Roots Rock Blog: Pat Green, Henry French, Album Charts, 20 Questions with Cross Canadian Ragweed

From my blog for NUVO  in Indianapolis (nuvo.net) – check it out there a couple times a week for show reviews and info like this:
On the Americana airplay chart from Radio & Records, Otis Gibbs was at #5 with his “Grandpa Walked A Picketline” album. The Gourds “Haymaker!” album is in the top spot, as last week’s #1 album, “Little Honey” from Lucinda Williams falls to #4.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ “Raising Sand,” which won album of the year at the Grammy’s on Sunday, re-entered the Billboard album chart at No. 68, with sales of 9,000 last week. For the chart, most gains are a result of downloads on Sunday night after the show. The Fray earned its first #1 on The Billboard 200 with its sophomore self-titled album selling 179,000. Last week’s #1, Bruce Springsteen’s “Working on a Dream”, slips to No. 2 in its second week with 102,000 sold.
***
Great little “20 Questions” interview with personal fave Cody Canada of Cross Canadian Ragweed. They blew the roof of the Vogue in late 2008 and defy simple music pigeonholing – they just rock in an American rock and roll way. Check out interview here….
***
Choose Only One? Live Show Pick: Henry French and the Shameless  rocked Birdy’s on Saturday night (2.14). They have a great EP “Swagger and Sway”. One of those bands (Bodeans, Swinging Steaks, Replacements) that make hook-filled, guitar-driven, songwriting-strong heartland rock records. Hear more here.
***
Though he has always been my Bryan Adams of country music, I have liked Pat Green for a long time. CMT.com says his new song “Country Star” (and watch some sidestage video – they come out to “Eminance Front”…) is “hooky, catchy and funny enough to move him from edgy Texas rocker to full-on Nashville phenom. And it’s about time.”He is great live, and I love Texas music, even if Pat has watered his down for more mainstream success. Jack Ingram has done the same. Still, would rather listen to those two than most of the glossy, sugary, disposable country music that is on the radio and dominate awards shows. Dann Huff produces (Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts are two other clients) so that means no rough edges. Still, worth staying on board with Green. Oh, and I liked Bryan Adams until he started to suck.
***
Randy Rogers Band received an Academy of Country Music nomination this week for vocal group of the year. They will lose to Rascal Flatts, but nice to have a rowdy Oklahoma/Texas/Red Dirt band get noticed.
****
Finally, an interesting into-the-head blog from Springsteen on his official site. Bruce blogging? Multiple albums in one year? Ten years ago, who would have thought those two could happen? Actually, a terrific blog. (Read it here) Bruce rarely writes prose, instead does interviews and writes songs. So it is a bit unsettling to read. But behind-the-scenes is what we want, right? Plus a striking photo gallery from Danny Clinch.

Concert Review: Jason Wilber & His Fabulous Band w/Tim Grimm/The Royal Theatre/Danville, IN

