Category Archives: My Back Pages

This Land May Not Be Our Land

You’ve likely seen the image of Woody Guthrie’s guitar an infinite number of times in your life. It reads “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” and you could interpret that phrase to mean that lyrics and music will unite people to rise against economic, racial, and social injustice. The origin was likely from a World War II government propaganda campaign, a sticker that was printed and handed out to defense plant workers. While living in a small New York hotel room, Woody likely affixed it to his instrument while writing songs such as “Taking Hitler’s Head Off Blues” and “All You Fascists Bound To Lose,” the latter performed live on New York radio along with Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry as The Headline Singers.

I’m gonna tell you fascists,
you may be surprised,
people in this world
are getting organized. 

On Feb. 23, 1940, Guthrie wrote what would become his most popular song, a sing-along titled “This Land Is Your Land” that has been documented as his response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” In true folk music tradition, he based the melody and structure on another song, “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” that was recorded in 1928 by The Carter Family and made it onto Billboard magazine’s music chart the year after, landing at number 14. 

An online Library of Congress entry about Guthrie’s version, with his updated lyrics, offers this interpretation of the meaning and origin of his thoughts, which has often been restated and circulated in news articles and stories:

“Guthrie heard Berlin’s song repeatedly while he traveled cross-country and became increasingly annoyed that it glossed over the lop-sided distribution of land and wealth that he was observing and had experienced as a child. Although Guthrie was no statistician, his observations accurately reflected the fact that, even in the depths of the Depression, nearly 20 percent of the nation’s wealth rested with one percent of its population.”

In the original version Guthrie used the phrase “God blessed America for me,” but he changed it to “this land was made for me and you” when he first recorded it with Cisco Houston in April 1944. And as you may or may not know, through the years he played around with the words and verses, leaving some out and putting others back in.

In an unrecorded verse, scribbled on a sheet of loose-leaf paper now in the possession of daughter Nora’s Woody Guthrie Archives, he adds a question perhaps insinuating hopelessness, something I feel very much in touch with in these modern times:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
By the Relief Office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.

To wonder if God blessed America for me (and you), could Guthrie also have been accepting, or at minimum questioning, the possibility that there was no blessing? And by extension, could it just be that economic disparity and exploitation of the poor and those of color who are different than the “one percent” simply represents the way things are? Taken in that context, rather than as a song calling out injustice under the banner of patriotism and suggesting the potential for change, it could suggest something completely different: We’re fucked.

For those of us who’ve traveled through the decades observing and experiencing both the good and evil in people, along with the systems we create to either raise up or crush each other, these are the hardest of times. The last two major election cycles have provoked in me a feeling I’ve been unable to express for the past several years until now: With an almost even split between voters, America is not the land I once thought it to be. We do not come together, we divide. We do not have a common set of morals or beliefs, nor do we have the capacity to listen, accept, or change. We are at odds with each other, and maybe this is not unique to the times. Perhaps we’ve always fallen for the con game of one nation under God.

As much as I try to block out hate speech and the dangerous violent rhetoric of a particular poor excuse for a human being who rides along with the support and complicity of millions standing with him, this evil permeates the air we breathe almost to the point of suffocation. For me, now closer in years to death than birth, who lives in a blue state with a diverse population and pervasive liberal thought, I wake up each morning and simply go about my business one day at a time, staying in my lane and pondering if my surrender is in itself an act of complicity.

Although it’s always given me strength, I’m not singing Woody’s song much these days because it feels futile. I pray that our children will still hold it close and carry it into the future. I might be a lost cause when it comes to hope, but one never knows what the future may bring.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Postscript: As a columnist for No Depression, I have been given the freedom to choose my own topics and share my views for the past ten years, which I’m grateful for. I want to remind those who may disagree or take offense that these words and opinions are mine alone. Most often it’s about the music, sometimes it’s not. This one combines several themes. I always publish my personal contact information for those who feel the need to take it further, so feel free to reach out. Any anger or distress you may have toward No Depression would be sadly misplaced.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my here own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

