Funny how the night moves

Bob Seger, at the speed of a silver mullet

By Don Allred

http://clclt.com/charlotte/funny-how-the-night-moves/Content?oid=2145830

"Everything I do is just a little wrong,

Everyday for me is the same,

Everyone I know is getting' in my face,

And I only got myself to blame."

That's Bob Seger, just before declaring (with a little swagger) that he's about to "Wreck This Heart," the first track on Face The Promise, his first album of all-new material since 1995's It's A Mystery. As on that album, Seger's pissed. But this new set is not divided into confrontational social commentary versus near-greeting-card verses about the joys of family life. No, Face The Promise is a richer mix, emotionally and sonically. At 61, Seger knows there's enough blame to go around, and for what. But he also knows how far knowing that will get you, so "Wreck This Heart," for instance, is less about self-recrimination than it is a pretext to cut loose, via guitars, bass and drums. Yet there's no macho nostalgia either. That's right: Bob Seger, of all people, is not doing nostalgia anymore.

Well, not much. But it's basically a familiar approach, and he can't help invoking comparisons, mostly favorable. Although, Face The Promise does have a few tamer examples of his patented medium-speed numbers, not quite ballads: "Seger mediums," he calls them. As he once admitted, "They were a challenge to write, now they've become formulaic."

But Seger's always been ready to teach us, on his recordings and in his overall career, about the trickiness of adapting, the need to remain unsettled. His earliest known songs bear this out, as collected on The Singles 1966-1967, a quickly deleted, or aborted, but still findable, Capitol Records release, or promo. Seger's first single, "East Side Story," is about the inevitable rise and fall of a novice thief, who brags about his ability to deal with soft, rich folks. The song stomps along in the face of doom, punk enough. Attitude is less predictably employed in his second single, "Ballad Of The Yellow Berets." In effect, its gleeful delivery is as much a takeoff on Sgt. Barry Sadler's solemnly monotonous original, "Ballad Of The Green Berets," as it is on the "yellow" mid-60s Vietnam War protestors. But then the third single, "Persecution Smith," shows up, and Seger's music seems to take a great leap forward, forcibly enough.

"Persecution Smith" speeds along, like Bob Dylan's contemporaneous "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The antique folk-rock style is still startling: the song, like its protagonist, jangles along, in a stiff, rusty, but tireless way. Smith is a compulsively radical reactionary, the embodiment of entropy, but human enough to torture himself and everybody else he can reach. The crudeness of the song makes young Seger's vision more unsettling, more believable: "Persecution Smith" is just plain old, and getting older all the time. "He's here, he's there, he's everywhere" seems more true than corny, in this case, because Smith infiltrates everything, like dust.

This kind of dust forms the covering question mark in the title of the fourth single, "2 + 2=?" In "East Side Story," the fallen bad boy's girlfriend cried, because he died like she knew he would. In this song, the girl cries because her boy dies in a war, that "she just doesn't understand." No political commentary is included, she's just left alone in the kind of dust that covers any answers or assumptions once taken for granted.

In 1971, Seger released Mongrel, about the adventures of a long-haired misfit, determined to strut his stuff in the grey face of conformity. "You can call me Lucifer, if you think you should, but I know I'm good!" Yet such cockiness has to deal with killjoys, the ones who are "Leanin' On My Dream," in which the narrator finally joins the protestors, when he gets his own draft notice. "Lord, you shoulda heard me scream!" He doesn't claim to be any better than the "Yellow Berets," and he's no less stubborn than the vicious reactionaries in "Looking Back": "Too many people lookin' back!"

Although "Looking Back" was recorded along with the tracks that appeared on Mongrel, it first appeared as a stray single. Its LP debut was on Seger's 1976 concert album, Live Bullet, the commercial breakthrough of which really was a case of too many people looking back. That's where he became a merchant of rock nostalgia, and something of an addict, though his masterpiece, Night Moves, appeared the same year. It addressed the craving for nostalgia, tracing the dusty, creeping awareness of age. From getting a kick out of remembering "workin' on our night moves," to waking up and thinking, "Ain't it funny how the night moves," which needs no question mark, because it's a feeling the singer already knows too well.

