Category: Music that doesn’t suck
Tom Waits: Desert Oracle
My man Ken Layne says in his latest episode of “Desert Oracle Radio” that he got the idea for his podcast from (wait for it) Tom Waits.
Somehow this fails to surprise me. Mr. Waits casts a wide loop. Wasn’t that long ago that people thought he was Leon Redbone. Turns out he was Ken Layne. Frank Zappa was Leon Redbone.
Not really.
Here’s Ken Layne:
One of the initial inspirations for this radio show was a Tom Waits interview I read in an alt-weekly newspaper three decades ago.
So Tom Waits has these bits that he’s doing for the press tour so the reporters aren’t too annoying. They can’t keep up because he’s just rolling out these little stories, tall tales, routines. And one of them went something like this. He says, and I’m quoting incorrectly for memory:
‘Oh, I’ve got a radio show now, out in the desert, in a little desert town, it’s called ‘Strange and Unusual Facts.’ And then he’d say some oddball factoid about lemurs or the height of Big Ben or how many legs a centipede has, which is variable, turns out. Then, Tom Waits tells the music writer for the alt-weekly, ‘It’s a small station and the signal doesn’t get far, but people are enjoying the show, and, in fact, a number of people are moving to this desert town just to hear it.’
That always sort of stuck with me. Because somewhere up ahead would be this radio show in the little desert town of Joshua Tree.
And you know what? I’ve had a number of people tell me in person, to my face, that they moved here because of this radio show.
So, Tom, if you’re out there tonight, thanks for the idea.
I’ve taken a few ideas from Tom Waits myself, not all of them good. Never went with the soul patch, though. That was Frank Zappa. Or was it Leon Redbone?
That’s just the way it is
Bruce Hornsby is having a moment, and good for him.
Once you start looking beyond his only No. 1 hit, “The Way It Is,” you realize the guy has been playing in your background for years. Decades.
Hornsby has worked with almost everybody worth listening to. Leon Russell. Clannad. Bonnie Raitt. Bob Dylan. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The Grateful Dead.
He co-wrote “The End of the Innocence” with Don Henley and played on the track with Henley and Wayne Shorter.
That’s a tune with legs, and you can still hear them kicking ass 37 years later:
O beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie
Some of Hornsby’s playmates appear on the new album, “Indigo Park,” due out April 3. Raitt, who sings on “Ecstatic,” told The New York Times that she treats herself to a live recording of her friend performing “Dreamland” before taking the stage each night.
“The guy is just still diving deep and improving and playing hours a day and stretching,” she said. “He’s the one musician I would have if I could only have one on a desert island.”
The new album came, as new ideas often do, when Hornsby had been hoping to take a break. Nope. The title song arrived first and dragged the others along to keep it company.
Hornsby told The Times that “Indigo Park” is something of a glance at the rear-view mirror.
“This is the first record where I’ve really dealt with looking back,” he said. “On a lyrical level, I’ve always been kind of pushing forward. But this time I thought, ‘OK, you’re 70, [expletive]’.’”
Sounds like he’s still moving forward to me. Don’t give up the driver’s license yet, Bruce. Try to make the ecstatic last.
R.I.P., Augie Meyers
Augie Meyers, whose work on the unheralded Vox Continental organ gave the Sir Douglas Quintet its signature sound, and drew the admiration of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, and Your Humble Narrator, has bid us all adios. He was 85.
I was just starting to find my own musical way in the Sixties after the old man got us transferred to Randolph AFB at San Antonio, Texas. My folks were into the big bands — Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, etc. — but there was this whole new rough beast slouching toward America’s AM radios, and local boys Doug Sahm and his sidekick Augie were riding it.
“She’s About a Mover” was getting a lot of airplay in San Antone back in 1965. And while I didn’t know diddly about Tex (folks on base were from wherever) or Mex (beyond the little taco shop just outside the main gate), Augie’s Tex-Mex fingers grabbed me by the ear and held on tight.
Tweedle … deedle deedle deedle. …
Sahm left Texas for California because of course he did. Meyers eventually followed, and in 1969 we got “Mendocino,” which brought that old Sir Doug sound back to this newly and only moderately hairy (with a covert assist from a Mexican barber) would-be-hippie kid, now in Colorado Springs.
It was fun stuff to listen to; made you want to get up and move around. According to his New York Times obit, Meyers liked the Vox sound, “reminiscent of a merry-go-round or a circus calliope,” because “it could cut through the guitars onstage.”
Meyers would join Sahm again in the Texas Tornados, with Freddy Fender and Flaco Jiménez. He was the Tex-Mex supergroup’s last surviving original member, until March 7. Peace to him, his family, friends, and fans.
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