From Tejano To Polkas: Americana Lost and Found

Photo by Jacqueline Macou/Creative Commons 2.0

Back in the fifties when I was just a little squirt, most Saturday nights were spent at my grandparents’ house, where we ate boiled chicken, played endless card games, and watched television on a small Dumont black and white. It was always the same routine: Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, Gunsmoke, a bowl of cherry Jell-O and then off to bed. Not sure how my older sister escaped these tortuous nights, but while she was out at sock hops dancing with her friends and cruising the parking lot at Bob’s Big Boy on the boulevard, part of my musical DNA was being formed by the sound of Myron Floren’s accordion playing, an Amercan-ized, white-bread version of polka music.

Fast forward to the mid-’70s, and I was working as a sales rep for an indie music distributor with a territory that took me deep into the small steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania, with an enormous catalog of multigenre titles, including all of Floren’s albums. For almost a half-dozen years I drove through the mountains on the turnpike and country roads with my VW Super Beetle equipped with a Craig eight-track player and an AM radio. Long hours were spent in that car, smoke-filled from Winstons and weed, listening to my own psychedelia mixtapes while alternating through the small local radio stations to get weather updates, check out the farm reports, and listen to polka music. Half-step or waltz, fast or slow, instrumental or with vocals, I loved it. And although this song from Tom Russell sure ain’t a polka, it captures that time period and geography spot on.

One of the people I was listening to back then was Augie Meyers, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator of Doug Sahm. It was his organ playing on the Sir Douglas Quintet albums that added the Norteño style that cut through anything else you were hearing on the radio at the time. Sometime after they released Mendocino, I picked up a copy of Augie’s Western Head Music Co. and played it to death. Pretty sure I still have it somewhere in the vinyl stacks, and I recently found this song posted on YouTube. It was my connect-the-dot to the polkas from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to the border music of Southern Texas.

Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records — now owned and administered by Smithsonian Folkways — has been a longtime fan and collector of Tejano and conjunto music, issuing a great series of albums culled from his 1990 purchase of Ideal Records under the banner of Tejano Roots. He’s also filmed two documentaries and written extensively about this music, which is posted on a page from the University of Texas at Austin  site. Below he explains how the music of Mexico was influenced by other countries and cultures.

“The musical traditions of the Tejanos of South Texas and Norteños of Northern Mexico have been influenced not only by the mother country, Mexico, but also by their Anglo-American, African-American and immigrant neighbors like the Czechs, Bohemians, and Moravians as well as the Germans and Italians. Industry, especially brewing, in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, was developed in part by German immigrants; and the distributors of German-made accordions aggressively marketed the loud, sturdy little ‘boom boxes’ as far back as the late 1800s. Norteño/Conjunto accordion pioneer Narciso Martínez learned many tunes from German and Czech brass bands.”

American-born or based performers who’ve since popularized and included the style into rock and folk music include Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, Ry Cooder, Calexico, Los Lobos, Latin Playboys, The Mavericks, The Mars Volta, and Los Super Seven. In 1971 Doug Sahm was signed to Atlantic Records as a solo act, and Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers were often in the studio backing him up. In 1990 the quartet released their debut album under the name Texas Tornados, and it was recorded in both English and Spanish. Sahm died in 1999, and Fender in 2006. Doug’s son Shawn has kept the music alive, working with Meyers and Jiménez as well as Tornado original musicians Louie Ortega, Speedy Sparks, and Ernie Durawa, and releasing Está Bueno! in 2010. Shawn is still out there performing regularly.

This is a link to Smithsonian Folkways’ catalog of Latin recordings, most of which were acquired by the Arhoolie purchase. You can buy, download, and stream most, if not all. The Tejano Rootsseries is comprised of several collections focusing on specific topics such as women, accordions, orquestas, San Antonio, and artists including Jimenez, Tony De La Rosa, Conjunto Bernal, and Lydia Mendoza.

