Robert Earl Keen in St. Louis

Lola and I decide we need a bit of a road trip having not escaped Madison since driving to Champaign to see James McMurtry in the bitter mid-winter cold. Searching for ideas, we discover Robert Earl Keen is playing The Pageant in St. Louis the Saturday night of Memorial Day Weekend, and the destination is settled. Since he doesn’t need to tour outside of Texas, it seems like a fair deal to meet him halfway when he does take the show on the road.

Artist Direct: Among the large contingent of talented songwriters who emerged in Texas in the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Earl Keen struck an unusual balance between sensitive story-portraits ("Corpus Christi Bay") and raucous barroom fun ("That Buckin' Song"). These two song types in Keen's output were unified by a mordant sense of humor that strongly influenced the early practitioners of what would become known as alternative country music.

The North Mississippi Allstars open with each band doing 75 minute sets. Lola and I settle into seats on the wing and chat with three couples from childhood friendships who similarly converge on this show from various parts of Missouri. I venture into the stage front crowd when the band plays “the road goes on forever and the party never ends”.

Keen closes with Bob Dylan’s You Ain't Going Nowhere which is first recorded in 1968 by The Byrds on their seminal roots country album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It’s a pleasant surprise and appropriate in that Sweetheart, arguably, is the recording that marks the abrupt about face from the excesses of psychedelia and back towards an appreciation of the music created by American working people.

Dale Watson Nights

Lola and I first come across Dale Watson on a wonderful summer evening in the ancient sandstone basement of the old Fess Hotel. This is July of 1999. Since then we attend his shows at Tex Tubbs on Atwood Avenue and Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon in Austin, Texas. That and every show he has played at the Club Tavern in Middleton since the turn of the century. So last night when we are asked if we’ve seen Dale before, we honestly answer yes, about a dozen times.

I never saw Johnny Cash in person so I’m not wasting opportunities to observe the closest practitioner of that musical lineage. This is a common thought by many in the Club Tavern audience last evening. Now this is not to imply that he is a gifted mimic. Quite the contrary. Dale Watson is as authentically skilled as any of the historical predecessors.

YouTube pulls up 175 videos but most of them are fan postings from the various venues of the traveling road show. If you aren’t sleeping on the tour bus, it probably means some corporate sponsor is picking up the hotel bills. Every soul, it is said, has a price. Then, of course, there are the gigs like Oneida, where you don’t have to play marathon shows and the casino puts the crew up in style for three or four days.

After some thought, I decide not to post any videos because even the few with professional production fall short of capturing the total complexity of the live stage performances. Besides, Dale is producing a diverse and maturing body of work that is impossible to appropriately summarize with one, two or even three examples. If anyone is really interested, Strictly Discs on Monroe Street will be more than happy to get you started.

The Race and Gender Blues

Last Saturday is International Women’s Day and the Madison Blues Society seizes the nomenclature to use as a fundraiser. The Brink Lounge hosts the event featuring Chicago based blues guitarist Sue DeBaco followed by Canadian born, now Austin based Sue Foley. Lola and I agree this is a good opportunity to hear Ms. Foley for the first time so we pay our $30 and order drinks.

Sue DeBaco puts on a Chicago Blues performance. Adequate vocals and frantic guitar work combined with an overbearing obsession with audience banter. It’s a stage show perfected for suburbanite crowds out to have an adventuresome night downtown in a big city Blues Club. Clap with me, sing along, have some drinks, tip your bartenders. Let me play you something in the style of Hendrix.

At intermission I slip into the lounge to watch the end of the Wauwatosa East v. Madison Memorial Wisconsin Boy’s State Basketball Championship game. Madison has victory in hand until Wauwatosa ties the game with a three point shot sending it into overtime. Alas, Memorial finishes second again. Lola tells me I miss Kathleen Falk give her Guest Speaker presentation. Kathleen, allegedly, says she wakes up every morning thinking about Rosa Parks. Every morning? That’s just absurd unless it's part of a specific meditation ritual upon rising. Just saying.

Sue Foley begins her time on stage with solo acoustic songs before bringing out her band to finish the acoustic set. It’s all very polished and sparkling. It’s the kind of mastery that a smoke free room of affluent white people appreciate. The electric set that follows is decidedly good but I can’t help thinking this would be much, much better if the room was much darker, hot and hazy, and scarred by the wear and tear of time.