As you probably know too well, he (and possibly you, and certainly I) indulged his mix of autumnal (yet sufficiently rocking) insight and mere mush for many a year, many a multi-platinum record. It's A Mystery only went gold, but Seger kept trying to make another album of (even sharper) social commentary, because he became a father at forty-seven. While that was his self-stated reason for "retiring," to take care of his kids, he's got a lot to sort out and sing about, to his family, to himself, to whoever listens. He's got a new song about war: "No More" is the title, and the point. He sounds, not necessarily older than on most of Face The Promise, but weary. He's tired of having to sing about war; he remembers previous occasions all too well. And that's a cure for nostalgia: a good strong memory.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band Play Charlotte Bobcats Arena, with Steve Azar; Jan 16; 7:30; $65; www.charlottebobcatsarena.com.

a longer, maybe better version of this one: http://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Symptoms ov life:

Sepultura still digs for fire

By Don Allred

Dec. 6, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/symptoms-of-life/Content?oid=2141550

Sepultura, whose name means "grave," is a death metal band,
founded in mid-80s Belo Horizonte, "Beautiful Horizon," surrounded by the mountains of Southeastern Brazil. This was a carefully planned community, and later an oft-cited example of industrial urban sprawl (but still kinda pretty). Appropriately messed-up with such rockin' roots, Sepultura was inspired to move to even sprawlier, massively industrialized São Paulo, the biggest city in the Southern Hemisphere. Population estimates swirl around 12 million or so---it's a little hard to tell, with mitigating factors like AIDS, drugs, environmental pollution, gang warfare, traffic, and cops (not necessarily in that order).

Sepultura has never stopped writing about such local, everyday atrocities. Chaos A.D. and Roots Bloody Roots found their way to a whole, real world of hurt. Like the exiled, wandering, score-settling late-medieval poet Dante Alighieri, Sepultura spotted a lot of familiar faces in Hell. Not so surprising that their new album, Dante XXI, shares some themes with Dante's Divine Comedy, though Sepultura's lyricists – singer Derrick Green, who came to DC as a voracious African American teen in Cleveland, and the equally on-point guitarist Andreas Kisser – never try to imitate Dante's verse. (Green and Kisser may feel like exiles from Credibility Island, since the dramatic departure of Sepultura's co-founders, brothers Max and Igor Cavalera.)(Also, though he's always rough and ready with a tune, Green has even been charged by some keepers ov the metal flame with being a rapper, gasp.)

Sepultura's 2003 release, Roorback, brought a sardonically swinging, slippery dynamic to songs that otherwise might've seemed too preachy and stiff. On Dante XXI, the slipperiness penetrates the material more deeply. A handclap backbeat provides a parody of gospel music, while a faintly sarcastic choir seeps into the headphones, like a whiff of gas. Brittle, hollow-pinging sounds flicker like a migraine around roaring, down-tuned guitar and bass. Horns and cellos appear, like polyps, in the murky center of the mix. At other times, the horns seem to lead the hunt, or circle overhead, like searchlights. Cellos may also mourn or brood, or turn as harsh and dry as the guitars usually are.

Other sounds, including those of words, get lost and reappear in new guises, new nuances. "Dark Wood Of Error" is dense but never too congested – the song and the album are always well-paced, like Dante's own journey through all shades of darkness and light. The narrator/singer's "I" rails at a "you" that sometimes seems like a distorted, mercurial image of himself. The "error" is straightforwardly admitted to be fear, seen as evidence of weakness and a sinful lack of faith in one's own better nature.

But also, the error of another "you" (sometimes "them") is so monstrously faithless, so compulsively fraudulent – promising salvation, law and order, everything – that mortal fear morphs into moral outrage and locks into a vicious power struggle with the forces of greedy oppression. (Did I mention it's a metal album?)

Eventually, in "City of Dis," a distinction is attempted between the steadfast heretic who, as Dante put it, "seems to hold all Hell in disrespect," and the overheated hero and/or villain, who snarls like a cornered B-movie gangster in "False." This antihero's stances and attitudes fuse in meltdown, despite declarations like "Your mask will soon fall, I will be free from this grave where you lie." The song takes place in "Molebolge" (Dante's "Malebolge" or "Bad Purse" for very bad pennies aka filthy, greedy souls). "End of Hell," Derrick Green abruptly announces, skipping Dante's frozen ninth ring, the quicker to land in Purgatory.

If the protagonist can stand to be alone, there's a chance things will get better.