As in all forms and subgenres of American roots music, this is simply another example of how our country is culturally richer because of our diverse heritage. Whether through the willful immigration from countries spanning the globe or the horrific forced slavery from Africa, people have found ways to connect and share their collective hopes, dreams, and talent, throwing it into the melting pot. And as Woody Guthrie wrote, “In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling, the voice come chanting as the fog was lifting … this land was made for you and me.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

New Tunes For Old Ears

Photo: Creative Commons 2.0

‘How To Catch Fish And Music In The Stream’ was the working title to this one, but as you can see I focused on new tunes for old ears instead. While it’s pretty easy to discover music on playlists and from recommendations on most of the streaming services that I hop around on, I’ve honestly never caught a fish in a stream. Nor a river, creek or lake for that matter. And then I also realized that if I stuck with that headline, I’d better include some great recipes too. Of which I have none. So I went with an idiom that was likely first used back in 1616 by Shakespeare in his play Comedy of Errors.

I’m gonna guess that y’all aren’t that interested in idioms or their country cousin phrasal verbs, but damn if it didn’t capture my attention for a good 15 minutes. A few examples of the former would be things like: “add insult to injury,” “Elvis has left the building,” “once in a blue moon,” and “to make a long story short” … or in this case, a short story long. But I don’t want to just jump into the music without sharing some phrasal verbs: do over, give back, hang up, and take down are but a few. And some of you might recall this triple grouping from back in the ’60s: turn on, tune in, drop out. I’ll leave it at that.

Kate Wolf

I had sadly put Kate’s music in a corner of my mind until I came across a live clip of Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris singing what is likely her most popular song, “Across the Great Divide.” She left us early at the age 44 back in 1986, diagnosed with leukemia and passing away after complications from a bone marrow transplant. Her recording and concert career began in 1976 and she released seven albums while alive, and another six have since come out. There’s also a wonderful tribute album that Red House Records did in 1998, Treasures Left Behind: Remembering Kate Wolf. She was so well loved and respected in the folk community that each year since 1996 her family has hosted the Kate Wolf Music Festival in Northern California. If you’re looking for an entry ramp to her discography, I’m partial to Poet’s Heart and Give Yourself to Love.

The Other Years

The Other Years are Anna Krippenstapel and Heather Summers from Kentucky, and their self-titled album goes far beyond yet another collection of old-time music. Using only their voices, guitar, fiddle, and banjo, they complement each other as if they’ve been doing this forever and yet it’s Heather’s first group effort. Anna plays fiddle for Joan Shelley and Freakwater, and the group will be opening on Louisville’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s current tour.

Marc Ribot: Songs of Resistance 1942-2018

This album of 11 songs of original and traditional songs features a number of different guests and styles. Appearing are Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, Sam Amidon, Ohene Cornelius, Tift Merritt, Domenica Fossati and Syd Straw.A seasoned guitarist with over 25 solo albums and an in-demand session player you’ve heard on dozens and dozens of recordings, Ribot gives this as his reason for releasing this compilation:“There’s a lot of contradiction in doing any kind of political music, how to act against something without becoming it, without resembling what you detest. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what to do, and I imagine we’ll make mistakes, and hopefully, learn from them. But I knew this from the moment Donald Trump was elected: I’m not going to play downtown scene Furtwangler to any orange-combover dictator wannabe. No way.”

Portions of the album’s proceeds will be donated to The Indivisible Project, an organization that helps individuals resist the Trump agenda via grassroots movements in their local communities. More info can be found at www.indivisible.org.

Laura Cantrell

Hard to believe that it’s been almost six years since Laura Cantrell last released an album. I’ve placed all five of her albums, as well as the five EPs she’s put out, on my current “crazy compulsive obsessions” playlist and have been playing the heck out of them. Laura is based here in New York and did gigs earlier this year in England, Ireland, and Spain, and she has a monthly concert series called States of Country that she does here at Sid Gold’s Request Room. She also hosts Dark Horse Radio, a program devoted to the music of George Harrison, on SiriusXM’s Beatles Channel.

Lindi Ortega

This year’s Liberty album has me totally entranced. I’ve gone back and revisited all of her past work and the only thing you really need to know is she’s from Canada, now lives in Nashville, and is doing stuff nobody else does. Brilliant work. Go forth and seek it out. Done.

