The Sound of Goodbye

As Setting The Woods On Fire and Groover's Paradise have already noted, country singer, Vern "The Voice" Gosdin (pictured left below brother, Rex) passed away on Tuesday at the age of 74. I wrote about The Gosdin Brothers last summer as part of the Clarence White Chronicles. The songs listed below are all on the playlist, so check it out.

Gosdin Brothers - Bowling Green

Read The Gosdin Brothers: Bakersfield 1966 - Includes "Hangin' On" and "Multiple Heartaches".

Read Gosdin Brothers: Capitol Punishment: 1967-68 - Includes "There Must Be A Someone (I Can Turn To)," "Bowling Green," and "Sounds Of Goodbye".

BEEN A LONG TIME LEAVING (I'LL BE A LONG TIME GONE)

Hie thee to A Truer Sound to download an amazing Roger Miller show from The Birchmere (Alexandria, Virginia) in February 1991. Weird that I would write about Roger and then this spectacular performance appears like manna from heaven. It's just Roger and his still nimble voice, an acoustic guitar, and a fusillade of one-liners, wisecracks, and great stories. Keep in mind that he was all but retired from country music and would be dead in less than two years. A must-own. Check it.

Happy Birthday To Me

Damn, I knew I was forgetting something. Believe it or not, this past Saturday was the one year anniversary of The Adios Lounge's first post! I know, it doesn't seem like more than 10 1/2 months, huh? It's been a good ride, especially to find out I got regular visitors and stuff. Anyway, to celebrate this semi-hallowed occasion, let me throw a couple tunes on the juke. One's a recent riff and the other an old fave ... curiously, both nods to my SoCal roots.

X - Year 1 [purchase]

Year one, you're one, I'm one. Oh X, you'll never steer me wrong.

The Muffs - Nothing [purchase]

Not only does this song come from the album, Happy Birthday To Me, but it features 7 things I like in a song: 1) It's 1:29, 2) It reminds me of Motorhead, 3) It has Kim Shattuck singing, 4) It has Kim Shattuck screaming, 5) It has Kim Shattuck playing guitar, 6) It has Ronnie Barnett on bass and Roy MacDonald on drums, a great punk rock rhythm section, and 7) It rocks the fuck out.

Thanks to all, LD

John Doe & The Sadies: Songs of Whiskey Dreams

"Country Club is the result of a drunken promise or threat I made to Travis & Dallas [Good, of The Sadies] the first night we played together in Toronto. We're not sure why it sounds like it's from the sixties. Maybe that's our favorite era of country music or maybe that's what we listened to when we first learned how to play it."
--John Doe

John Doe and The Sadies combine talents for an album of classic country covers and originals written in the spirit of those covers. On paper this is a perfect, inspired partnership. The Sadies can pretty much do no wrong in my eyes and John Doe ... well, he's John Fucking Doe. Do I really need to explain the greatness of Under The Big Black Sun? Come on.

If there's an achilles heel in the Doe catalog, it's his occasional drift toward the singer/songwriter safety net. What made those tendencies work in X was the fact that the band was a lockdown rhythm machine. Doe wasn't a great bass player, but he developed a cool, melodic style that meshed perfectly with DJ Bonebrake and Billy Zoom, both of whom are gods among men. People forget that X was essentially a power trio. Without that sturdy base, Doe's songwriting occasionally veered into coffeehouse territory, which ain't no place for John Fucking Doe.

This is where The Sadies come into play. In an era of lifeless, soulless indie pop and rock, they are a swaggering, four-man strike force of awesome. Surf, psych, country-rock, bluegrass, punk, gospel, garage rock, rockabilly, ballads (murder and otherwise), reels, breakdowns, songs with vocals, songs without vocals, The Sadies do it all. They bring a full panoply of A game and force other musicians to bring their A game to keep up.

