics they’re using… Then, you’ve got these people who won’t come out on the weekends. They won’t even compete with the young people anymore. It’s like they’ve given in and given up. It’s really become two separate societies as far as the age difference is concerned.
I just celebrated my birthday. It was my 69th, so I didn’t celebrate it that much (laughs), I just stayed at home. I don’t even go to the Quickie Stop after dark. My family and everyone I know is the exact same way. After dark, the streets seem like they belong to the gangs and the police. But, hell, by 9 p.m., the gangs and the police are even shut out! We played in Kansas City, Kansas, the other night, and our hotel was way up high on a hill. You could look out and see the whole town, and there was nothin’ goin’ on! The place was totally shut down. America used to be a 24-hour country, and these days it seems like it doesn’t do anything after 9 o’clock.

Connect Savannah: As an artist who’s crossed the U.S. for decades, you’ve got a unique perspective on this changing climate. Do you feel any sort of sea change in the works? Is there a backlash brewing?

Merle Haggard: I believe you and I will never see any different as long as we live. We’re stuck with it. I feel like certain towns in America are committed to entertainment. You have Myrtle Beach, New York City, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and after that you head toward the center of the U.S., and there’s nothing. Nothing! If it’s happening, it better damn well happen in the middle of the day, or it’ll be a failure.

I don’t know how America can work on only eight hours a day. People shouldn’t forget — this used to be a 24-hour country. It used to be you could go anywhere in Las Vegas and get steak and eggs at four in the morning. ‘Round the clock. Now, you can’t get breakfast after 2 p.m. in Las Vegas! If there’s anybody that doubts what I’m saying, they need to go out, and ride across this country and see what I’m talking about. It’ll break your heart.

Lots of stuff to chew on there. He’s right, I won’t go see a show that starts at 10pm on a school night. Why? Well, I’m not spending the next day sleeping it off on an air-conditioned tour bus rolling to the next town. While it used to be tolerable fun to spend the next day hungover and tired, it’s not so much anymore. Sorry, Merle, but it has nothing to do with no terror alerts or lack of freedom. I won’t fight the youngsters, either. Why would I? It’s their turn to have fun. Why clog up the works for them? Why cling to some youthful fantasy? Grow up, Merle…the rest of us are.

And you can damn well get steak and eggs at 2pm in Las Vegas — I did it a little less than a year ago. Evidence of Hermititis.

Well, he’s earned it. I don’t begrudge him. Go read the whole thing. It’s refreshing, if slightly deluded and overly insulated. Like I say, he’s earned it, to my mind.

Last week The Wife, as is her wont, chucked a CD at me and asked me to review it. I groaned, as always, because some really sad stuff comes over the transom around these parts. But then she told me it was Pearl’s new solo album, so I became less grouchy and more interested. Pearl is actually Amanda Shires, fiddler and lead vocalist for the Thrift Store Cowboys. Now, I’ve been watching TSC for five years now. They’re one of the few bands that will un-ass me from a poker table on a weekend night. I’ve raved about them in this space many times, so if you’ve been keeping up, no more needs saying. If you haven’t been keeping up, that’s a YP.

Anyway, Amanda is front and center of TSC, and being a young good-looking gal, it’s probably easy for people to be dismissive of her contribution to the whole sound. But I’m here to tell you that would be a big mistake. I’ve never not been impressed by her fiddle playing on the TSC tunes, both live and recorded. I always thought that she brought a certain west Texas sparseness and purity to their sound, an evocation of that big space and far horizon that makes west Texas what it is, and the musicians that come from there what they are. Say “fiddle” anywhere around here, of course, and the next thing people say is “Bob Wills is still the king.” So there’s no small set of boots to fill (nyuk, nyuk).

So, on to the CD Herself put in my hands. Being Brave is the title of the CD, and while that’s just a bit too precious for the hard-charging girl that I’ve come to know, I slapped it in and gave it a spin. First off, it’s definitely a fiddler’s solo album. It’s chock full of traditional and old-timey songs. And that’s good, if you’ve got the good sense to appreciate a good fiddle. Now, let me state just straight out — I’m no musicologist, so I have no clue if what I’m saying is true and proper, but I can hear pure Texas barn dance in here, I can hear pure Kentucky bluegrass in here, I can hear some slight Mexican influences (and I’d like some more), and (my favorite) I can hear goosebumpy Scots-Irish reels in here that make me all misty-eyed and eager to slice the throats of Englishers. Now, these are mostly instrumentals, backed up with proper accompaniment, and they are all expertly, superbly done. You’ll tap your toes to the ones where you’re supposed to, you’ll close your eyes and drift away to the ones where you’re supposed to, and you’ll grin and two-step across the kitchen to the ones where you’re supposed to.