And don’t forget … Willie’s reminder to vote:

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Dale Watson And The New Honky Tonk Heroes

Photo from dalewatson.com

Do y’all know what they call the type of roots music that is no longer played on country music radio? Ameripolitan. You can thank Dale Watson for that genre classification, and the story of how it came about can be found in this excerpt from a 2014 profile of the Texas singer-songwriter that ran in The New York Times, in partnership with Texas Monthly:

“Country music has to evolve in order to survive,” Mr. [Blake] Shelton said in an appearance on Great American Country TV in January last year. “Nobody wants to listen to their grandpa’s music. And I don’t care how many of these old farts around Nashville are going, ‘My God, that ain’t country!’”

Many musicians … were incensed. “This guy sounds like in his own mind that his head is so large no hat ever made will fit him,” Ray Price, the recently deceased crooner extraordinaire, wrote on Facebook.…

Ten minutes after hearing of Shelton’s barb, Dale Watson, who was touring Belgium at the time, wrote “Old Fart (A Song for Blake).” A video of Watson and his band, The Lone Stars, playing the song against a backdrop of the famous photograph of Johnny Cash giving the finger was uploaded to YouTube on Jan. 25, 2013.

When Watson returned to the United States, he came up with a new term to describe the genre of music that encompasses honky-tonk, outlaw, rockabilly, and Western swing. By February 2013 the first Ameripolitan Music Awards were held in Austin, and Ray Price was acknowledged for lifetime achievement. Five years later, the association and awards are still alive, and though it’s all sort of low budget and not as well known or promoted as the Americana contingent, younger musicians turned off by today’s country-pop are tapping into the sound, and it feels as if it’s building.

If I wore a hat I’d tip it to Dale Watson, and should the Americana Music Association be looking for someone to give some sort of an award to next year, I nominate him. He’s keeping a musical tradition alive.

Here’s a few folks I’ve recently been listening to, and this Ameripolitan is not all homegrown here in the USA. A number of radio stations are coming onboard and there are live venues all throughout the country and beyond, including Sweden, Germany, England, and Belgium. Just goes to show, it’s hard to keep a good ol’ honky-tonk hero down.

Jake Penrod and His Million Dollar Cowboys

Jake Penrod has been kickin’ around his home state of Texas for well over a decade, often playing tribute shows as Hank Williams, who he looks and sounds like. In 2007 he took the lead for a road production in Buffalo, New York, of the musical Hank Williams: Lost Highway. He followed that gig up with two albums of Williams’ music and played atnumerous legends tribute shows at the Gladewater Opry, Texas Star Opry, and the Louisiana Jamboree in Shreveport. Since 2013 he’s released a full album and two EPs of his own music. Now based in Austin, Penrod was named Honky Tonk Male Artist of the Year in the 2017 Ameripolitan Music Awards, and in 2016 he was awarded the Academy of Western Artists’ Will Rogers Award for Pure Country Male Vocalist of the Year. New album coming soon, so keep your ears open. 

The Country Side of Harmonica Sam

This five-piece band is out of Sweden, of all places. They describe their music as “inspired by the honkytonk sound of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The band delivers steady 4/4 shuffles with whining steel guitar and tic-tac bass. Dale Watson is a huge fan; here’s what he wrote about the song “True Lies”: “Harmonica Sam’s vocals are reminiscent of Webb Pierce crossed with Wynn Stewart. The band is tight and confident and settle around Sam’s vocals like warm whiskey. Their originals are such natural progressions, drawn directly from their musical influences, yet obviously make their own individual sound and style.”

Casey James Prestwood and The Burning Angels

Prestwood has been nominated in the honkytonk male vocal category for this year’s Ameripolitan Music Awards. The band’s web presence is a little thin, but they’re based in Colorado and I pulled this off their Facebook page: “If the late night scene on Broadway Street in Nashville, Tennessee, could talk, they’d sing you a Casey James Prestwood tune. Drenched in the honest twang that made Gram Parsons and Hank Williams household names, the classic crooner’s carefree vocals and careful guitar playing feel more like country than a worn-in pair of cowboy boots.”

