Late last week, Willie Nelson released a new song “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die”. It’s a good, catchy song, just like his recent collaboration with Snoop Dogg called “Superman”, that starts out, “Too many pain pills, too much pot. Trying to be something that I’m not.” And we can’t forget (though many of us have tried) the Toby Keith joke song “I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again.”
First country sold its taste, then its heritage to keep the dinosaur corporations that run country music afloat. Now it has sold it’s greatest the asset that has always given country music a distinction from the rest of popular music. It has sold its values, and is creating a generation of knuckle-chucking assholes in Affliction T-Shirts, and the girls who love them.
The Rolling Stone has just reported that a long-rumored project pairing Bob Dylan and Jack White together to oversee the recording of an album of Hank Williams songs that were found without music in a briefcase will be released on October 4th. The title is The Lost Notebook of Hank Williams . It is being released on Dylan’s Egyptian Records imprint…
One of the standouts in 2011 so far has been Bloomington, Indiana-based singer/songwriter Austin Lucas, and his album A New Home in the Old World. He sat down with me for about a hour to discuss his experience on the Country Throwdown and touring with Willie Nelson, how he got into country, and how his goals are measured and focused on the art of songwriting first, above his own popularity.
Townes Van Zandt’s story is one of hope, for all of music and musicians, and artists of all kinds. As much as he struggled commercially, socially, and with his own demons, somehow over time the cream still found a way to rise to the top. It is a shame that some of the greatest have such a hard time relating to life, and that Townes Van Zandt found his greatest success after death. But he found it.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend the most talent-rich event I have ever been to, as the convergence of Willie Nelson’s 38th Annual 4th of July Picnic met up with the finale of this year’s Willie Nelson Country Throwdown tour at the largest honky tonk in the world, Billy Bob’s Texas, in the historic Ft. Worth stockyards.
Hubbard was as important as anybody in the formation of the Austin music scene, but he was unfortunate enough to record his marquee release in Nashville. In a classic story involving Music Row, once MCA was done adding their over-produced elements to Ray Wylie Hubbard & The Cowboy Twinkies, Ray and The Twinkies wanted nothing to do with it.
We all like free stuff, right? Beats paying for it. Unless taking something for free is silently eroding something we’re perfectly willing to pay for. The amount of music out there right now that’s being either given away, or offered for unlimited free listens, is astonishing when you consider what normal was only a few years ago. If it is not expected of artists to at some point make their albums or songs completely available to fans for free, then it will be within months, if not days.
But as much as Eric Church is a problem, the bigger systemic problem throughout the country is the hip hop culture infecting small towns to the point where you can’t walk into a local IGA without stumbling over a bunch of corn fed boys with their straight brimmed hats on sideways and their pants around their ankles. For years popular culture and even politics has been preaching that people from the country are “backwoods” . . .
A New Home, In The Old World is a parade of high-caliber, heartfelt songs set to good music, with some of the most twangy and eloquent country singing you will hear from any modern artist. The depth of his soul-wrenching themes, and the breadth of his singing ability, exercising masterful pitch and control, combine to be like a rock in between the eyes, striking you down to the depths of human emotion from where the song’s inspiration sprouted from.
Willie’s Place was built about three years ago. Though it wasn’t very old, it was the last of a dying breed of unique places that America can boast, where commerce happens, but not at the expense of regional taste and local appeal. What it didn’t have was a well-recognized company logo out front, like 98% of the gas stations and truck stops in America do. It had a hand-painted sign.
That’s right folks, THIS SUNDAY, 2-20-2011, none other than Wayne “The Train” Hancock will be on Saving Country Music’s live streaming channel, aka SCM LIVE, for a streaming video concert, with his full touring band at 6 PM Central! This is a special edition of Jashie P’s Outlaw Radio, and it will be coming LIVE from Chicago, IL.
Now that the ink has dried on the acquittal of Billy Joe Shaver for shooting Billy Coker with a .22 pistol outside Papa Joe’s Saloon in Lorena, TX, (just outside of Waco) on March, 31st of 2007, he can now have a little fun with the story, and with a little help from old friend Willie Nelson.
Billy and Willie have just released a duet called, “Wacko From Waco” about the incident…
Jimmy Carter (no, not the peanut-farming ex-prez) on 96.9 “The Kat” from North Carolina in his “Wednesday Dirt Alert” segment called the recently-released Academy of Country Music awards nominations “super-political” and asserts that he was specifically told that Carrie Underwood got snubbed for nominations from her label so that fellow label-mate Miranda Lambert would get some much needed press.
Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson were part of the recent Kennedy Center Honors festivities honoring Merle Haggard in Washington, and during the numerous functions, the three country music legends apparently had some time to discuss the possibility of a supergroup. Previously Merle had discussed plans of doing an album with Willie . . .
Please indulge me for a minute here because I need to blow off some steam. Yes I’m glad that The Kennedy Center honored Merle Haggard and I guess you should be grateful for what you are given and not look a gift horse in the mouth. But in my opinion, the Kennedy Center’s presentation to Merle was horrifically mild and uninspired. Merle Haggard is an American treasure and deserves better.
Tonight the Poet of the Common Man, Merle Haggard will be honored with a Kennedy Center Honors award for his contributions to American music. Well, actually he received the award on December 5th, but the ceremony itself from December 5th in Washington DC will air tonight on CBS (as they say, check local listings for times).
Yesterday I was sorting through all the amazing pictures on Ruby Jane’s new website, having my mind blown apart by all the big names that she has shared the stage with at one time or another (see some examples below) when lo and behold, a new video came down the pike from CBS News, featuring her sharing a stage with of all people, CBS’s main man in Washington, Bob Schieffer.
Indulge me here ladies and gentlemen, because I need to get something off my chest. I can’t in good conscience sit around tight lipped anymore as the youth of America are stultified and our young women exploited by these assholes over at The Disney Company.
When “Dandy” Don Meredith died on Sunday, he was remembered as many things: Dallas Cowboys football player, commentator for Monday Night Football, actor in dozens of movies and TV shows. But one element you may not hear much about is his involvement with country music, and specifically, good Texas Outlaw country.
Yesterday, fiddle phenom, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and singer Ruby Jane turned 16. Less and less it feels right to call her a “prodigy” as she grows older and her skins on the wall continue to grow as well, surpassing the accolades many musicians twice her age have amassed. Ruby Jane has deserved to be judged against musicians of any age for years, but as she reaches 16, her songwriting and singing have become even more refined.
On Monday (11-1-10) Jashie P. of Outlaw Radio Chicago met up with the one and only Willie Nelson for a brief but productive interview on Willie’s bus right before his performance at the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, IL. Willie talked about how the title for his new album Country Music was a tip of the hat to what he always though country music sounded like, and how he never listens to Sugarland, or most of the other stuff coming out of Music Row.
On Saturday the mother of all SCM Live events will be going down, as we will be broadcasting Hillgrass Bluebilly’s Launch Party, featuring 7 bands, 2 stages, and 6+ hours of music, all LIVE to anywhere in the world from the Hole in the Wall in Austin, TX!
I know some of you think that I’m a little crazy for touting Austin’s 15-year-old fiddling phemon Ruby Jane so highly. That is because you have never seen Ruby Jane live. If you had (or have), then you know that despite all of my ridiculous accolades, nothing I’ve written about her does any justice to how astonishing a Ruby Jane Show is. It is the best music I have ever seen live.