Chambana Road Trip

Every now and then a moment is just everything you want it to be. For example, leaning against the painted black eight foot two by four railing of the six steps leading up to the stage of Champaign Illinois’s old downtown porno theater now rehabbed as 'The High Dive', and being in the core of the sound bubble as James McMurtry's band plays 'Choctaw Bingo' for an appreciate packed crowd.

These days McMurtry is based out of Austin, Texas so when they drift this close to Wisconsin it is worth the four hour drive and over night stay to catch them live. Remind me to thank the parents for the Christmas money and let them know we used it to listen to a lyricist so gifted he can place the phrases 'sewer line' and 'zoned commercial' perfectly into a song about inheritance.

Monday Night Out

Tonight is Red Stick Ramblers night at the High Noon Saloon. Lola and I catch them twice in Bristol, Tennessee a little over a year ago and vow to attend any place these Louisiana boys show up locally. If that means a Monday night show in downtown Madison, so be it.

It is the bands first trip to Wisconsin and they don’t know what to expect from a weeknight show in a town that none of them have ever been before. What they get is about a hundred people and an active dance floor. The dual Cajun fiddle mastery of Linzay Young and Kevin Wimmer form the acoustic heart around which the band drifts into zydeco rhythms and south delta blues and dirt poor country melodies of the bayou.

The big world always has lots of problems, so every now and then it is perfectly proper to welcome in autumn with some live music and a couple taps of Capital Brewery Oktoberfest as a reminder that life is pretty good.

Atwood Summerfest 2007

As of this month, Wisconsin has a Truth in Music Law requiring at least one member of the group that performed or recorded under a groups name still be in the group before a performance can be promoted as a groups performance. Got that? It’s a copyrite thing.

In the 1967 Summer of Love, Canned Heat is playing blues based sets at the Monterey Pop Festival. 40 years later drummer Fito de la Para retains the name and continues to play gigs from stages set up in the parking lots of neighborhood bars. Hey, more power to anyone who spends his life doing what he wants.

Maximum Ink: How many lineup changes has the group had?
DE LA PARRA: We’ve had more than 30 lineup changes in 42 years, it’s been a crazy ride. So when people ask me, “Who is in Canned Heat now?” it’s okay, because as long as I’m there, it’s still Canned Heat.

It’s just another beautiful summer day in Wisconsin and the city has closed off a few blocks of Atwood Avenue so the neighbors can party in the street. The Maximum Ink stage speakers rebound off the new condos across the road but no one is out on the balconies to take advantage of those most excellent sight lines. The long time residents, however, turn out in droves with their children and pets for a grand afternoon.

Gentrification is following the same patterns with the same tensions in Madison as in every city of America. None of the people I speak with want their neighborhood marred by ugly overhead wires and their main avenue busted up by rail tracks to ferry high paid government employees to their downtown jobs. Be a man Mayor Dave. The best way to save face is to admit the public doesn’t want your toy trains and drop the idea.

Canned Heat plays through their 40 year old “hits” with the bored professionalism of anyone doing the same task for the thousandth time. Fortunately the local bands kick up the noise with the joy of people playing for fun and the striving of musicians earnestly working to build a legacy, like The Gomers and Bobby Bryan respectively. Around 3 PM a B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber cruises overhead which reminds me why these peaceful community gatherings are still free of suicide bombers.

La Fête de Marquette 2007

In the industrial corridor east of the Capital is a 17 acre bare patch of land between the rail tracks. In the middle of our dry summer the grass is patchy brown and the fine dirt perfectly dusty. It’s a great spot for a party. This is the second year of La Fête de Marquette, the French themed festival of the Marquette Neighborhood Association. Lola and I recall the shade less afternoon heat of the inaugural event, so this year we wait till later in the day to catch the young kids of Feufollet and the legendary talents of C. J. Chenier.

Nothing quite says Madison like a guy in a New Orleans tee shirt that says: Make Levee Not War, standing in front of the Sierra Club booth as a fully loaded coal train rumbles immediately behind them. Something has to burn to make enough electricity to power those big stage speakers. Of course, irony is integral to the social fabric of Madison. Last year the goal was to raise funds to turn this piece of open ground in the middle of the city into a central park. This year the goal is to raise awareness of central park.

Awareness Not Funds for Central Park: Hundreds celebrated the French holiday "Bastille Day" on Madison's Near-Eastside tonight at the proposed site for what could become one of the city's largest parks. The second annual La Fete de Marquette was not raising funds for Central Park tonight, but rather awareness for the park's potential. Central Park needs a lot of money before it becomes a reality. This year, the money from the French festival will go towards the more immediate needs of the neighborhood.