Neko Case (pictured left) is a prime example. Like Doe, she's got a honey-sweet voice and a legit rock 'n' roll background. However, also like Doe (the solo artist), she's become too comfortable with torch songs and mid-tempo rock, as if she were going out of her way not to offend her fanbase. I don't know what the problem is because anyone's who heard her sing "Thee Exalted Potentate Of Love" knows she's got the kung fu grip. The beauty of The Sadies is that they allow that side of her to flourish, so Neko's collaborations with them ... Furnace Room Lullaby and The Tigers Have Spoken, specifically ... are more spirited than her other efforts. HA! Take that, Starbucks!

This, of course, brings us back to Country Club. When the album works, which is usually, it's because it invariably plays to the strengths of The Sadies, who easily cover the ground between classic mainstream country (1957-69 or thereabouts), barroom honky-tonk, bluegrass, and the countrypolitan ballad. There are excellent contributions from Eric Heywood on pedal steel, Bonebrake himself (pictured right) on vibes, and Bruce Good, patriarch of the Good clan, on autoharp. And Doe's voice is excellent, as usual.

If Country Club has one outstanding flaw, it's that it's a bit too safe. Take away two ballads ... my vote being "Husbands And Wives" (see below) and "A Fool Such As I" ... and replace them with "I've Got A Tiger By The Tail" and "Black Rose" and the album would be damn near perfect. I'm also not sure if the Brothers Good even sing backup. I could be going deaf, but I don't think I hear them. The band gets a couple brief instrumentals, but they couldn't be indulged for one song? These criticisms aside, Country Club is a keeper. In fact, Doe and The Sadies are embarking on a short tour (see that below too) and my guess is that woodshedding these songs and introducing some honkier, tonkier material into the set will breathe even more life into the affair.

Rather than farting my way through an album review, I'm using one of my favorite songs from the album as a jumping off point to explore the country roots of both John Doe and The Sadies. If you like this, you'll probably wanna buy Country Club, as well as 1-2 back catalog items from both acts. You don't hate Americanadia, do you???

John Doe & The Sadies - It Just Dawned On Me [purchase]

"While we haven't reinvented the wheel, we have created a cohesiveness between several hit country & western singles and our own styles."
--Dallas Good

"It Just Dawned On Me" is the perfect summation of this stylistic cohesion. Great vocals, great picking, solid production ... it's amazing when country music sounds like country music. It was written by Exene Cervenka and John Doe and features Kathleen Edwards on vocal harmonies so eerily reminiscent of Cervenka, I'm pretty sure she owns an Exene voodoo doll. Just sayin'. On top of that formidable foundation are The Sadies and their turbo stringbending, slinky groove jockeying, and perfectly formed pocket of Goodness. While the song as written blends X's basic sound with early '60s Nashville ("His Latest Flame" by Elvis maybe?), The Sadies ... Dallas' guitar work, in particular ... hold their own with audacious Clarence White-era Byrds flavor. In fact, "Time Between" from Younger Than Yesterday could be another template for "Dawned."

Knitters - Try Anymore (Why Don't We Even) (2005) [purchase]

The Knitters' 1985 debut, Poor Little Critter On The Road, was much better in theory than execution. It's cool that 3/4 of X and Dave Alvin of The Blasters collaborated on an album of old-school roots music, but the results rarely rise above good. To be fair, X and The Blasters were constantly touring and recording, so they didn't have time to give Critter its propers. Suffice to say, 30 years of touring in one form or another and a genuine feel for americana have turned The Knitters into a kickass collection of road-tested musicians.

"Try Anymore" is a barnstomping tale of marital woe written by Doe. I like how the washtub bass (either usual bassist Jonny Ray Bartel or DJ Bonebrake) drives the band forward while Dave Alvin's steel licks pull them back. That musical tension is mirrored vocally through the patented twang 'n' howl of John 'n' Exene. "Neither of us seem to have the tiiiiiiime!" Like scratching a favorite itch.

John Doe - I Can't Hold Myself In Line (1994) [purchase]

"Bakersfield vs. Nashville was never a dispute ... Bakersfield!"
--John Doe on the Doe/Sadies mindset

This Merle Haggard cover was a revelation in 1994. I was a big fan of X and knew Doe liked country music, but hadn't heard the evidence. I failed to see X in their prime, Poor Little Critter was long out-of-print and impossible to find, and it wasn't like X bootlegs were readily available. Tulare Dust: A Songwriters' Tribute To Merle Haggard changed all that. The album mostly veers between good and great and Doe's version of "I Can't Hold Myself In Line" is definitely a highlight. Smokey Hormel's steel lines are a perfect foil for Doe's velvety croon.