If so, his reward is the "Crown and Miter" of faith found in himself, and so he can give up the power struggle: "Powerless! What does that mean? Who has control over everything? I had to have compassion, to understand that I have to give." But it still sounds pretty ominous. Sepultura might have noticed that although Dante earned and rewarded himself with a heavenly vision at the end of his Divine Comedy, he died soon after finishing it. The band sounds determined to sail its underground river as long as they can, seeing by the light of Hell or Heaven or whatever's at hand.

Sepultura plays Tremont Music Hall, with Sworn Enemy, Diecast, Suicide Silence; Dec. 6; 7:30 p.m.; $18-$20; www.tremontmusichall.com.

Mayberry After Dark

And They'll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning:

Nickel Creek's l'il pilgrims progress, cope, burn, chill

By Don Allred

Oct. 11, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/and-theyll-sweep-out-the-ashes-in-the-morning/Content?oid=2141149

Nickel Creek's self-titled Sugar Hill debut in 2000 was a vivid mix of youngblood joy and anxiety running through bluegrass. Raised conservatively -- but in Southern California -- the trio were prodigies living near prodigals, singing: "My greatest fear will be that you will crash and burn, and I won't feel your fire, I'm hung up on that wire."

Nickel Creek's wires included those on the mandolin, banjo and bouzouki of Chris Thile, then 19 (he's the tallest, and most excitable-sounding); the fiddle of Sara Watkins, at 18; the guitar of her brother Sean, who was 23; and the little-but-wiry vocals of all, who have performed and recorded together since childhood. On their very first album, 1993's Little Cowpoke, the band featured the traditional (and Hollywood) Western stylings of Chris, age 12; Sara, 11; and Sean, 15. (Be sure to request that era's "I'm an Old Cowhand," when they come to town.)

The 2000 release went gold, which is unusual for bluegrass, but so is the trio's music. Not so much the classical and jazz elements; those are fairly typical of progressive bluegrass. The young Nickels already had a strikingly personal point of view. Songs like "A Lighthouse's Tale" were early glimpses of their take on the world's beauty and wreckage, between the sea and the mountains, home and the freeway. Nickel Creek also sounded like they were ready to hit the road, Jack. There was one potential problem they were taking with them.

"Look at my girlfriend, isn't she pretty?" Chris asked, shakily, clutching his mandolin and staring down into its "face" for CMT's cameras, in late 2001. "I don't wanna boyfriend!" Sara laughingly answered a nosy reporter in the same mini-documentary, while still sounding like she meant it. Nickel Creek's energies seemed entirely focused on their music, and the resulting nervous edge was smoothed out by producer Alison Krauss, who brought the atmospheric sound of her own successful bluegrass-pop albums to the trio's work. The blend was distinctive, which may well be why Nickel Creek ended up in Billboard's Country Top Twenty in 2002.

On their second album, 2002's This Side, there were coded, subdued indications that Nickel Creek's (very) private lives were getting more complicated. But This Side's subtleties became hard to listen to, as Krauss' cautious approach gradually made the music more predictable. The group's new Why Should the Fire Die? (Sugar Hill) sports more versatile producers, Eric Valentine and Tony Berg, who make the dark moments seem dramatic now. The numbing down of This Side is receding.

On Fire, the Nickels sound like they've been easing into the kind of places they once could only enter via the stage door. And they've kept up with their homework. The disc's first single, "When in Rome," doesn't fiddle around except in the musical sense, as Sara's sweet, snake-charmer strings chime around Chris's calls: "Hey, those books you gave us look good on the shelves at home, and they'll burn warm in the fireplace, Teacher, when in Rome. Grab a blanket, sister, we'll make smoke signals, bring in some new blood, it feels like we're alone."

There are also plenty of candlelight confessions, which underscore what seems to be a more direct lyrical tack. Some boasting about what bad li'l pilgrims they are surfaces, as each Nickel contributes to the songwriting and takes turns singing lead. The only consistently disappointing track is Sara's wispy version of Dylan's "Tomorrow Is A Long Time." Brief instrumentals provide refreshment, while adding momentum. And "Doubting Thomas" is a confession so mature it's inspiring, especially since it leads to the breakthrough of the title song, in which love and doubt aren't just risked and endured, but embraced. If you can grow up to that point, then indeed, why should the fire die?

Nickel Creek plays at Ovens Auditorium, with opener Leona Naess, on October 13 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $24.50-$29.50. Call 704-522-6500 or go to www.musictoday.com.