jasonwilber250It’s rare to take the three variables of every concert – venue, sound and performer – and get all three right. Saturday night, the three came together in a better-than-should-be expected way, and gave the Jason Wilber show at the Royal Theatre in Danville a magical quality.
Wilber, the fulltime guitar player for folk legend John Prine, hushed a crowd of nearly 300 at the historic theatre with his folk-inflected songs. It was a wise move to bring along a full band, featuring a sax and trumpet, drums and bass, and John Mellencamp’s keyboard player Troye Kinnett all finding the spots to sneakily shine.
It was a listening audience, less concerned with chatting up friends than they were to hang on the notes and the words of the performance. A nice change from the cacophony that can be a club show.
The musicians took advantage of the focused audience to hit their spots and serve the music. Tim Grimm and wife Jan opened the show, with 40 minutes of exquisite vocal interplay, understated and funny stories, and Tim’s great folk finger-picking. He adds a bit of percussion to his strumming and pushes the songs along, while Jan’s high harmonies would make Emmylou Harris smile. I’d drop him into a Lyle Lovett/Robert Earle Keen/James McMurtry for this night. Midway through their set, Jan pulled out an instrument she called a “spring drum” to an evocative, rumbling success, perfectly providing a unique duet to Tim’s words and guitar. A thoroughly enjoyable set.
Clean, nearly pristine sound is an element of the great little theatre. So many times at a show, I can’t hear certain instruments, or the volume is too loud or not loud enough. I am picky about the mix at a show, and am relatively unsympathetic to a room (and live sound man) that could do better, especially if it is a music venue that hosts shows regularly. Whether you have had 5 or 50 years to solve any problems with the venue sound mix, if a room sounds good, I like to think it’s an owner who cares enough to make it right. They have it right at Royal.
Wilber put together the evening with Grimm (he and Grimm and Wilber work together on many occasions, including recording a unique “soundtrack” to James Still’s play “Amber Waves” which is the story of immigrants who settle on a farm in Indiana.) and his decision to bring a band (Jason Wilber and His Fabulous Band) elevated Wilber’s music. The five other musicians were effective in pushing the energy level higher on many of Jason’s tunes. Laying down a Stax-like sound on the upbeat songs, and fitting and filling in beautifully on the slow songs, Kinnett especially shined, not just on solos, but coloring the night’s music with pretty piano and a gospel B3 sound.
Jason was generous with the providing spots for musicians to step forward, making eye contact with each in most songs, nodding for solos to start, and smiling to himself when the band put him in the musical pocket so he could close his eyes and feel the music around him.
He told stories throughout the evening, many short and simply told recollections of where he wrote a song (whether it was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, or London) and then letting the audience hear the rest of the story as he played it.
Mixing older songs off his solo records with what he revealed as new music, Wilber was comfortable, seasoned and engaged all night. His story about sitting in Russell Square in London, on his way to, but never arriving at, a famous art museum, was typical of the evening. Good stories told in a movie house. He remembered how he enjoyed the park in London and its surroundings far too much to leave, even for a museum he was informed he must see.
Emitting a nice 1970s vibe, the theatre, built in 1927 and smartly refurbished, has the letter “R” in multiple monogram-style spots on each side of a blueish/green room color. Or that’s the color to me ,with the lights low and after a visit to the hidden jewel of the night: a tiny theatre taproom. (They have area-brewed beers and wine).
Can you tell it was a good evening? A terrific night of heartland-infused music, in a cool theatre, from two Indiana singer/songwriters who represent a folk tradition that, based on this night, seems pretty healthy in Central Indiana.
The Royal Theatre has upcoming shows on the schedule; the booking of Alejandro Escovedo in April is brilliant. He’s touring behind a fantastic album and Springsteen-certified after the two dueted on Escovedo’s “Always a Friend” at a Bruce show in 2008.
Put me down for two.

Concert Review: Old Crow Medicine Show – The Vogue/Indianapolis

oldcrowvogue250The crowd at the sold out Vogue Theatre was ready for the Old Crow Medicine Show to bring the old country instrumentation and killer harmonies to town on Saturday night, and the Nashville band didn’t disappoint those packed into the club.
By the time the band hit their third song, “Humdinger” from their
recent Tennessee Pusher album, both the group and the crowd were
into high-energy mode.
Performing most of the songs off the new record, OCMS’ guitarist and singer
Willie Watson introduced “Next Go Round” as a “genuine country song,” and then singer/fiddle player Ketch Secor dedicated “I HearThem All” to Pete Seeger, who they had met the night before at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival.
Old Crow dipped generously into two of their older albums, 2006’s “Big Iron World” and 2004’s “O.C.M.S.” for “James River Blues”, a rousing “Union Made”, crowd favorite “Cocaine Habit” and
their most well-known song, “Wagon Wheel”, which got the fans of the band into full singalong gear midway through the second of two sets they played.
Their bluesy version of “C.C.Rider” was dedicated to the women in the house, and Secor spent much of the between-song moments reciting landmarks in Indianapolis, and making it known the band had studied up on Broad Ripple
and the Hoosier State. He ripped off a list of cities and towns as the encores ran down, mentioning Goshen, Richmond, Vincennes, Fort Wayne and Evansville.
Their reputation for live show preceded them, and OCMS connected Saturday night. For a rock and roll/bluegrass band that doesn’t make it onto the radio too often, and relies on word-of-mouth, the web and their reputation to build
their audience up, they did nothing to disappoint the Indy folks, most of whom obviously have the albums and/or have seen them play before, judging from the reaction to both the new and old material.
Good to see the knowledge Indianapolis has for a roots band like Old Crow Medicine
Show. A nice mix of men and women (a little more than half of the crowd was male) did their homework, knew their stuff and supported a band that, despite their lack of true mainstream success, have carved a meaningful niche
in the Americana music world, and put it into the spotlight Saturday night.

OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW HITS INDIANAPOLIS WITH NEW ALBUM, CLASSIC SOUNDS

oldcrowbw2With Tennessee Pusher, left-of-center bluegrass-slash-rock band Old Crow Medicine Show has a new album iconic and idiosyncratic enough to be both mainstream and misunderstood. If justice were to prevail, this gem of a record would be in line to earn a Country Album of the Year award.  But it won’t and you get the feeling Old Crow’s Ketch Secor doesn’t care.
“When I listen to country radio, I listen to it because I like to know what we are up against and who is setting the trends we are here to buck,” says Secor, the chief songwriter and frontman for a band that doesn’t seem to give a crap about pomp or glitz. As Secor talks, it’s evident he wants real, tangible, greasy, smoky, oozing vitality in his music, whether out of the five band members he tours with, or from speakers that play the music of others.
“I believe in the power of music – to console, comfort, heal and to bring joy.” Says Secor, on the phone from Nashville as the band gears up for a tour that will take it across the United States again and then to Australia for the first time. The band hits Indy for a show at the Vogue January 31, for the fourth stop of the tour
The record debuted at #7 on the Billboard Country Music album charts with scarcely any mainstream radio help.
And here’s why it is a great album: It is full of hook-laden, embraceable harmonies and genuine rock and roll attitude from a bunch of guys who have cloaked it all in classic country instrumentation. Unique yet familiar. An oddly compelling record that reveals itself with multiple listens, as great albums do. Well-crafted and inspirational songs about mortality (“Evening Sun”, “Next Go ‘Round”) mixed with boozy party songs (“Alabama High-Test” – an ode to moonshine, and “Humdinger” – a Crow retro-sounding cut about a cop-free party).
There are also distinct reminders of influences that blow through their music. Listen closely and hear moments that echo The Beatles, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Kristofferson, Springsteen, Skynyrd, and Neil Young.
Playing music together since 1998, Old Crow Medicine Show was started by Harrisonburg, Virginia junior high buddies Secor and Critter Fuqua. They went to New York state, met friends Willie Watson and Ben Gould, and recorded a record (1998’s Trans:mission) in Critter’s bedroom, so they would have something to sell when they went on the road. Since then, the current lineup of Secor, Fuqua, Watson, traveled hard – crisscrossing the country, playing thousands of shows.
“People are going to get a high energy, pulse-racing, foot-stomping show,” Secor says of the band’s concert. “Sometimes it feels like a little bit of a camp meeting, like a little proselytizing is going on, in a snake handling, strychnine drinking way. Though I’m not saying were are going to drink strychnine on stage, and I don’t want to encourage anyone else to either. But if you are seeing us for the first time, I do hope you have tomorrow off from work.”
Secor, intelligent and forthcoming in an interview, is strident about his quest to carry American music forward.
“Regionality in music is one of the most important factors we have today,” he says, as I hear a dog bark in the Nashville background. “I like a sense of place in music. I really like artists who come from somewhere. Listen to John Cougar and you know the guy’s from the Hoosier state. There’s a backdrop to all the language in his songs. There is a rusty truck idling outside of a Quik Mart. I know where that is.”
There is plenty of unique landscape in the “Tennessee Pusher” album. The harmonies are raggedly perfect. The fiddle playing screams like a rock and roll guitar. The banjos and harmonicas and stand up bass ring familiar. It is deep-rooted American music, blasted into 2009.
Produced by Don Was (best known for helping resurrect the career of Bonnie Raitt, crafting her 1990 “Nick of Time” Grammy winning album), the band also enlisted legendary drummer Jim Keltner for six of the 12 tracks and Tom Petty keyboardist Benmont Tench on four.
“The album is a progression more than a departure from our earlier albums,” Secor says. “It is a little more accessible. That is because of Don.”
Secor seems to relish the band’s place in the continuum of American music, no matter what their too-soon-to-tell legacy ends up being.
“I am honored to be a part of the work that has gone on in the past to get us to the present,” he adds. “I like to think Old Crow and Barrack and the dreamers, thinkers and tinkerers are all part of a new paradigm.”
(also read at nuvo.net – Indianapolis’s Alternative Newsweekly)