But what blew me totally away were the songs where Amanda sings. Never in a million years was I expecting to hear such a heart-grabbing voice. It’s not one of those pure, sweet angelic voices, yet it’s not one of those gravelly, five-packs-a-day voices, either. There’s just this completely unexpectedly mature and robust voice, with a couple of hitches in the gitalong that make it really unique and powerful. It helps that she’s not really stretching it out or trying to win American Idol with it, but as much as I love those velvet-throated warblers, like a LeeAnn Rimes, Amanda is the kind of girl singer I really want to hear when I’m in a Texas honky-tonk. It probably also helps that I’ve followed this kid and the band for five years and have a great deal of respect for her (and the rest of them.) They’ve been out there doing it the way it needs to be done, selling themselves and their music, one bar-stool at a time.

Probably my favorite tunes on the disc are “Low and Lonely” (an old Roy Acuff tune), “Hearts Are Breakin” (one of Amanda’s), and “Cattle in the Cane” (a traditional). But there’s really nothing on here that would make me punch out to the next one. I’m really happy for Pearl that she pulled this together, that she used her bandmates Daniel and Colt to help record it (I don’t want anything busting up TSC), and that it found it’s way to my iPod. I hope that this isn’t a one-off and that she can find the time to do some more solo fiddle & singing stuff. Because, you know, there just ain’t that many good girl singers out there that suit me.

You can grab this CD here at Yellowhouse Music, and I recommend that you do that. You’re not going to find something like this on iTunes or Amazon (more’s their shame, no?).

I’m a bad husband, because I keep forgetting to mention Herself’s Big Christmas Shindig.

TexasGigs.com along with This is Texas Music and Spune Presents a Fa-La-La-La-La Musical Extravaganza
Where: - The Cavern
When: - Saturday, December 3rd - 8 PM
Who: - The Gene Pool (Austin) / Black Water Gospel (Austin) / Thrift Store Cowboys / Spitfire Tumbleweeds
Cover: - $6.00

As noted by no less an authority than the Dallas alterna-press thingamajig, all of her (really & truly) hard work is self-supported, with the occasional and much too rare donation trickling in from broke-ass musicians and appreciative fans. Your job is to go spend a little bit of dough at the Cavern, so they’ll keep inviting her back, and so the musicians will keep talking to her, and she can continue to ogle dudes young enough to be her son.

I’ll be there, too, but nobody cares about that. The Thrift Store Cowboys are one of my favorite acts and I strongly recommend them to you. Say the secret word (”suckout”) and I’ll buy you a draft beer.

I might be able to help out this dude:

So I’m turning to any long-time country fans to help me out here

Numero uno, quit listening to music from the Nashville shite factory¹ that is designed to sell tampons². Especially when it comes from 99.9% of the radio.

Numero two-o, read Jack Sparks.

Numero tres, tune into Boot Liquor Radio to get a solid base of non-Nashville.

Lastly, you very likely can’t go wrong with just about anything billed as Texas music by the fans.

Oh, and destroy Big & Rich, the worst example of Nashville cut-n-paste extant.

1 Kevin Whited
2 Alex Whitlock

OK, some levity:

Thursday State Fair Grand Stand, $Your Eternal Soul’s Damnation in Hell (if you go with two of your best friends, make sure one of you wears a tshirt, the other a Western shirt, and make the fattest of the 3 of you wear a long-cut, untucked silk shirt with a spikey collar and the sleeves undone, pout at any girls you meet)

Jack completely punishes Maria McBridges and some boy-band.