The World's A Mess, It's In Their Kiss

X is still ready to cross your heart

By Don Allred

Aug. 23, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/the-worlds-a-mess-its-in-their-kiss/Content?oid=2140637

---

Los Angeles, 1976: rockabilly genius guitarist Billy Zoom and bar band bassist/Beat Generation fan John Doe decide to form a band. The duo's inspired by the "classic rock & roll music and kind of funny, sick lyrics" Zoom says he's found on the Ramones' self-titled debut album. 1977: Doe attends the Beyond Baroque poetry workshop and meets Exene Cervenka. He wants to use her poems as lyrics, but she doesn't trust him alone with them, so she joins the band. The pair finds a way to sing together, wailing in slippery-rail harmony. 1978: jazz-schooled drummer DJ Bonebrake joins, and the band, X, proves to be an intersection of insight and sheer flash. Both can be found in words and music alike, as their Aug. 23 show at Tremont will no doubt demonstrate.

The band's first single, 1978's "Adult Books" (on the Dangerhouse label), is the ripe embryo of all Xstory. Cervenka yowls (and Doe chants): "Many, many guys and girls, all real beauties. Everybody's making a stab, they hurt themselves. Singles rule the world, feeding on fresh blood." Not exactly Oscar Wilde, but the droll drawl of their delivery suggests a twisted version of an old comedy routine, about Southern hicks, fresh off the bus -- like Homer & Jethro taking a walk on the wild side. Doe and Cervenka (late of Hairspray-era Baltimore and St. Augustine respectively, after both knocked around the boondocks with their folks) (Zoom was a cornhusker, Bonebrake is the band's only native Hollyweirdo) marvel at "all real beauties," rather than sneering in the stereotypically punk manner. Cervenka exclaims, "They're all in a line! Like adult books?! I don't understand!" But to us hard old city folk, it's a familiar sight: wasted youth, lined up for the taking, stuffed full of bad ideas and pulp fiction fever---cheap at twice the price, I tells ya!

The last verse is about a girl who finally gives in to a sadistic date, which seems to save her, because "he just goes for that special girl, who says no." This final twist is a b-movie gimmick for a b-side song, but it's still jarring, no matter how many times I listen. The a-side of that single, "Los Angeles," became the title song of X's first album, on the indie Slash label. Los Angeles wasn't recorded and released until 1980, three years after X began writing and performing. But by that time, they'd built on all the notions behind "Adult Books," editing songs with transitions meant to startle listeners into becoming more aware of how they're being "edited" by manipulators of greed and fear.

Just as that last sentence suggests, Los Angeles is an album about what "they" do -- until its last track, which tops the tumult of the third-person songs, by confessing, "The World's a Mess, It's In Our Kiss." Accompanied by the happy, trashy organ of former Doors keyboardist/longtime X producer Ray Manzarek, X is ready to dance this mess around, as the B-52s would put it.

Wild Gift (1981), X's second album, develops from "The World's" breakthrough, and "our" even becomes "my," though songs about the married life of Doe and Cervenka re-mix the funky details, so as not to reveal too much, or drive all the cool single people away. Things aren't so violent here, except for self-torture and a bit of mental revenge. For instance, on "White Girl," Doe moans about his attraction to a neighbor, and Cervenka keeps reminding him, "She's 19," sounding reproachful, then taunting, and then suggestive, stirring the mix of guilt and desire around and around (talk about your devil's food).

X's next album, 1982's Under The Big Black Sun, was its first for a major label, Elektra, where the band stayed until 1988, when it went on hiatus. Although X had maintained its high standards through the fourth album, More Fun In The New World (1983), it still wasn't selling many albums. X was too idiosyncratic, too arty and too rowdy for increasingly polarized hardcore punks and new wave popsters of the Big '80s. Billy Zoom left, but they all got back together to tour in 1998. Many of its best songs come roaring through 2005's Live In Los Angeles (Shout! Factory).

Also in 2005, Doe, Cervenka and Bonebrake reconvened their proto-alt-country side project, the Knitters, which also includes founding Blaster /sometime X lead guitarist/growler-songwriter Dave Alvin, for The Modern Sounds of the Knitters, a playfully soulful set on Rounder. Doe's recent Yep Roc releases, Forever Hasn't Happened Yet and For The Best Of Us, are his best solo work ever, as sleepless ballads and wellspring rockers continue to spin their way through worlds, messes and kisses.

X, the Rollins Band and the Riverboat Gamblers play the Tremont Music Hall; Aug. 23; 8pm; $25.00. www.tremontmusichall.com.