FYI, Doe revisits the Hag catalog on Country Club, taking "Are The Good Times Really Over For Good?" out for a spin. Actually, The Sadies do most of the spinning, as they get the song hopped up on speedballs and take advantage of it in the backseat. Doe wisely plays it straight, letting the band shine for 2:40 of no bullshit country music, especially Dallas on guitar shred and Mike Belitsky on rave-up drums.

Roger Miller - Husbands And Wives (1966) [purchase]

"The songwriters in Nashville would follow him around and pick up his droppings because everything he said was a potential song. He spoke in songs."
--Buddy Killen on Roger Miller

I'll say it now, Roger Miller (pictured left, singing) is the most underrated country artist of all-time. From roughly 1957-67, his songwriting featured the most sublime combination of intelligence, wit, poignancy, ridiculosity, and flat-out anarchy in country music history. Start listing songwriters with a better 10-year stretch and you're gonna have yourself a short list. Few country performers have a better 3-year peak than Miller, whose work from early 1964 to early 1967 is damn near flawless and worth millions. He was a spectacular vocalist and performer, fully inhabiting the pain of Hank Williams one moment ("The Last Word In Lonesome Is Me"), scatting like a slapstick Ella Fitzgerald the next ("Dang Me"). He could play guitar, fiddle, and drums. He was funnier than a sack full of yo mama jokes. And he's underrated because for many country music fans he's essentially a novelty act.

A novelty act can produce "Do-Wacka-Do," not "Husbands And Wives," the second track on Country Club. While Doe probably has the purer voice and does a good job singing it, even he can't compete with Roger's effortless, jazz-influenced vocalistics. Like his old friend and drinking buddy, Willie Nelson (also pictured above, playing guitar), Miller was perfectly comfortable phrasing off-the-beat and he obviously wrote this song with his unique voice in mind. The real difference-maker, though, is the original arrangement, an uncluttered affair meant to highlight Miller's vocal and lyrics. There's a brief mandolin solo and Pig Robbins' dramatic, yet understated ivory-tinkling, otherwise the band smartly lays back. "Husbands" is one of Country Club's rare missteps because there's too much going on, including an awkward 12-string guitar part and superfluous vibes. What can you do? Sometimes you invent a square wheel. Still, it gave me an excuse to pimp the great Roger Miller, so consider it a lose-win. Incidentally, anyone else think Charlie Rich would've done a killer version of this tune?

Neko Case & The Sadies - Home (2006) [purchase]

"Home" went to #2 for Jim Reeves in 1959, but this version from In Concert Volume One is clearly based on the 1966 re-recording by the song's writer, Roger Miller. In Concert actually has a pair of obscurities from the early Miller catalog, the other being "Jason Fleming," which Miller himself cut in 1959. Oh circle ... you can't stay broken for long.

A nostalgic reverie, "Home" hears Neko in great voice (I know, weird), Kelly Hogan provides perfect close harmony, Dallas (pictured right) tears up the B-Bender, and, oh by the way, that's Garth Hudson of The Band on piano. GARTH MF'IN HUDSON!!! I love the very brief exchange between Hudson and upright bassist, Sean Dean, from :33-:36. Cower in awe, mere mortals.

Sadies - Within A Stone (2002) [purchase]

One of The Sadies' first straight-up country originals ... written with Unintended homeboy, Rick White ... this is about as close as you can get to The Band without owing royalties. Hell, you can almost hear Rick Danko's keening wail, lone American, Levon Helm, guiding him home on rustic harmony. Of course, the connection makes sense since both bands are filled with Canadians in love with American roots music.

"Within A Stone" features great harmonizing by the Good boys and I love the dobro part, though I suppose that could be a Nashville guitar. If there was a point where The Sadies put themselves on a collision course with Country Club, this track from Stories Often Told (pictured left) may have been it. Big props for the Night Of The Hunter reference ("It's a hard world for little things.").

