The Great Booker T.

Booker T. this year has done what Bettye LaVette did a couple of years ago. He hired the best Southern rock band around known as the Drive-By Truckers, added Neil Young and cut a hard driving rock & roll, R & B album called Potato Hole. Best part is of course the signature Southern rock sound of three lead guitars. I first read about this album earlier in the year when Playboy profiled Booker T. and this new album. It is great stuff. The album is on ANTI records which is home to Bettye LaVette and Neko Case. Good company there.

A potato hole refers to a hole in the earthen floor of a cabin where food was kept when Booker T was growing up. The album has the new sounds of today's Southern rock but also that ancient feel, a deep and unyielding beat that must go back thousands of years. Primal but tempered. Modern yet it interprets the past. There is plenty of Hammond B-3, but don't expect any Green Onion organ fills here. Booker T. and his assembled group do a couple of cool covers. One is Outkast's Hey Ya. The second is a nice instrumental (the whole album is of course instrumental) version of Drive-By Trucker's Space City. Cool stuff, good modern R & B. Strongly recommend this to anyone dabbling in blues and R & B in general.

Chuck Berry

I live in Columbia, MO home of the University of Missouri. A downtown club here called The Blue Note hosts a set of (mostly) free concerts. Well, August 26, promised Chuck Berry. Of course it is always great to see a living legend. Especially since I am in the habit of blowing these guys off and then they die! Well, Chuck was very much alive, his voice was great but man his guitar playing was a lot like the Cheech and Chong sketch that features Blind Melon Chitlin'. It was like he was up there playing air guitar and then someone foists a guitar in his hands. It was so out of tune that if you walked in to an alley where the sound was distorted it would put the guitar back in tune. I thought surely this guy can hire a guitar tech. Seeing that beautiful Gibson hollow-body being violated like a couple of alley cats hard at it damn near ruined the experience for me. I did get to see him walk through The Blue Note and say hello to him. His handlers whisked him away pretty quickly. As far as I could tell, no one was peed on.

New stuff that's not new.

A few real neat things I picked up. Mary Lee's Corvette-Blood On The Tracks spectacular reworking of Dylan's album; Kinky Friedman-Last of the Texas Jewboys, the Frank Zappa of Austin, TX country music; Marty Robbins-Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs, the 1959 cowboy classic; Asylum Street Spankers-My Favorite Album, Scroat Belly meets Squirrel Nut Zippers.

More about Son Volt

I am listening to Son Volt's new album American Central Dust. The more I listen, the more I am struck how good of a songwriter that Jay Farrar has become. I think he has always used powerful metaphors, way back with Uncle Tupelo even. But these gentle and tender tunes on American Central Dust are just soooo good. The opening track of Dynamite has this great chorus lyric of our love is like celebrating Fourth of July with Dynamite. I really like that a lot. Cocaine and Ashes is his reflecting on a story he heard about Keith Richards smoking the ashes of his cremated father and mixing them with cocaine. I could go on-and-on about this record's great songs...and I might. The album closes with my favorite tune with its cool guitar fills called Jukebox of Steel.



I would not want him to, but Jay Farrar is good enough now to head to Nashville. He could write a commercial tune. And I am certain his tunes would be better than the drek that is passing for songs on country radio now. Hell, maybe he could just pen some Laurel Canyon stuff. He's that good. If Jeff Tweedy has heard this album, his heart is pierced with searing jealousy.