I Let my Mind Wander : Willie's Way

By Don Allred

July 25, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/i-let-my-mind-wander/Content?oid=2145165

I let my mind wander, and what did it do?

It just kept right on going,

Until it got back to you.

− Willie Nelson, "I Let My Mind Wander," (ca. 1960)

On his new release, You Don't Know Me: The Songs Of Cindy Walker (Lost Highway), Willie Nelson starts out with "Bubbles In My Beer," a song he's been singing since he was a teenaged roadhouse journeyman in the 1940s, already wandering out of his tiny Hill Country hometown of Abbott, TX.

However Nelson sang it then, he sounds pretty worn out now, confessing that he blew his chance at true love: "and the dreams I once dreamed are empty, as empty as the bubbles in my beer." The bright little bubbles in the music seem to mock his ol' man quiver. Actually, though, Nelson's own peculiar and subtle western-swing style creates a unified effect: The whole track is tight and bouncy as any bubble, yet it never bursts into mere cuteness or self-pity. It's a great combination of both.

Classic Willie, in other words -- at least in terms of his own early songwriting, like "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" -- hits for Patsy Cline and Faron Young, respectively -- which he'll likely perform at Verizon on July 28.

Effective contrast is something that Nelson may well have learned about from fellow Texan songwriter Cindy Walker, who died in March. On You Don't Know Me, Walker's songwriting demonstrates how to adapt to different mid-20th century country music fashions without sacrificing distinction. She's got style, in both senses of the word.

Although he evidently did get some early tips from Walker's songs, Nelson later took the misery and fun of "Bubbles In My Beer" to a new extreme for an emerging Nashville songwriter. In his early '60s song "I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye," describing a spurned lover who finally turns violent, the lyrics are both startling, in a sneaky way, and yet reassuring, because the trickiness is like something in a screenplay. Not a movie -- it's a little more detached than that.

(Nelson may have been looking for a kind of novelty hit, the musical equivalent of trendy, Hitchcock heyday, cross-genre "psycho-westerns" like Paul Newman's Left-Handed Gun.)

Yet that detachment makes it more believable, ultimately: Here's the typical early Nelsonian brooding nerd character once again, still sitting in a honky-tonk and forever polishing the lines he'll (probably) never say to the woman who done him wrong.

In or out of honky-tonks, there are a lot of people like that. This one's got a palpably woman-shaped hole in him, which all the booze and all the music can't fill. But still, Nelson's got to try, and her absence and his need -- expressed in a vocal and guitar style that are conversational, spontaneous-seeming via expert timing -- are real enough to make for compelling listening. (Check out RCA's virtuoso 1966 set, Country Music Concert, later on CD as Willie Nelson Live.)

Nelson's early songs return, in a high-contrast reggae setting, on the 2005 Lost Highway collection Countryman. This album’s uneven; sometimes the vaulting grooves seem to romp obliviously all over his worn voice, not even mocking it, like those "Bubbles In My Beer" did.

More often, though, he and the other performers act out a mutual sense of righteous grievance. (It also helps that he covers two  of the most reliable, vibrant 1970s reggae anthems: Jimmy Cliff's  "Sitting Here In Limbo" and  "The Harder They Come.") There's not too much leaning on rhetorical self-righteousness because the music, as written, arranged and performed, is too fluid to stand pat.

And of course, "On The Road Again" is his theme song; he seems to still thrive on touring. His new book, The Tao Of Willie (Gotham Press), is a reminder of his long-held belief in reincarnation, of the underlying balance between continuity and change.

It's this guiding -- but still restless -- sense of the connections underneath divisions (in time and space, music and society) that seem to keep Nelson going and inspired. He's not above working different angles: The 2002 "vigilante" duet with Toby Keith, "Beer For My Horses". on Keith's Unleashed, was followed in 2003 (while the Iraq War was still young) by the anti-war "Whatever Happened To Peace On Earth?" The pro-gay cover of Texan singer-songwriter Ned Sublette's "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly" was released on Valentine's Day of this year.

Both of the latter tracks remain available only as iTunes downloads (the "Cowboys" is also a ringtone). But Nelson keeps taking chances, to whatever degree.