There is a time tested way of achieving results in this city and it goes awareness first, tax levy second. Near the end of the evening another freight train rolls towards downtown with ten cars stacked with very large tubes of missile compatible diameters. Big plans are moving forward all over Capital City. As the sun goes down the music is incredible and dancing fills the evening.

In case the Marquette organizers stumble across this corner of cyberspace, I do appreciate two fiddlers on either side of an accordion, dredging up Louisiana swamp roots. So in honor of the French contribution to our national character, I nominate The Red Stick Ramblers for next year. Lâche pas la patate.

Picnic Blues

“Blues music is primarily a "live" art form,” so seven state bands get together in Warner Park to play. Los Angles native and current Madison resident Bobby Bryan and his Original Downtown Players close out a lovely cloudy blue sky summer evening, at the 5th annual Madison Blue’s Society Picnic. The band is the Wisconsin selection to compete in the upcoming International Blues Competition in Memphis next January.

Isthmus: The Madison Blues Society’s annual Blues Picnic has always been a fund-raiser for the organization. But society president Catherine DeValk says the free event hasn’t always raised much in the way of funds. … “This year we’re living within our budget,” DeValk says.

Even as he goes on record supporting the blues, living within a budget is a lesson lost on Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz. His profligate obsession with spending Madison in to decades of debt for misguided rail based infrastructure will leave generations of Madisonians with sorrows to sing.

People in the Kenosha area should take advantage of any opportunity of see Living Will perform. When Tom and Joel get their guitars amped up Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix start smiling. Sweet easy summertime living.

A Lieberman Ripple

It is a beautiful afternoon, Madison is a beautiful city and the Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood is one of our archetypical communities. For a number of years the neighborhood association schedules a Jazz In The Park day and so Lola and I decide to spend the late afternoon with some live music on the edge of Lake Wingra.

This near west side area is a Democrat enclave and I would not be surprised if Party membership is a deed restriction. These are the people who have kept Fred Risser in state government since 1956. Back in 1881 former Governor Washburn donates his Edgewood estate to the Dominican Sisters to provide Catholic educations. In 1945, in the aftermath of WWII, a number of Jewish settlers move to the area eventually founding Temple Beth El. Over time, non-judgmental community empowerment sets deep roots in the marsh lands.

This year, merely meters away from the Synagogue, clusters of citizens are proudly wearing their “Hands Off Iran” buttons. Then in the public remembrance of the late union activist and festival founder is a plea for the community to cherish the ideals of the ancient Greek city-states, where citizens debate and decide on the issues of war and peace. The thought crosses my mind that perhaps a Lieberman ripple is passing through Madison.

Then observing the men and women associating freely in shorts and summer wear, enjoying cold bottles of beer and sparkling wines, listening to music and playing with dogs, it strikes me that this glorious afternoon would absolutely be prohibited in Iran. Of course, we have our community and those far away Persians have their own cultural ways that should be respected. Besides, the park signs warn the serious approaching danger is foreign mollusks.

Last Night in Vegas

You know the sound: the continual tinka tinka ching blending with babbling chatter. It’s a long walk south through the crowds and construction dust but Lola knows what she wants at the MGM Grand. So sitting at a counter in L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon we finish dinner with a fragrant Armagnac no longer listed on the menu. We have only four bottles left from 1986 says Fred, and you know we have a celebrity present? Yeah Fred, we know Robin Williams has been sitting immediately behind us this last hour. The high roller aspirations are so quintessentially “The Strip”. It's all fake dear but fabulously authentically fake.

Yet yearning for something authentically real we then grab a cab to get away from the all the manipulated and manufactured opulence. The driver is clueless but his dispatcher knows where to find Sand Dollar Blues Lounge. A subdued sign on the side of a two story building is all that marks the doorway. It’s as if the venue proclaims: I ain’t trying to find you if you ain’t trying to find me. Outside people are riding up on bikes and inside Andy Walo is filling an old black walled room with complex and inspired guitars riffs. Years of honing his skills in the Chicago blues bars shows as the band follows his lead through playful, soulful and intense emotions. The dancers and aficionados in the audience rightfully approve. It’s exactly the best place to end up in the darkness of the desert.