Sadies - What's Left Behind (2007) [purchase]

What's that? You need another Clarence White-style fix? Oh OK, twist my arm.

Photographic awesomeness again made possible by RockPaperPixels

STOP THE TOUR AND LET ME ON

Beginning on April 29, John Doe and The Sadies will be playing a handful of record release dates in southern Ontario, the Atlantic seaboard, and the upper midwest. So, you lucky bastards living near Toronto, New York, and Detroit have no excuses. I'm officially jealous starting ... now. Get yer country clubbin' on.

Click here for April dates
Click here for May dates

Gary Louris > The Sadies < Clarence White

The Sadies, in glorious "Toronto-vision," courtesy RockPaperPixels

While researching The Jayhawks for my Lover Of The Bayou post, I discovered that Gary Louris produced The Sadies' 2007 album, New Seasons. How in the name of God did I not know this?!?! I'll tell you how. I downloaded the album from eMusic and it didn't come with liner notes. Is it really that difficult to include a PDF of the liners as a standard part of a download? Sheesh. Reason #347 why I prefer vinyl. Gimme an actual record along with a free mp3 download and you'll have me as a loyal customer forever. You hear that music industry??? Get on it.

I haven't written too much about The Sadies thus far, but not for lack of love. Led by brothers Travis Good (guitar, fiddle, vocals) and Dallas Good (guitar, vocals), and anchored by Sean Dean (upright bass) and Mike Belitsky (drums), Toronto's favorite sons have developed into the most complete, most versatile, most sublimely rooted rock 'n' roll band going. They effortlessly combine surf music with Byrdsy country-pop, early Pink Floyd psych, and touches of bluegrass, gospel, rockabilly, and punk, and it all works. They can play sidemen to Neko Case's torch songs or Andre Williams' dirty funk and it sounds like an organic extension of the same band. In 2006, they released In Concert Volume One (pictured above), one of my favorite albums from this decade, and a no shit, I kid you not indie-roots version of The Last Waltz. In short, you cannot stop The Sadies, you can only hope to contain them.

To that end, I'm not sure how much was Louris and how much was the natural evolution of the band, but New Seasons (pictured right) was a breakthrough for The Sadies, at least from a studio perspective. As a live unit, they already had the mad skillz. But, I think the head 'Hawk was crucial in helping them flesh out their vocal arrangements and songwriting. Louris' work with Mark Olson, let alone his own affinity for The Byrds, helped the Brothers Good fully realize their inner McGuinn/Hillman. Furthermore, with Dallas' venture into B-Bender territory, they added full-on Clarence White flourishes that totally slay. In fact, I am officially going on record as saying The Sadies have now surpassed both The Jayhawks and The Byrds in terms of the all-around game. Live, studio, versatility, balls, showmanship, you name it. The Sadies have no weaknesses ... other than rarely playing Texas. OK, so that's a big weakness since I can't see them here in Austin. Damn Sadies.

A BAD DAY FOR STEEL PLAYERS

Here's an excerpt from Frank Goodman's kickass interview with Travis, conducted shortly after the Fall 2007 release of New Seasons. Available in full on puremusic.com, the conversation offers great insight into the choice of Gary Louris as producer and the adoption of the StringBender by Dallas. As a bonus, I'm including the song referenced, "Never Again." Such greatness.

Sadies - Never Again [purchase]

Pure Music: So, when it came time to do a new studio record, how did it come about, picking a producer, picking a studio. How did the process begin?

Travis Good: I guess it all began on that Jayhawks tour. That would be the beginning of it, and getting to know Gary Louris. He said shortly after that he wanted to work with us, producing some stuff. And we were quite flattered. It had been a while since we'd done a record, and this time we kind of all went off our separate ways before we went and started to try and get some ideas -- not necessarily write whole songs, but just get a few ideas each, because we really wanted to get as much of Gary's influence as we could, too. We were saying beforehand that it would be kind of a waste to go in there with Gary and just do a bunch of surf songs.

