Do The Bruce, Butch ! Uh, I Mean Stay Gold, Ponyboy! Uh, I Mean...What Was I Just Talking About?

The One Buck Guy is not known to be lazy, though he's increasingly known for talking about himself in the third person. Because if I were, lazy that is, I would just copy and paste a chunk of the write-up for Ozarker and attach it here. You know, that part about cool musicians emembering the music they heard, when they were young, and that music would possibly probably certainly include Born In The USA. Listening to  utch Walker's Stay Gold - and its obvious pointer to nostalgia, and 80s nostalgia specifically, in the title, I had the exact sae thought I had when listening to Ozarker: 'This man loved Born In The USA when he was a kid, and that love will out'. The sonic markers might not be as pronounced as on Ozarker, but they're there. 

Butch Walker had been lingering around on the periphery of my record collection and musical awareness, popping up on the occasional 'various artist'-sampler. One of those appearances finally got put to good use hen I used his cover of a Nirvana song for my Nirvana rock opera redux project, but other than that I hadn't really deepened my knowledge of Mr. Walker. I finally did, thanks to a mistake. Browsing on Allmusic for one reason or another, I saw a link to an interviw with Mr. Walker on the title page, which sounded interesting enough, and was. It talked about the impressions and the making of his new album. Well, except it didn't. That album was Stay Gold, which had come out in 2016, but that  tite page link to what I assumed was a promo for the just released album was in...2024. Surely a programing error, but you know, some philosopher, possibly me, once said 'Life is using a faulty algorhythms to get something useful out of it' (or something). So I finally dove into Mr. Walker's music after that interview piqued my interest, if you pardon my French. Deep-dive would have been too much, since Walker is active ince the 80s, in -various bands ranging from glam-metal to moe straight forward rock. So I mainly focused on checking out some of his solo work. 

Oh, and of course first and foremost, the aforementione Stay Gold. which is a really really swell piece of rock'n'roll business, with just the slightest hints of twang and Americana to it. The set-opening "Stay Gold" is, well, pur gold, Ponyboy. "East Coast Girl" has some weird spoken word interludes that remind you vaguely of, oh I don't kno, ggy Pop maybe, but the chorus threatens halfway through to collapse into that of "No Surrender". Like I said, maybe this isn't intentional, but, you know..."Ludlow Expectations" has a title that Springsteen would never write, the song's chorus, however...

Anyway, I don't wanna hammer these comparisons down everyone's throats too much, so let me say this: Great set of ten rock tunes, whether you're a Springsteen-ite (-ist, -ophile?) or not. Walker is a bit of a traditionalist, for sure, in music and attitude, even sequencing - something the One Buck Guy wholly approves of, of course. He puts the pedal to the metal for most of this album, but when he slows down for ballads "Descending" and "Record Store", it's on traks five and ten, the vinyl side closers. Well done, Butch. As is the whole of Stay Gold. Just a wonderful album, that reminds you of what you liked about Ryan Adams back in the days when he still made good records. 

So, everybody, stay gold with, naturally, Stay Gold...

The Dirty Dozen Of Bluegrass Chartbusters Is Full...

 

It's the ying and yang of the cosmos, or at least of the One Buck Records part of it: One series - beloved All Pearls, No Swine - slows down while another - it took a couple of volumes, but now also beloved Bluegrass Chartbusters - picks up the pace. As said in the last installment of our series, I got to diggin' again...and diggin...and diggin'...And then I got to recompiling...and recompiling...and recompiling...So I did spend a lot of time recently with this series to knock it into shape after a wave of new arrivals made it grow by another 25%! 

The result of some of this work is now right in front of you. The first reworked 'old volume', into which I reseeded some of the new arrivals, the idea being that they don't all arrive in the back half of this series disproportionally. Also: Get some cool new discoveries out early, and for all to hear. I've spent the last week plus or sso grooving to one particular tune, Molly Tuttle's "She's A Rainbow". It's such a propulsive, fun cover of the ol' Rolling Stones experiment - and for me it dusts the original. Now this is bluegrass verging on pop, with drums and electronic effects. But if we consider the latter a nod to the horribly dated psychedelic effects on the original, I'll allow it. Ah, scratch that, I would allow it anyway, it's such a great track. 