The band has released four albums, with the latest being Born Too Late.

Weldon Henson

With five albums under his belt, Henson is another Texas-based seasoned songwriter and performer. Along with his band Honky Tonk Frontier, they play extensively throughout the state at the historic dance halls and bars. Growing up in Humble, Texas, Henson played the piano and violin, and picked up the guitar in his late teens. After a stint in the Air Force, he moved to Austin and last Feb. 25 the mayor proclaimed it “Weldon Henson Day” for the city, placing him among the noted local ranks of Willie Nelson, Rosie Flores, and Jon Dee Graham.

Zephaniah OHora with The 18 Wheelers

One of my favorite albums from 2017 was OHora’s debut album This Highway. Based in Brooklyn — yeah, that Brooklyn — OHora is the music director at Skinny Dennis, the honky tonk bar named after Guy Clark’s bass player that is the center of the region’s classic country music scene. His album was heralded by a couple of other websites — Wide Open Country and Saving Country Music. American Songwriter magazine had this to say: “Channeling the country icons of decades past is something of a trend these days, but only a handful of artists are able to pull off such homage without devolving into mimicry. Brooklyn’s OHora is one of those artists.”

Since we don’t do all that much line dancing here, OHora’s music is less Texas dance hall and more Bakersfield with a touch of western swing. By the way, that video was from a recent gig in Sweden. Small world.

Let’s close this one out with the great Dale Watson himself.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Me and Richard Thompson Love Marissa Nadler

Photo by Ebru Yildiz

Seven years ago, just before Marissa Nadler’s 30th birthday, I watched a simple homemade video that was uploaded to Couch By Couch West, the online fest alternative to SXSW that launched in 2011 and sadly faded away after five years. The fingerstyle guitar and upper-register vocals really struck me as being familiar, yet it took me several days to realize that not only did I know Nadler’s music, but I actually had a whole bunch of her songs already sitting in my digital library. Some were downloaded from her website and Bandcamp page, others came from music nerds and weird old men from faraway places who file-shared late into the night and wrote things about her like this:

“Marissa Nadler could be a damsel who has tumbled from a frayed tapestry in search of her unicorn, a crystal doll who has escaped from her vitrine, or a tubercular maid who has slipped out of her Victorian deathbed photograph to traipse this earthly plane.”

“Part of me wishes she’d use her siren’s call to unite Sisters of the Moon in a woodland super-group of nymphs and urban wood-sprites.”

“She’s like a young Stevie Nicks, all doped up and duped to serve as Devendra Banhart’s geisha. Nah, too strong for that. How ’bout Donovan reincarnated as Linda Ronstadt? Except instead of a ’70s pop star, in this life she’s Fairy Queen of the Muir Woods, a mythical creature spotted only by hippie chicks who dare to eat strange mushrooms and venture into the redwoods past nightfall.”


Baby, I Will Leave In The Morning, May 2011

Throughout Nadler’s music career, which formally began in 2004 with the release of Ballads of Living and Dying, attempting to explain what sort of music she makes by putting a genre Post-it note on her is the equivalent of herding kittens hyped up on catnip. I tried my best to do it with a No Depression feature article that I published in 2011 titled “The Demystification of Marissa Nadler.”

After gently and courteously stalking her through social media and email, we put together an interview that introduced her to y’all bunch of alt-country hillbillies, aging cowpunks, and Americanarama-ites. And if you could get past the image of a Goth princess in heavy makeup with long flowing dresses who played freak-folk acoustic guitar with effect pedals and sang through layers of reverb as she opened late-night shows for metal bands, you might get as platonically smitten as I was and respect her work as an artist and musician.


Firecrackers, June 2014

This was my take on Nadler back then:

“She is not living in the land of unicorns and dragon slayers, her music is not all incense and peppermints, and it sits neatly on the shelf with artists ranging from Joni Mitchell to Emmylou Harris to Vashti Bunyan. There is a lot of talent, strength,and intelligence in this woman, and although I’ll admit that I fell for the image at first, it offers great satisfaction for me to help assist in the demystification of Marissa for you and bring it all back to Mother Earth.”