[laughter]

TG: So I don't know if it was consciously or subconsciously, but we went into the direction that we thought we could use some help in, and I think that was kind of the singing and songwriting aspects of it.

PM: So which of the brothers is playing StringBender (pictured left) on "Never Again"? Is that you?

TG: No, that's Dallas. He's got the B-Bender.

PM: Who made that for him?

TG: Well, he bought that one. But you know the story, those are made by Clarence White originally, right?

PM: Yeah. Boy, I love those StringBender guitars. The welcome stiffness of the banjo and the slinky rubbery quality of a good Bender, those two things just go so well together.

TG: Yeah, they do! For a while we had a steel guitar player, too, in the band. He kind of became obsolete when Dallas got that Bender.

[laughter]

TG: Yeah, we were kind of getting to the point where we were like, "Can you play this part on the steel?" [mimics twangy sounds of a B-Bender] He goes, "Yeah, I think I could probably do that." And we're like, "Ah, fuck it, we can just do it." That must have been a bad day for steel players when they went and invented that thing.

COMING NEXT TIME

The Sadies combine forces with John Doe (X, Knitters) to record an album of country songs. Entitled Country Club (pictured right), it's a righteous mix of covers and originals, and available for preview on Yep Roc's website. Click that link, yo.

Clarence White: White Lightnin'

"I know a little place to go where the band is cookin' every night."

It's my pleasure to announce the arrival of more gems from the Clarence White archives. John Delgatto of Sierra Records has walked a Bataan death march to issue White Lightnin', a collection of 18 obscurities covering the breadth of Clarence's career. 15 of the 18 tracks were recorded between 1967-70, so its synchronicity with the Clarence White Chronicles is fortuitous. I've addressed a few of the songs ... The Everly Brothers and Joe Cocker, e.g. ... but for the most part this is unreleased nectar from the stringbender wing of Mount Olympus. You get your CW acoustic, electric, and pre- and post-B-Bender. Oh yeah, and the first 500 customers receive a free mini-DVD featuring live versions of "Truckstop Girl" and "Take A Whiff". According to yesterday's email, 255 are still available.

Freddy Weller w/Clarence White - Birmingham [purchase]

"Birmingham" comes from Freddy Weller's debut LP, Games People Play (1969). Weller is a decent enough vocalist, but the stars here are Clarence (panned left) and Red Rhodes on pedal steel (panned right). White's syncopated intro is suh-weet and his funky playing from 1:38-1:54 is ridiculous. I especially love the interplay between White and Rhodes at the end of that passage where they're "talking" to each other. Great stuff ... and there's more where that came from.

Visit Sierra Records

White Lightnin' is worthwhile for musical reasons, but buying it also supports John, the Original Twangsta of Sierra Records. The dude has endured manufacturing, distribution, electronic, and medical woes to bring you the sweet, sweet country-rock love, so for the love of Job, help a brotha out! If you place an order over $30, you get 40% off, and the Sierra catalog includes Clarence, Gram Parsons, Muleskinner, DVDs, books, and posters. There may be another way to get a discount, but it involves math, and math is hard. So, contact John at mailorder@sierra-records.com to ask about the discount policy, the availability of items in the catalog, and to thank him for his dogged years of service.

THE FUTURE YOU SAY?

FYI, according to yesterday's email, a Parsons box set and Byrds DVD may "see the light of day someday," so consider your purchase to be a sound investment in the country-rock canon. Everybody wins.

Clarence White: Lover Of The Bayou ... and other notorious brethren (Part 7)

Byrds - Lover Of The Bayou (1970) [purchase]

The live LP kicks off promisingly with one of the Gene Tryp numbers, "Lover Of The Bayou." This foreboding tale of a voodoo houngan man is swamp-mojo braggadocio in the great tradition of Bo Diddley's "Who Do You Love." The music is threatening, and tense, like the rant of its witch-doctor narrator.
--Byrdwatcher on (Untitled)

It's been awhile since I tackled the Clarence White catalog, so let's dive back in with the song that turned me into a Clarence fan. I first heard "Lover" in 1994 when a friend bought a used copy of Untitled. At the time I was a very casual Byrds fan. I had the requisite Sweetheart Of The Rodeo LP, which I loved, and the Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, a hit-and-miss affair that I bought mainly because it had "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man." I grew up in Southern California in the '70s and was inundated with the classic Byrds jingle-jangle and soft harmonies. I thought I knew all I really wanted to know about The Byrds. Wrong.