New Springsteen – Working on Dream – The First Listen

bannertour2Picked up the new Bruce Springsteen album “Working on A Dream” a few days early. It is getting both roundly ripped for being rushed and lyrically vapid, and also earning some glowing reviews, focusing on the well-executed pop/rock sonic departure and commending him for not using his platform to perform a soundtrack to the Obama juggernaut.
Here’s really what it is: “Working on a Dream” actually allows us a new way to listen to a Springsteen album. Is rocks and pops like nothing he has made. Clear and undone of the muddy Brendan O’Brien production of “Magic”, it positively gleams. The band shines, even if much of it was overdubbed, after a core group of Bruce, pianist Roy Bitten, drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Gary Tallent cut the basic tracks. But it moves me. And I wasn’t trying to like it, anymore than I was trying to hate it. I was just listening.
There are hooks and shining chord changes and plenty to make it as interesting – in spiritually musical sense – as any music coming from any artist.
Lyrically, I will give those who say the gut-wreching, subtle universal truths revealed by Bruce are fewer than on, say, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”. Yet it feels like a record (and I will periodically still use the term RECORD to refer to albums. I won’t however, say EIGHT-TRACK) that will grow, peeling back to reveal more good tracks than bad with repeated listens. As I write about the latest Old Crow Medicine Show album, “Tennessee Pusher”, the best albums are never just a sugar buzz, though need enough instant gratification out of the case to warrant a deeper dive.
Bruce has something good here. So I will continue to dive in. More listens will tell me if this one is a masterpiece hidden by those who bemoan because of what it is (different), or if it is really just a 2009 version of “Human Touch” (shiny and empty). I’ve been wrong before. But my gut is saying interesting and worth the time to get to know it
I’ve been right before too.

Todd Snider – Welcome to the Greasy Tent Revival

Profile
Todd Snider – by Rob Nichols
If it wasn’t so true, Todd Snider would star in the movie.
The story of a kid who hitchhikes from the great northwest to Texas, is befriended by local music legends, learns to play guitar, and heads off on his own to conquer America.
But close the curtain and turn on the lights. There is no movie tonight.
Instead, Todd Snider will deliver the real thing. The lost art of living, sweating, screaming, testifying, American rock and roll resurrected.
Snider, with his band the Nervous Wrecks, brings his roadshow into Fort Wayne for a concert at Piere’s on Friday, June 26.
After some success in 1994 with “Talkin’ Seattle Grunge Rock Blues”, a minor hit from his first album “Songs for the Daily Planet”, Todd and the band have toured nearly continuously since. His writing has continued to be some of the best and most honest music of any genre. The new album, “Viva Satellite”, rocks more than either of his two previous records, while still maintaining a social concieus worthy of a man who has a singer/songwriter background of Snider’s.
“Viva Satellite is decidedly more rock (than past efforts),” Snider told Rolling Stone this month.”But I don’t think it abandons our Jerry Jeff Walker/Joe Ely side, which is where we kind of come from.”
On stage iswhere the album, not to mention Todd, comes to life. Even from the first listen, album sounded like it would translate well live. It does.
But Todd Snider could probably make you dance to lyrics taken from a Betty Crocker Cookbook. And he would probably put a Chuck Berry riff to it to help it along, no doubt.
Fans who are seeing Todd for the first time when he hits town Fridaywon’t see a man and a band looking to tell you their troubles. As Todd points out in his live show, “we didn’t come hear tonight to stare at the floor and tell you how everything sucks.”
“If really feel we’ve gotten to the point where we’re the best band you’re going to see,” Todd said in an interview last week in the El PasoTimes, while the band was on a swing through the state that provided musical wings for the Beaverton, Oregon native. Snider moved to Austin with his brother Mike when Todd was 18. He lived there until heading to Atlanta in the late 1980’s before landing in Memphis.
“I think we are highly underrated'” he continued. “We are a good time rock and roll band, and you don’t see that kind of thing anymore.”
But the phrase is too simple for these guys. “Good time rock band” almost sounds like a description for a bunch of guys who go out and play Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers.
Which is what Todd and the Wrecks can do. They aren’t afraid to hit the stage blasting with “Long Haired Country Boy”, or “I’m Bad. I’m Nationwide”, or even the hidden track from the new CD, “I’m a Nervous Wreck”. If it rocks, it works.
The band just finished an month-long stint as the opener for blues kid Kenny Wayne Shepherd. From most accounts, the KWS fans were won over by the Snider’s enthusiasm and straight ahead Tom Petty-ish rock and roll that hit them for 50 minutes each night before their hero took the stage. An unusual bill, but one that undoubtedly won Snider some new fans, since he has yet to hit the jackpot in the music business by means of a big radio hit.
Besides “Talkin’ Seattle”, he earned some airplay with “Alright Guy” from the first album, and also with the second record’s (1996’s Step Right Up) first single “I Believe”, a bold statement of beliefs ala John Lennon chained to a CCR backbeat. The first single from the new album, a restrained screamer called “I Am Too” stalled after reaching the top 30 on the Adult Album charts.
Still a long road traveled for a kid who went to Texas searching for a little direction in his life.
After joining his brother Mike in Austin in 1984, Todd started playing solo gigs and open mike nights in the area, eventually hooking up with singer/songwriter Kent Finlay, who befriended Todd and let him move into his house. Todd stayed three years, learning to “make up songs”.
Snider soaked in the rich Texas musical culture, grabbing inspiration from gonzo-outlaw-party boy-genius songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker and folks like Joe Ely, Hal Ketchum, Billy Joe Shaver, Lyle Lovett and Robert Earl Keen. All the influences mixed together and added to Snider’s Skynyrd-Dylan-southern rock soul result in a sound that’s both original and stolen. And it is a good thing.
We can hear touches of all of those artists in Todd’s music. But his point of view, as his song points out, makes everything alright.
“He is a helluva writer,” Rock 104’s Doc West said. “That’s the thing that impresses me. I met him back when we brought him to town the very first time (1994), and he’s great on stage.
But there is a great photo of him on his first album, laboring over a pad of legal paper. He’s a writer, and he’s a very, very good one.”
His new record draws obvious comparisons to artists like Petty, with it’s accessible lyrics and ringing guitars.
“That never bothered me,” Snider said, of comparisons. “When people come up to me and say ‘you remind me of John Prine’ or ‘you remind me of Steve Earle’, I just say ‘great’.
“But I’ve been playing since I was 20. I’m 31 now. And (I’m being) compared to Tom Petty. I love Tom Petty, so if that’s my big tag for life, that doesn’t scare me,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s true,” Snider told Rolling Stone. “I thing we’re better than them.”
Reverence and attitude. Two of the biggest factors going for Snider. He had enough attitude to get kicked off his first record label, Capital Records, after not allowing the record executives force him into a studio with a band other than his own.
So Todd went back to Memphis and played a solo gig every Thursday at a club called The Daily Planet. He found Keith Sykes, musician who was in Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band. Sykes helped Snider get together with Buffett and in 1993, Todd signed with Margaritaville Records, a new label Jimmy had formed.
Like Buffett, Snider creates a concert party. With ace guitarist Will Kimbrough, longtime bass player Joe Marienchek (be ready, Todd will have you yell Joe’s name at least once during the evening) and former Afghan Whig drummer Paul Bucheghanni (pronounced Buk’-in-yanni), the band’s purpose also involves spreading the gospel of homegrown rock and roll.
Snider will fire up the crowd. He will make them sing. Everyone will dance.
“Every night, it seems we are getting better,” Snider said. “I never know what’s going to happen, but I know that we’re out there connecting souls.”
So turn off that old movie projector. Open the curtain. Turn it up. Todd’s in town.
 