A Tuesday Night in January

It is time to write the property tax check. Time to place it in the pretty yellow envelop and stick a rat stamp on it. Thank you US Postal Service for remembering the Chinese have a year of the rodent. Drive to the big line of drop boxes and wave the money goodbye as it heads off to buy top of the line health insurance for all the union teachers. Mosey over to the Brew Pub for a pint and a quick listen to the house band. Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone and the Statesboro Blues. Drift back home consoled we have the government we deserve.

Dale Watson Night

Get a clue: Dale Watson in the Club Tavern with a Lone Star.

Lola says we are now in attendance double digits for Dale Watson shows. I believe she is correct and know for sure the first time was in the basement of the Great Dane Pub a block off Capital Square on July 20, 1999. Lola immediately senses there is something special in this band from Austin, Texas who are picking up a last minute paying gig on a trip up north.

Moose must have also sensed the vibe because the story goes he gave the boys food to eat, a place to crash and a stage to play whenever they found themselves in the neighborhood. Every Dale Watson night since has been remarkably unique. Tonight the stage banter muses about the inferior product corporate music is marketing, so it is no longer appropriate to call his work country music. Moose proposes calling it roadhouse music for historical accuracy, but Lola and I agree the proper term is honky-tonk. Music of the people, by the people and for the people people with kick ass guitars and a fiddle player.

Tennessee Road Trip Soundtrack

The 2006 new Camry Tennessee road trip is officially over after 2,195 miles on the long flat roads of the Mississippi River floodplain, to the crest and plummet pathways through the ridge and valley Appalachians. A lot of good things happened but the music is worth remembering.

Memphis has been pouring money into Beale Street for twenty years and the crumbling brick buildings are now completely gone and the neon is bright and abundant. There is good music in the clubs but my favorite place remains the band box of Blues City Cafe. The black poverty of south Memphis is still quite close and the bums and rascals and petty con artists are everywhere, but Lola and I have no concerns on late night downtown streets and our upper floor hotel room looks out over miles of the big river.

We check out Soulsville USA, also known as the STAX Museum of American Soul Music. Tina Turner’s stage dress and Otis Redding artifacts are worth a glance but it is Isaac Hayes’s 1972 "Superfly" Cadillac that triggers true desire. I want it and I want to drive its gold plated, white fur, teal blue opulence. Drive it real slow up and down McLemore Avenue with Sam and Dave or Booker T and MG’s playing from the speakers on a summer night.

In Nashville we skip the tourist zone and head for the gulch. We eat Texas BBQ while a county band plays their versions of the current corporate template. The singer songwriter takes pride in the one tune he got recorded by some “hat act”, with some airtime on WSM. It’s the classic tableau: getting stage time for a dinner crowd while trying to find the right solution to the fame and fortune formula.

Later on at 12th and Porter the other Nashville rocks the night. The building retains the big garage doors from some original purpose, but now a cavernous work bay is painted black from floor to ceiling and Atomic Blonde is pounding out seriously loud and furious emotions. Four young women choose this town to form a band with the dream of following “in the footsteps of rock goddesses like Janis Joplin, Chrissie Hynde or Debbie Harry.” Kendra controls the dynamic with her drum beats and Dacia commands the audience with her vocal presence. Amazing how a little head banging clears the mind.

The birthplace of authentic American country music is the region on the backside of the eastern mountains, away from the culture of the eastern seaboard cities. Lola and I are in Bristol for the Rhythm & Roots Reunion which has attracted around 40,000 people to listen to the hundreds of musicians. Of the two performers we specifically came to hear, Jim Lauderdale didn’t bring a band and Junior Brown apparently fired his long time drummer the night of the show. Professional to the core, however, they both show up on time and perform.

A band from Louisiana called The Red Stick Ramblers emerges as our favorite new discovery, and it is a pleasure to hear established masters like the Seldom Scene and the Del McCoury Band in person. We want to buy a recording of Chet O'Keefe and the Farmers Co-Op but Chet tells us they haven’t had enough money to do one yet. He hopes some sort of deal will come together this November. There may well be a deal because there is always a deal for the talented and the driven. We live with our ears tuned to the vibrations of the world, it is a fundamental aspect of our nature, and the exceptional flourishes are always captivating.

Talking Buys Time

OK, it has been 73 days since Lola and I last heard Ben Sidran play live and outside in the Wisconsin evening air, so tonight it is Jazz at Five on the Capital Square. The 10 piece Latin Jazz group Madisalsa follows with Santana styled rhythms and one excited youth blurts out: “This is so Madison; there is no other city like it”. More mature adults converse about the stupidity of criminals, the folly of trolley and the impact of taxes on the poor.