Within :20 of the needle dropping on Untitled, it was clear that 'soft' and 'jingle-jangle' were being touched inappropriately by hell-raising rock fury. Panned hard left, Clarence White announced his presence with an Eddie Hazel-esque wall of superfuzz. Nowhere in my synapses was I prepared for the heavy sludge being heaped upon me. And singing about the Lousiana bayou? Who did The Byrds think they were ... Creedence?!?!?! And it wasn't just White. Bassist Skip Battin was pistol-whipping his way through the low end, with drummer Gene Parsons locked right in, busy, but funky. Roger McGuinn, a guy I'd considered the rock 'n' roll equivalent of a turtleneck sweater, sang about cooking a bat in a gumbo pan and drinking blood from a rusty can ... and pulled it off! His voice was a raspy snarl, like he'd recently taken up smoking Camel non-filters, and his 12-string sound was equally surly. Inexplicably, everything worked.

It was Clarence, though, who pushed "Lover" into Vesuvian territory. His coiled intensity perfectly evoked the song's sinister mojo and, if anything, he underplays throughout. Battin and Parsons are moving around way more than CW. The B-Bender and distortion pedal ... variously described as a Fender Blender, Gibson Maestro, Valley Arts fuzz box, and Mosrite Fuzzrite ... were used to expert effect, but it was Clarence's safecracker's touch that made the difference. Tone ultimately comes from the fingers, not gear, and like all great guitarists, Clarence's fierce tone on "Lover" displayed brain-fingertip coordination not available to lesser players. I love his searing entry into the solo (1:25), but my favorite part is from 2:57 to the final gun, when it sounds like he and Gene are riffing off each other. What could've been a good, moody setpiece was elevated into one of the band's last outright classics. Needless to say, my journey with The Byrds was just beginning. Thank you, Clarence White.

GENE TRYP

"It's contemporary, like country-rock oriented. It's got hard rock; it's got country. They're going to do rear projection films and slides and tapes -- mixed media. (It's a) McLuhanistic musical idea with a pit orchestra -- cause you have to have that, the union says you have to have 26 pieces at least but we want that anyway. We have a cat who's going to orchestrate the whole score. I just wrote the tunes and he's going to put it to fiddles and celli and so on.
--Roger McGuinn discussing Gene Tryp in 1970 interview with Vincent Flanders [read full interview]

I'll discuss this more during my proper overview of Untitled, but I'll mention now that "Lover" was composed for the Broadway musical, Gene Tryp. Co-written with Jacques Levy ... later to be Dylan's foil on Desire ... Tryp was an unwieldy behemoth that never saw the light of day. But, McGuinn wasn't about to let these songs go to waste, so several ended up on Untitled. According to Flanders' interview, "Lover" was set in the bayou "where Gene Tryp, the main character, was selling guns to the Confederates and rum to the slaves. The slaves find out about it and Big Cat sings this song to Tryp to scare him." Put that in your gris-gris bag and smoke it.

IT WAS NOT LOST ON ME

Jayhawks - Waiting For The Sun (1992) [purchase]

One of the underlying factors in my sudden re-evaluation of The Byrds was my appreciation for The Jayhawks (pictured below). I got turned onto their 1992 album, Hollywood Town Hall, after seeing "Waiting For The Sun" on 120 Minutes. This was way back when MTV included 'M' as an essential part of their programming. Anyway, "Waiting" was manna from country-rock heaven. Great vocal harmonies, crunchy guitar sound, Nicky Hopkins on piano (there he is again), it should've been played to death on classic rock radio, what with it being, you know, both classic and rock.