All The Colors of The Dark, February 2016

Today, at age 37, Nadler is married, still lives in the Boston area where she was raised, is an accomplished illustrator and artist, has toured all over the world while developing an adoring fan base, and has just released her eighth studio album, For My Crimes. It’s a more stripped-down album compared to some of her past work that nevertheless feels lush with a brilliantly executed production and mix. The songs are mostly guitar-centric with harmonies from Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Kristin Kontrol. Here’s Nadler’s description of her songs, which she shared with Jeff Terich at San Diego City Beat:

“They’re written from personal experience, but I think it’s a good thing if people think they feel they’re more like character sketches. I really believe in the power of people to connect with music like that. I was very much writing a personal album—pretty confessional songwriting for me, I guess. I don’t put people’s names in songs, though. It gets pretty tricky when art and life collide. It’s a very hard record for me to talk about because the songs are so personal, and I want to make sure not to cause any fires that I can’t put out.”


Blue Vapor, August 2018

Several days after the Sept. 28, 2018 release of For My Crimes, I sent Nadler a link to an article from The Quietus, an English music and pop culture site “for people aged 10 to 73.” They have an ongoing feature called “Bakers Dozen” in which they ask people to list their favorite albums, and Richard Thompson just published his. Along with Moby Grape, Crowded House, Offa Rex, Squeeze, The Watersons, The Left Banke, and others was Marissa Nadler’s Songs III: Bird On The Water from 2007, which was nominated as Best Americana Record of the Year at the 2007 PLUG Awards. Here’s what Thompson wrote:

“My youngest son, Jack, introduced me to Marissa Nadler. Her music is really strange, lovely stuff. I think it’s a little bit linked to shoegazing, or that sound, although I don’t know a lot about that. I find it very mesmerising and very dreamy, especially the way she harmonises with herself. I’m also never quite sure what she’s talking about – there’s lots of ambiguity in her lyrics, which I like. Songs and stories don’t always have to be straight.”

Within minutes of getting my message she replied “Insane!!! I’ll have to send him my new one! He’d probably like it if he liked that one.” I complimented her on all the press she has been getting on the new record. There’ve been articles and interviews from Rolling Stone, SPIN, Paste, Revolver Magazine, Consequence of Sound, Red Bull, and now, No Depression. She used to read ND back in high school and has covered songs by Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Bruce Springsteen. On her new album there’s a song about listening – or rather not listening – to Gene Clark from the Byrds. She’spends a lot of time on tour in the US and abroad, so check out her site for dates.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

The Film About Blaze Foley That You Didn’t See

 

Blaze Promo Photo/blazefoleymovie.com

Up until this past January I doubt that I’ve actually sat in a movie theater more than dozen times in the past six years. It’s not because I don’t enjoy watching films, but here in New York where tickets are usually around $15, I’m required to hop onto a train and subway to get into the city and it ends up blowing up my budget when you throw in lunch or dinner at the Saigon Shack on MacDougal and a side trip to The Strand for book shopping.

I tend to get my film fix on my 60-inch screen, using Netflix, Amazon Prime, or one of the premium cable channels. Earlier this year that changed with MoviePass, the $9.99-per-month subscription service that allowed me to go out and catch a different show 30 times in 30 days. It was hardly a surprise that this was not a sustainable business model, and this summer the company crashed, burned, and resurrected itself on life support, now offering only three hand-picked films per month. But for a good six months I devoured every big budget, indie, and foreign film I could possibly see, and I’m proud to say that not once have I succumbed to the concession stand.

On the first day of its release in the city a few weeks ago, I went to see Blaze, the biopic on the life of Mr. Foley that was brought to the screen by Ethan Hawke, who both directed it and co-wrote the screenplay with Sybil Rosen, whose memoir was the basis for this biopic. In the film she is portrayed by Alia Shawkat, the love interest in film parlance, while Ben Dickey – a musician with no previous acting experience – sparkles and shines as Foley. His performance is so strong that I’d be surprised if he doesn’t get nominated for some award or another. Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt, a friend and alcohol-fueled co-conspirator/prankster of Foley, acts as a narrator of sorts, conversing with interviewer Hawke, who remains offscreen, as Josh Hamilton, playing a composite musician by the name of Zee, sits uncomfortably and listens to what amounts to a bunch of tall tales. You also have a few interesting cameos such Kris Kristofferson, Gurf Morlix, and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra.