His 1973 LP, Phases And Stages (which has just been re-released as part of The Complete Atlantic Sessions on Rhino), could easily have been mere (rather than inspired) soap opera. Phases...could have turned off his newly acquired rock audience, which was developing a taste for rough-edged country: Nelson even uses some string arrangements, which he'd previously rejected when moving from the conservative Countrypolitan approach toward his hip Outlaw image. The strings, are effective though---warm ‘n’ eerie--- and the set is presented in a then-fashionable rock format: the concept album. It's about a couple who have broken up and are trying to adapt. Eventually, the woman is left back at the beginning: "I may be falling in love again, and if I lose or win, how will I know?" Maybe if she lets her mind wander just a little bit further.

Willie Nelson and John Fogerty play the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre; Friday, July 28, 7:30pm; Tickets are $53.50, $38.50 and $23.50.

Keep Texas Beautiful

Jerry Jeff Walker, still swingin' on a Lone Star

By Don Allred

Jul. 12, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/keep-texas-beautiful/Content?oid=2140399

"Mr. Bojangles," Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous song, is about a man waking up in a New Orleans jail in 1968 so "down and out" that a fellow inmate tries to cheer him up, by tap dancing.

The old street performer tells his tattered story, in descending melodic lines that jump up and turn around, right before they end. It's not just what he says, but how he says it, and he's ready to show any audience that he isn't finished quite yet. Jerry Jeff Walker, who will appear at the Neighborhood Theatre on July 17, evidently learned a lot from this guy. Also from the likes of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, in early '70s Austin, before they all hit the road again, under a new Outlaw banner.

Which was very cute 'n' colorful, but, in Jerry Jeff's case, especially, such a banner could be a dark and dusty backdrop for the dancer's jumps and turns.

Anthems like "Pissin' in the Wind" and "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother" are still as potent as they always were ironic. But now the former (red-nosed) "Jacky Jack Snowflake" seems to dance on the grave of his bad(der) self, where once he was closer to dancing into it.

Jerry Jeff's recent collection, Best of the Rest (Tried & True), sometimes floats some very mellow material, but his voice is well-preserved (smoke-cured, a tad raspy: can dry ripe imagery nicely), and even the lesser songs keep an eye on time's tricky gifts. My favorite, "Keep Texas Beautiful," is a celebration which sounds like it senses the cost, of what has been and is still there to be lost, if we can't "keep it free." As even George W. and the Dixie Chicks, hearing this, might agree. And Mr. Bojangles too.

Jerry Jeff Walker and his Gonzo Compadres play the Neighborhood Theatre on Monday, July 17, at 8pm; no opening act. All tickets are $30. See www.neighborhoodtheatre.com for more info.

Both Sides of the Line

Chatham County Line rides it like it writes it

By Don Allred

May 31, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/both-sides-of-the-line/Content?oid=2361137

Chatham County Line would like you to know that it don't rock jamgrass -- no neo-hippie hayrides in the sky, getting lost while looking for St. Jerry of Garcia. Nor does it play newgrass -- rehearsals for a Wynton Marsalis production of Riverdance ain't beckoning. Instead, the simple, subtle, lyrically propulsive sound that CCL brings to the Visulite Theatre on June 2 is what band members call "new traditionalism." Which basically means no drums -- but no singing through their noses either.

And no trying to hide the fact that this young quartet didn't get into bluegrass until the members graduated from high school. CCL learned fast, and won the Rockygrass national competition for bluegrass bands in 2004. But earlier experiences in rock & roll left impressions; in fact, lead singer/main songwriter Dave Wilson and bassist/pedal steel guitarist Greg Readling also remain true to their rock band, Stillhouse.

Stillhouse was formed in 1998, and its rootsy brew attracted fiddler/mandolinist John Teer and bassist Chandler Holt. However, these players all became further entangled in the late '90s Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Americana scene. Between other projects, Peer toured with Thad Cockrell's Starlite Country Band, while Wilson and Readling backed Tift Merritt in the Carbines.

Still, Chatham County Line got together when it could. Both CCL and Stillhouse became safety valves, away from the push for alt. country success. The Chathamites (who never lived in the county, they just like the name) also opened some shows for Merritt. Chris Stamey (of dB's fame) talked them into making their own self-titled CD, which he produced. It was released on the Bonfire label in 2003, and the safety valve became another real job.

But CCL is up to the task, having hit upon a way of working both sides of the trad-futurist sonic divide. The group's original songs can sound "old timey" but possess historical detail that often evokes more empathy than nostalgia. After all, bluegrass isn't much older than rock -- they're both spry great uncles, deep in this age of Hip-Hop. These genres are also children of the modern, migratory South, primed to follow the work or follow dreams.

