Turnpike Troubadours In The Fast Lane

   

Very rarely do you come across a band whose lyrics play with your head and whose music kicks your butt.  That happened to me when I caught the Turnpike Troubadours on a recent “Austin City Limits” on PBS.

They ran me down with rollicking rockabilly music and then resuscitated me with some of the most ear catching lyrics I have heard in a long time.

The set began with with an upbeat ode to “Every Girl”  who evolved after breaks for fiddle, pedal steel and guitar solos from best girl to best friend. It begins with

She says she don’t believe in marriage

But she still believes in fate

And ends with

She’s a flighty good time buddy at the corner of the bar

But she’d fight the devil for you just for being who you are

Human emotions are the subtext of a weather report on “Tornado Warning,”

Kerosene to feed the flame

Your effect is quite the same

Shadows dancing on the wall

Waiting for the sky to fall

What hooked me for good was a moving-on love song, “Diamonds and Gasoline.”

And I would buy for you a diamond

Or myself some gasoline

If I can’t afford you darling

Then I can’t afford to dream

The small town love triangles and family dramas reminded me of the stories that John Mellencamp could whip up in three minute songs. But the Turnpike Troubadours give the tales of teenage angst the kind of sage ironic view of fortune’s ups and downs that John Prine can recall. They capture the feelings of the players while at the same time observing the chessboard they are playing on.

The band is presided over by lead singer (and song writer) Evan Felker who has movie star looks, a clear voice and stolid demeanor. He seems to be the axle around whom the rest of the band spins. In an interview after the show, he and bassist R.C. Edwards talked about how their use of recurring characters was influenced by William Faulkner and Stephen King. As Edwards put it, “they create their own little universes.”

Felker, mentioned the Red Headed Stranger as an example, “Essentially what I’m after is not having to create a concept record because I just like to mess around with these stories.”

Willie Nelson has obviously been a role model for their music style, a dance hall and cowboy bar sound that is reminiscent of “Willie and Family Live.”

Their backstory is as colorful as their lyrics. They began a dozen years ago in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and have been barnstorming at the rate of 100 dates a year since then, with five studio albums to date. They are criss crossing the country this summer from Johnny’s BBQ in Salado, TX to the House of Blues in Anaheim and Zoo Montana in Billings.

It promises to be fun.

We’ll raise another round boys and have another glass

Be thankful for today, knowing it will never last

Still let’s leave the world laughing when our eulogies are read

May we all get to heaven ‘fore the devil knows we’re dead.

Johnny Cash, Moody Blues & Spike Lee

It's been an interesting musical week. It started with an impromptu Moody Blues retrospective, ended with a listen back to Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and included a great story from Spike Lee about his father, bassist Bill Lee.

The Moody Blues concert was prompted by the passing of founder, Ray Thomas. The Moodies always seemed a little out of step with the musical trends of their day. Too smooth for rock and roll or even traditional blues, too much orchestration for purists and too cerebral for Top 40 radio. Still they had the chops and the talent to create their own sub genre and their own following that grew into a trend.
Their first big hit, "Go Now" in 1967 is a distant echo of their later orchestral symphonies and complicated rhetoric. But regardless of  the production values they added, they never lost the knack for a good hook. My personal favorite is from The Question,

It's not the way that you say it
When you do those things to me
It's more the way that you mean it
When you tell me what will be.

When it comes to interpreting lyrics, no one could do it better than Johnny Cash, especially in live shows.  (Of course he could pen some memorable ones as well.) So it's always good to hear him get his due as he has this week with stories about the 50th anniversary of his live album, "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison." He took a big gamble to force Columbia Records to record and release it at a time when his career had fallen into one of its periodic eclipses. Boy did it pay off.

It's been a regular on my turntable several times a year since I found it a discount department store in the sixties for the nice price of $3.67. Listening to it again is like opening The American Songbook and realizing how the country-rock and alt-country got started and dozens of singer/songwriters owe him huge debts.

It's with some embarrassment that I admit that I never realized that Spike Lee's dad was a legendary bass player who wrote folk-jazz operas, scored Spikes' films and performed with Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. In a recent radio interview, Spike shared a story about what happened when Bob Dylan went electric. At the time Bill Lee was making a good living backing Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Theodore Bikel and Dylan. It was his bass line on Puff The Magic Dragon, according to Spike.

 Bill Lee refused to make the switch to electric, on principle, and his work dried up to the point that his wife had to go back to teaching school to support the family. When Terry Gross asked Spike if he had any regrets about his dad's choice, Spike replied: "Never."

And finally, as long as we are remembering music legends, here's a story from Wayne Cochran, the legendary front man for The C.C. Riders with the eye-popping blonde pompadour. In the early 1980's, David Letterman asked him where he got the raspy voice needed to sing the blues.

"You gotta sound like you're hurting a little. I used to tell people, 'Just tie yourself to a donkey, let him drag you for about six months across a desert. When you stand up, you can sing the blues.'"