In Tehran, the Chinese Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai has a meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqch to express Chinese regrets the United Nations took so long to stop the horrible fighting in Lebanon. It is speculated the Chinese are advising the Mullahs to say the right words on the world stage, because simply put, talking buys time. The leadership of the Islamic Republic is not stupid and their spending is not dependent on tax dollars. Their dreams are of grander things than simply looping in circles and time, after all, is what it takes to achieve visionary goals.

Again

Again

What A Wonderful World

“Feel the breeze, sway with the music and watch the sun set over Lake Mendota, ahhhh!” The Isthmus Jazz Festival translocates to the UW Madison Memorial Union Terrace and the performers groove and bebop in perfect weather against the iconic Madison backdrop.

Of course you need to be a member in order to purchase a Leines or a Capital, and so in some sense The Isthmus is retreating from the greater community and back into the University. One thirty something adult gentleman arrives wearing the most elaborate multicolored silk screen Che Guevara shirt I have ever seen and it reminds me of the difference between the left and the right.

Che Guevara: "Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy."

The musical groove from Ben and Leo Sidran is more in tune with pleasant summer evenings and when Gerri DiMaggio, Jeannie Woodall, Sara Yervand, Michelle DuVall get together to sing Louis Armstrong's “What A Wonderful World”: it is.

Memorial Day 2006

Lola and I drop in on Brat Fest three times over the weekend, avoiding the Celebrity Cashiers and listening to the Bands outside in the glorious summer warmth. Even in the midst of Madison the willows near the water are majestic, with dragon flies zipping and baby geese floating in tight gatherings near their parents. $5.00 beers are selling even though this is clearly price gouging. Half way through the Phat Phunktion set, one of the performers says: “How about giving up a little love because we will give it right back.”

There are lots of people in Madison sincerely believing the environment is in danger and the economy only benefits the wealthy. A lot of them think that love is a sufficient response to evil. Moments like this, where the kids run in the sunshine and the adults relax in the shade, exist because Americans have fought for the right to live with liberty within a peace achieved through strength and justice. Some people through pride and false principle will never understand or acknowledge the sacrifice. Fortunately, most of us do.

Truckstop Honeymoon Night

Lola and I live in Madison, despite the intellectually misguided leadership, because major University towns are stopping points for individuals from all the backgrounds of the planet. Tonight we attend a show at Cafe Montmartre because authentic country music comes from the people living downwind from the chemical plants. Besides, real life is better than recording.

Truckstop Honeymoon: Katie Euliss learned guitar, piano and bucket bass in the streets of New Orleans. She scammed enough money from tourists to buy Lucky Strikes and smoked oysters for six years. Then she met Mike West. Part entertainer, part snake oils salesman, Mike lived by pickin’ banjo and selling cds that he claimed were a curative for hangovers and small mindedness. Together they began a perpetual tour of North America, Europe and Australia. They spent their wedding night in the Tiger Truck Stop, somewhere between Lafayette and the Atchafalya Swamp, Truckstop Honeymoon was born.

Katrina destroyed the 9th Ward of New Orleans where the law never really cared much about how people lived. All nine of their chickens drowned and the strawberries were dispersed in all directions. In the purest of tradition of country music, Katie and Mike sing about the reality and dreams of the children of asphalt pavers raising children of their own, while aspiring for a love just like June and Johnny Cash.

Get A Clue

Dale Watson in the Club Tavern with a Lone Star.

Every New Day Changes Something

All day long the news channels warn of Katrina bearing down with Biblical wrath upon the City of New Orleans. By late afternoon on this perfect blue sky summer day, Lola decides we should attend C J Chenier & the Red Hot Louisiana Band. Some people in the crowd are aware of the news and some people have not turned on a television in days. The band puts on a tremendous performance because Zydeco is party music to help you forget the hard times life blows your way. Midway in the show, CJ tosses off one comment about heading back to I-10.

Madison is filled with a core group of believers that The Republican Party and George Bush and Corporate Capitalism are the worst threat to the poor and oppressed on this planet. I learned along time ago, it isn’t worth my time to talk with them. A few liberals without a pathological obsession with ideology may eventually understand why Iraq was the correct choice for the second battlefield against the Jihadists who attacked us first. For example: A War to Be Proud Of by Christopher Hitchens.

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty.

The sun will come out tomorrow and the new day will be filled with challenges. Every new day is.