So, on the Chatham County Line debut, the very first song, "Closing Town," is about a guy coming to the end of the line, in a place where he meant to settle down. He's complaining about the newspaper business (talk about historical detail), and while he knows his Captain Ahab and his Merle Haggard, he also knows he's "miseducated" for any job that'll keep him safe.

Not that the people in CCL songs have much time for moping around. The band's travelling and performances also inspire songs about how images -- in words and visions, in wishin' and hopin', in the scenery, for that matter -- have such power in our lives. The restless, wised-up culture worker of "Closing Town" is immediately followed by someone who's thrilled to be on his way to Nashville, to "stand before the stage." Because this song protagonist's connection to the Grand Old Opry comes from memories of listening to the show with his family every Saturday night, on station "WSM (650)." So now, although on the road, he feels more connected than ever to where he's come from and where he's ultimately headed. Life in a CCL song, whatever the feeling expressed, is always a work in progress. Even on the way to what seems like certain doom, there's never any big melodramatic finish.

Which also means the group knows how to keep the tension building. Even CCL's often hesitant second album, 2005's Route 23 (Yep Roc), sometimes makes effective use of its apprehensive atmosphere. "Saro Jane" is sung by someone who's wandered so far that he finds himself adrift in his own home, while the disappearance of his wife continues to sink in, and tables continue to turn. "The train it whistles, through the pines/One sun sets, while another one shines."

CCL's third album, The Speed of the Whippoorwill, released on May 30, is more than a return to form. The ensemble sound is richly detailed (but never too glossy), in both playing and singing. And Dave Wilson pushes his characters further than ever. Especially on "They Were Just Children," where a man discovers that his children have musical talent, and he takes them on the road to earn enough money to save them (and himself) from working in the mines. They live a hard, combative life and get ripped off by another performer in a grimly ironic play on the cliche aspect of "outlaw" music. Finally, the fear of going back to the mines is too much, so the father takes the money his children have earned and runs.

But the song doesn't hurry; it tracks the thieving father with the measure of coldness, compassion and justice. This is also in the cadence of bluegrass, and like all the people in Chatham County Line songs, somewhere he's still running down a dream.

Chatham County Line plays the Visulite Theatre on Friday, June 2, at 9pm; Hooverville opens. All tickets are $10. See www.visulite.com for more info

Don't Put the "O" Back in Outlaw

Shooter Jennings doesn't need it

by Don Allred

April 12, 2006

http://clclt.com/charlotte/dont-put-the-o-back-in-outlaw/Content?oid=2360406

Waylon Albright Jennings, born in 1979, was spared a heavy "Jr." forever hung around his neck. His famous father slipped in a new middle name: Albright, named for Richie Albright, veteran road warrior and drummer of the elder Waylon's band. It was a fitting tribute, because wee "Shooter," as Daddy soon nicknamed him, spent much time in a crib on his parents' tour bus. The younger Jennings' never-ending road running brings him to the Visulite Theatre on April 15.

Shooter Jennings' mom, Jessi Colter, co-starred with Big Waylon on an epochal 1976 album, Wanted! The Outlaws (the 20th Anniversary reissue is even better, as it better be, with ten bonus tracks, five starring Jessi, including two duets with Waylon), which also featured outlaw pioneers Willie Nelson and Tompall Glaser. In the mid-1970s, that LP turned out to be country's surprisingly successful answer to marketshare-biting rivals over on the rising Southern rock bandwagon. By the time of Shooter's debut appearance three years later, Southern rock had pretty much crashed and burned with Skynyrd -- or, at least, run out of gas with most of its other midnight riders -- but the migratory Jennings family was still layin' down the outlaw law.

In March 2003, Shooter, an adolescent defector to LA, finally laid his six-year-old glam metal band Stargunn to rest and headed back to Nashville. Jennings' vision for Stargunn -- something like Lynyrd Skynyrd mutating into Guns 'N' Roses -- had been deemed conceptually D.O.A. by the major rock labels. So Jennings returned to his roots, selling Universal South his already completed debut country album, Put The O Back In Country. It was commonly assumed the "O" was for outlaw. And why not? He was entitled, if anybody was.

Although Jennings did say that was what it stood for in at least one pre-release review, he has since denied it repeatedly: "The Outlaw Movement was a movement in time ... If you call yourself an outlaw now, your fly's unzipped."

He's got plenty of other Os, after all -- two in Shooter alone -- so he can spare one for donation.