 
Todd rants and rolls – by rn
I remember my first time.
It was Indianapolis, on a snowy January night.
Todd Snider and his band was at playing at the Patio. The line stretched around the corner. All I knew was some song called “Alright Guy” had reached through my car radio speakers and grabbed me by the shoulders and said “Uh, hey buddy. There’s something cool goin’ on here.”
And it was that first live show that hooked me. It wasn’t just the music, which was gut-busting good. It wasn’t the just the words, which were cool to sing with Todd. No, it was something Todd did three times. Five times.
Ten times. Hell, I had beer. I don’t know how many times, in the course of the show, he’d bring the band way down, and over top a juicy groove, Todd would rant.
About anything.
Beautiful part was he took the crowd with him during the story, building the suspense until the band exploded back into the song like a wrecking ball into a building.
It still happens. At every show.
Rant and roll. Just like the examples below, compiled from actual Todd Snider shows over the past couple of years, all voiced while the band played on.
A lot of people over the last year have listened to our music and some people have written about it. Some have called me a cynic.
A cynic? I am here set the record straight. I am not a cynic.
I believe in a better world. I believe the meek shall inherit. Until all of us stop counting on or blaming the rich white politicians to take care of us, and as soon as we turn around and make ourselves into a country instead of this big, fat beer commercial we have become, it will happen, sooner than later.
Memphis, Tennesee, 1996If you’ve ever seen us play before, you know we don’t like to leave until every single solitary person in the entire building is singing and has made unforgettable asses of themselves.
We make you the same promise we makes everybody. If you look straight ahead, and you let everything go and let yourself shake and let yourself do what you want to do, I promise when you wake up tomorrow and can’t quite remember what you did, please remember that you weren’t as big of a jackass as I was.
Bryan, Texas, 1997And then we get into a van and come to a town in Indiana where a bunch of people are wanting to connect in a spiritual sort of way.
Indianapolis, Indiana,1996