What struck me on the day of my Untitled deflowering was how much "Lover Of The Bayou" sounded like a menacing precursor to "Waiting For The Sun." Given The Jayhawks' obvious appreciation for The Byrds, I realized the connection between the two songs went beyond their common Am-G-F chord progression. It was a passing of the bird band torch, if you will. You can probably extrapolate further and say that The Jayhawks picked up where both the late-period Byrds and early-period Eagles left off. Of course, inspiration goes both ways. "Lover" has the same chord structure as "All Along The Watchtower," with the live released version drawing on Hendrix's righteous cover, and the studio outtake featuring prominent harmonica like the Dylan original. Thus, in SAT form: The Byrds are to The Jayhawks as Bob Dylan is to The Byrds.

While Louris' phenomenal guitar playing probably owes more to Jimmy Page than it does to Clarence, the White influence is apparent in his use of string bends and tremolo bar to achieve steely textures. I think this is heard to brilliant effect in the ascending runs from 2:46-2:53, the deep bend at 3:05, and throughout the final half-minute. Like Clarence's playing on "Lover," it's not virtuosic, just a wondrous, gnarled guitar tone that makes the denizens of The Adios Lounge giddy like little schoolgirls.

ON ... KEEP MOVIN' ON

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Mary Jane's Last Dance (1993) [purchase]

As it turns out, there was a subplot to the subplot in the form of Tom Petty (pictured right with Mike Campbell). Petty, of course, owes a huge debt to The Byrds and perhaps a small, though significant debt to The Jayhawks. Or it could be coincidence. Either way, in late 1993, Petty released his gajillion-selling Greatest Hits CD, which included the new track, "Mary Jane's Last Dance." I think this album was given to all incoming college freshmen, delivery drivers, and any white person visiting 7/11 between November 1993-February 1995 because that shit was everywhere.

"Mary Jane" was the first single, the hit-in-waiting, and a pretty good song. But, from the first few notes, it sounded pretty clearly to me like a certain someone was ripping off a certain "Waiting For The Sun." Sure, the Byrds and Jayhawks (and Dylan) go Am-G-F, while Petty jukes us with the Am-G-D and a Dark Side Of The Moon chorus, but come on. It's not like I'm Manson with the White Album mad libs here. The song's main riff? Work with me here.

Before you think the peyote has finally driven me loco, please note that there is a connection between The Jayhawks and Tom Petty circa 1993. Rick Rubin. The Jayhawks were on Rubin's label, Def American, and he also happened to produce "Mary Jane's Last Dance." I'm pretty sure that if anyone were in a position to turn Tom Petty onto The Jayhawks, it would be Rubin. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Jayhawks toured with Tom Petty in 1995 and the results ... well, they were not good. The band typically played a perfunctory 45-minute set for an arena full of empty seats, after which Gary Louris (pictured above) would gather the group in the dressing room for their nightly cry. By the end of the year, Mark Olson was an ex-Jayhawk and Louris and Co. headed into more pop/less country waters.

Interestingly, since I began work on this post, news has arrived via carrier pigeon that The Jayhawks are reuniting for a series of summer shows. So, chin up Olson/Louris fans. Help is on the way.

MUDCRUTCH

Mudcrutch - Lover Of The Bayou (2008) [purchase]

I'm actually gonna let Tom Petty have the last word. While he may have lifted inspiration from The Jayhawks, guess what? That's how music works. Everyone's listening to everyone else and there all ripping each other off. Sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you get into massive debt and your band sweats out life in dive bars (most likely) or concert halls (it could be worse). Hell, Petty himself went through that racket with his first band, Mudcrutch. Luckily for him, success with The Heartbreakers allowed for the totally cool moment to arrive where he reconvened his former band for a one-off album and mini-tour in 2007-08. And wouldn't you know it? The Notorious Crutch Brothers were kind enough to bring us full circle by covering the band that done started this whole thing off. According to Petty, Mudcrutch used to cover "Lover Of The Bayou" when they first started. So, they decided to cover it again.

Here's the video, which as far as I'm concerned is Mike Campbell's show. You wanna talk about an all-timer guitarist who has totally absorbed Clarence White's style into his own playing, Campbell is the man. Tastefully badass, profoundly underrated, and in all likelihood sucked and weaned on chicken bile. Mike Campbell, this post is for you!