If you’re a country or roots music fan, whether you’re a longtime listener or new to Foley’s music, Ben Dickey’s live performances are so personal and spot-on that it might be difficult for some to separate the actor from the subject. And the story line, an odd duck country singer-songwriter whose relationship and music career are derailed by bad luck and bad choices, ends tragically. Because I have no knowledge or skill sets when it comes to writing a film review or critique, all I can add is that I simply loved it and at the end I just wanted to stay and watch it again. To be honest, the only reason for this week’s column is because I’ve yet to see a mention of it on the No Depression site and frankly, that makes no sense.

It was No Depression‘s co-founder Peter Blackstock who first introduced me to the name  Blaze Foley when he mentioned him with reverence almost 20 years ago in the original periodical. In September 2006 (issue #65) they published what is likely the definitive and best article ever written on Foley. Joe Nick Patoski is the author of The Fall and Rise of Blaze Foley,and although the print version may have faded over time, the story remains available to read right here on this website (click the title to get you there). One note of caution and sorrow: when No Depression migrated the original website to the current platform, the formatting was lost. But try not to let the giant word jumble deter you, as it’s a great article written by one of the best. It reminds you why the original No Depression magazine was so relevant and vital to the times.

Since you might have been expecting to read an actual review, I don’t want to disappoint. So I’ll drop in a couple of excerpts from other publications, and mention that this is a “small film,” which means at present it’s only been shown at film festivals and distributed to 43 theaters. Pulling in less than half a million dollars this month, it’s destined to make its journey to the world of streaming. Don’t miss it. Perhaps it’ll become a cult classic, an Americana musical, sort of like what Rocky Horror Picture Showdid for fishnet stockings and toast.

“Maybe it’s a stretch to make a biopic about a singer best known for a song another singer wrote about him. Or maybe that’s what biopics are for: to throw light onto figures who’ve been unfairly cast in the shadows. The better biopics, anyway, and Ethan Hawke’s ‘Blaze’ is one of them, even if a listen to Blaze Foley’s music hints at much that Hawke doesn’t quite capture about the man. Ben Dickey, an Arkansas-born rocker, plays the title character and matches Foley in bearlike heft and wayward eccentricity; the performance won a special jury award at Sundance this year.”
— Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“The great singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt used to say there are two kinds of music: the blues and zip-a-dee-doo-dah. Both are on full, florid display in ‘Blaze,’ an absorbing, illuminating film about the late musician Blaze Foley. With his bearlike physicality and unstudied air of emotional honesty and vulnerability, Ben Dickey commands the screen from start to finish in ‘Blaze,’ making even the film’s most self-pitying asides not just tolerable but also full of genuine regret.”
— Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

“Cinematographer Steve Cosens frames shots in ways that seem loose but capture both the grain of a place and its aura, how it seeps into people. Throughout the film, Hawke keeps returning to Foley’s last show at Austin’s legendary Outhouse bar, where he’s at the end of his tether but not — even whiskey-addled — his talent.

“Hawke’s syntax — the jumps from the Austin Outhouse concert to Van Zandt’s radio interview to life in the tree house and back — muddles the momentum. He even inexplicably jumps forward and back withinscenes. He’s like a film student fiddling around in the editing room, and he makes a hash of the events leading up to Foley’s violent death … for all his silly directorial stutter steps: he makes you believe in the power of music to summon ghosts.”
— David Edelstein, NPR