Me, I’m sitting here loading up all my damn Cajun music into iTunes*, in honor of the Big NO. Here’s who I gots so far:
Boozoo Chavis
Clifton Chenier
Buckwheat Zydeco
Beau Jocque
Jimmy Thibodeaux (we last ran into Jimmy on these pages here…)

No New Orleans? Not while I’m drawing breath. Hell, I’ll sell it all and build the world’s biggest dance hall on stilts down in the Quarter if I have to. We’ll ferry everybody in on airboats, right over the gators’ heads. Poker in the back, too (heh). And I won’t need no stinking federal dollars to do it You can’t let that kind of greatness just wash away. You know how many people don’t even know that they like that kind of music yet? Shoot, man…

* I believe I’m thisfar from buying a damn iPod. And yeah, I feel like a pod-person. Kevin, didn’t you have one of those you said you weren’t using much? Make you a deal…

Banjo Jones notes* the drop in talk-radio audience. He sez:

Across the country, audience ratings for talk radio are dropping. It could be a function of the election cycle, say some. And it could be a reflection of the fortunes of the current Administration, since most talk radio is Republican.

Me, I think it’s because they insist on letting the general public call in, and then put them on the air. I like to imagine that all of those callers are mouth-breathing morons living in their collective parents’ converted attic, but sadly, I know that at least some of these callers are productive members of society that contribute to our national economy and probably lead good lives, with happy families and well-kept lawns. Any sensible adult, though, would shun them if their ignorance and lunacy were widely known. That’s why I turned off political talk radio, anyway (and it’s why I’m punching out more and more on sports talk, too.)

Combine Caller on Line One with the undisputed fact that the random generic talk radio host is an uninformed, egomaniacal blowhard, and the these-days inevitable Gaggle of Baboons with Headsets that they have surrounding the host, and it’s Sayanora, Sweetheart for me. Life’s too short, and there’s too much good music**, to waste a second on someone else’s st00p1d poli-sci opinion.

* Still no permalinks for Banjo. Aren’t they a default part of that Blogger buddy?

** Which reminds me of a business idea I had for those satellite radio dudes: add a Buy CD button to the receiver. It works like this — when you get your service, you can go online and fill in your credit card number and shipping address. Then, when a song comes on that you like, you hit the button, and the Magical Interweb Wizard finds the lowest price, buys it, and sends it to you. Heck, you could probably go ahead and sell it yourself and take a couple of nickels for the trouble. My desk would be piled to the ceiling with new stuff I generally hear and like but then forget about 5 minutes later. Wrap this around the new all-digital download services, if you’d like. Oh, yeah — this idea is copyrighted by The Fat Guy©. You can PayPal me the royalties. You’re welcome.

A rampaging pack of weenie dogs.

Need a hat?

James Hinkle wins Best Dressed (Male) award.

Ponty Bone wins First Accordion Ever award.
The resulting zydeco prompted the annual discussion of when we’re going to get our loose act together and put on a cajun festival. Must have mudbugs, so I’m thinking March or April.

Steven Fromholz, sounding good and strong - just great to see and hear him.

Dirt was runner-up for Best Dressed, with this wacky lemon yellow cowboy shirt.

I’m still fairly burnt down. I’m considering slapping on a Nicoderm patch, too…no travel this week, the festival is over, nothing but four dreary months of work-work-work left for the year, might as well try to kick the coffin nail habit. I can sit here at the deer cabin and be a grouch without bothering anybody. Except — good gravy — no cigars here. Maybe later, maybe not. I can’t think my way out of a wet paper bag right now, so…I’ll decide not to decide.

Alt hed: I drank what? Good grief…

The Man

As is typical, I’ve got zero personal friends to hang with this weekend. Billy Joe Shaver, a man who has been called the Poet Laureate of Texas by far smarter guys than me, wrapped up his set and I had to wake my daughter and send her to bed. Davin James, a Texas guitar slinger that I’ll personally stack up against anyone drawing breath today, is pounding out his encore as I type.this. We’ve got a real good crowd here, but I’ll be damned if there’s anybody I know.

How does a man come to this pass? I don’t make any money off this deal. I only do it because, Gawdalmighty, it’s unique and it’s an unmitigated blast. Yet nobody I know gives a rip. Not a gottdammed soul can be bothered.

Well, silver lining here, thank the Lord for the ones that do. Especially the young ones. This music and this setting is too good to just ditch. You’ll never know how good it is until you sit under that massive moon without a thought in your head but the music.

Corky did stop by for a while to marvel at the engineering feats on display:

“…and it’s running!”