As for the O-lessness of "country," well, um, market research has indeed shown that most country consumers are female. And Jennings explains that he wants to make music for "young people," not for "adult women," not predominantly -- but y'all too, y'hear?

Yet mature women significantly influence his process. Jennings' ladyfriend Drea Di Matteo, late of The Sopranos and Joey, is an exceedingly well-preserved thirtysomething, and Jennings credits her with urging him to use Put The O Back In Country as the album title and theme. "Put the O Back in Country" was written to the tune of Neil Young's "Are You Ready For the Country" (with permission), and also refers to Big Waylon's LP (and cover version) of that same title. The younger Jennings' re-tooling of Young’s ancient buckskin hippie melody bounces beats like basketballs, so the performance of the song seems even goofier (and much more likable) than its point. "Put the O" is about the risky need to rock the country -- as if "rebel" rock isn't a lucrative and established practice in country today. No need to sweat it, podner.

But -- just to prove me wrong about his need to worry -- the star-making machinery was a bit slow to crank up. And Put The O, finished in January of 2004, wasn't released until March of 2005. Meanwhile, Jennings enjoyed another fruitful music encounter with a grown-up woman: his aforementioned Outlaw Maw, Jessi C.

Although Jennings has described recording rock experiments with his father -- Waylon Forever, with new backing tracks  by the 357s, will reportedly be released this fall -- I hadn't seen any mention of studio work with his mother. Not until after Waylon's 2002 passing, that is. In 2004, Shooter Jennings and Jessi Colter co-wrote and recorded the song "Please Carry Me Home." It's about sweating yourself dry of temptation's power, cold turkey and step-by-bare-step. Jennings' drums count out the cost, slowly, mercilessly. It's a disturbing song, for it implies the risk of losing desire along with banished temptation. Not a good idea because, as Smokey Robinson put it: "If you can want, you can care." Then (maybe), as long lost Southern rockers Hydra put it, you can "care enough to survive." But Jennings and Colter know this risk; hearing is believing.

Although "Please Carry Me Home" is the only track he appears on, it's a fittingly dramatic climax to Colter's recent Out Of The Ashes (Shout! Factory), her first solo album, except for a couple of kiddie-song sets, in 22 years. Colter's fluid, gravelly, gospel-schooled, piano-driven twists and turns on Ashes may well have provided some of the juice for Jennings' new Electric Rodeo (Universal South), which he began working on while Put The O was still unreleased.

However the transference of style happened, Jennings has really tapped the power of transitions -- within songs, as well as from one song to the next. The preachy, impulsive jive of  Put The O 's and Electric Rodeo's title tracks now seem lived. One of the latter disc's key songs, "The Song Is Still Slipping Away," sounds as gentle as the debut's "Lonesome Blues" -- 'til the chorus slips in: "When your heroes turn out to be assholes, and the light that you're chasing in the tunnel is a train/The singer's in key, the guitar's in tune, and the song is still slipping away."

Jennings shrugs off his response to this disillusionment by trying to refuel with some "Hair of the Dog," but it doesn't rock him (or me) enough. So he chases that with "Little White Lines." And suddenly, he's bursting out with his Daddy's baritone and trademark "wun too, wun too" bass beats -- now almost discofied, which is certainly drug- and decade-appropriate. This twist in "Little White Lines" blasphemes against the supposed cultural separatism that "Outlaw" signified for some.

Mordant (laconic, Waylonic) humor resurfaces throughout Electric Rodeo, especially in the shades of George Clinton/Tony Joe White-worthy swamptoon "Alligator Chomp (the Ballad of Dr. Martin Luther Frog Jr.)." Aw, you can figure out from the title how that ends, can't you?

"Lil Waylon" addresses the weight of his Daddy's legend on a revival of Hank Williams Jr.'s "Living Proof," singing "You ain't as good as your daddy, and you never will be." This cover works out its tensions by opening with faithful homage to the original semi-fortunate son---and then closing with a stomping out of the habitual marching instrumental vamp Big Waylon used on many of his hits. If Shooter Jennings continues to flip the script so deftly, the road and the "Outlaw" weight may not do him in. (PS: at the last second, he dropped this promo-CD track from the issued album---butt still!)

Shooter Jennings, plus the Rick Brantley Revival, play the Visulite Theatre; Saturday, April 15, 8:00pm; Tickets are $14 advance and $16 day of show; www.visulite.com