Outside of the film trailer at the beginning of the column, all of the video clips here are Blaze Foley and not Ben Dickey. They come from a variety of sources, and I’d be remiss to post this without acknowledging a previous film documentary produced and directed by Kevin Tripplet. Shot over an almost ten-year period, Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah was shown via non-traditional theatrical exhibition with Gurf Morlix in 2011. (It had an early showing at SXSW in 2009.) The DVD is available for purchase at Lost Art Records, which also is home to the six Foley albums that are in print. You can find Morlix’s tribute album, Blaze Foley’s 113thWet Dream, on his website and read an interview with him about the film and his album back from 2011 in The Austin Chronicle.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

A Tribute to Side One Of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo

Photo by Easy Ed

Barring any storm, fire,earthquake, malaria outbreak, tooth impaction, gall bladder attack, transit strike, fall, cut, bruise, forgetfulness, or worse, by the time you read this I’ll likely have had the pleasure of attending the Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman reunion concert, backed by Marty Stuart and The Fabulous Superlatives. It is the 50th anniversary of The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, one of several albums of the 1960s that assisted with the infusion of country music into the minds of baby boomer rockers and several generations thereafter. The month happens to coincide with another anniversary of sorts: Gram Parsons, who with the help of Chris Hillman brought the concept for the album to the band in 1968, passed away on Sept. 19, 1973.

I could easily cut, paste, and re-juggle the incredibly large volume of words already written about this album (the Wikipedia page is incredibly detailed), but I thought perhaps there might be another way to acknowledge the impact and importance that it has had over time. When Sweetheart was first released, it really didn’t resonate with most music fans of the day, who looked upon the group as the “American Beatles” with their string of jingle-jangle top 40 hit singles. But for those of us city folk who were enchanted with both the cowboy iconography and Nashville honky-tonk instrumentation, it was the game changer.

In a recent interview with Rock Cellar magazine, McGuinn talked to Jeff Slate about the album and tour:

“My wife and I were in an airport in Buenos Aires, waiting to get on a plane,” McGuinn says. “We remembered that it was the 50th anniversary of the album, and we were thinking about Chris Hillman, he’d had a tough year because his house was damaged in the fires in California last year, and Tom (Petty) had died, just after finishing Chris’ album with him, and so I said, ‘Man, let’s do something to cheer up Chris!’

“I think we were doing country music even before Gram was,” McGuinn points out, referring to Gram Parsons, who had just joined the Byrds at the time the band headed for Nashville, and who is often credited as the godfather of the country-rock genre. “He’d been through a Kingston Trio phase, and all the same things I’d been into. He was turned on by Elvis, just like the rest of us. And Elvis was combining country and rhythm and blues anyway, long before any of us. But we’d done ‘Time Between’ and ‘Old John Robertson’ and lots of other songs in that style long before Sweetheart.”

Hillman picks up the story, and gives Gram a little more credit:

“I met Gram, standing in line at the bank. He came over to rehearsal, and he had two great songs — ‘Hickory Wind’ and ‘One Hundred Years From Now’ — and his youthful exuberance, I think, too, gave us a shot in the arm that we really needed. It was good timing. The Sweetheart sessions were fun, because we were down in Nashville and I had a comrade. I had Gram, who loved country music like I loved country music. He understood it, just as I did. So we hit it off immediately, and we had great times during the sessions down there.”

Recently I had an idea to create a tribute to the album by finding some covers and originals and putting them together in a playlist that I could listen to and share with friends. Never got around to that, but it stuck with me. So you might be wondering why only Side One? To be honest, as I started to work on this column I got hungry and went out for pizza. As I walked passed by a theater I impulsively stopped to see a film and then went to a bookstore. When I got home I fed the cat, watched the news, and forgot about my deadline. And going through YouTube looking for the right clips took longer than I anticipated, but abracadabra — a new concept has emerged. The one-sided tribute is now a thing, and trending.

You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere – Counting Crows

I Am A Pilgrim – Merle Travis

https://youtu.be/fqVtQzRwYTw

The Christian Life – The Louvin Brothers

You Don’t Miss Your Water – William Bell

You’re Still On My Mind – Rodney Crowell

Pretty Boy Floyd – Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal

P.S. The show went on, I didn’t get malaria and was able to sneak up to a primo box seat overlooking the center stage. It was magic.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.