But a one highlight reel this is not! We got more where those come from. also making their series debut: The Dirty Grass Players, introducing Jimi Hendrix to the row of covered artists, with their take on "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)". As a one-off, we have brothers Jake And Tebey Vandelaand, covering Aloe Blacc's "Wake Me Up", an immensely popular tune in bluegrass covers, and for good reason. Even in its original pop arragement it sounds half like a lost bluegrass tune already! Tebey Vaadeland is normally more of a rockabilly specialist, but they bring a nice old-school backwoods feel to it.

And there's another series debut for future contributors: The Grateful Bluegrass Boys dropped an album of bluegrass covers in 2017, and nothing since. Paul Simon's "Late In The Evening" has some of the Zydeco feeling (accordeon solo!) that Simon brought - not wthout controversy - to Graceland. The rest is ably handled by the veterans - old and new - of this series. Want to hear "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" in a countrified/deep country fried version? Dale Ann Bradley and Dave Adkins will oblige! Ever thought that Mr. Mister's "Kyrie Eleison" (or "Carry A Laser", for those of us in the know...) would make a nice bluegrass tune? Listen to Love Canon to find out...

Newly covered artists here include Phil Collins (and his coolest solo song), The Allman Brothers, one-hit wonders The Lumineers and Gotye, as well as Jimmy Webb, although his song would only become a hit when a certain country veteran supergroup got their hands on it...and picked up its title as their band name! 

So, you know the deal: Behind its admittedly sobre cover, here's another 20 great bluegrass tunes covering 20 great originals. Need I say more? 

The Other Side(s) Of Being Born In The USA...And Making Music There

It has become almost apocryphal to say that for every album Bruce Springsteen released, there is at least one he didn't, but since the man has opened the gates to his vault over the last decade (and, ahem, the gates to his other vault), it's becoming more and more evident, how true this is, now that people don't have to exclusively piece things together from bootlegs anymore. In the cas eof the run-up to Born In The USA, Bruce had material for about six albums, that he then pruned down and selected and reselected until coming up with the twelve-song track list - including famous late arrival for hit single purposes "Dancing In The Dark". A ton of the other tracks went back in or stayed in the vaults, though Bruce churned out a handful of possible contenders as b-sides. 

Now, not all of this material is top notch - how could it be? - but overall there are a number of very strong songs that didn't get their due in time, and coud have been hits if Springsteen had issued them with an eye on the charts. I'm mainly thinking of "My Love Will Not Let You Down", finally issued on Tracks fourteen years later, which sounds much more like a hit single than half of the tracks of Born In The USA that did become top ten hits. With Born In The USa you can easily argue that momentum in pop and rock music is real, because at any other time, I don't think a so-so song like "I'm Going Down" would have come anywhere near the top of the charts if it hadn't come from the unstoppabe blockbuster that was Born In The USA.

But back to some of those songs. What if Bruce had kept some of the unused, but high quality stuff that didn't make the cut, and quickly thrown out a follow-up album in late 1985 or early 1986? (In real life he didn't need to, because Born In The USA was still throwing off singles in November 1985, more than a year and a half after the album had been released, following the trailblazing of Michael Jackson's Thriller) That album could've been Rockaway The Days, our One Buck Record of the day, slily presented with a cover that would remind people of its prdecessor - as if here was a need at the time to do so. I have already documented some of Bruce's best demo work with Don't Back Down last year, so this focuses on the finished tracks. I was rather brutal in my selection, dropping two numbers at the last second to make Rockaway The Days a vinyl-appropriate nine-track 40-minute affair. All killer, no filler, or pretty much.  

"Frankie", a lengthy track that oes back to Bruce's love of Van Morrison was a concert classic in 1976, the dropped from the line-up of Darkness On The Edge Of Town for Bruce's harder-edged material. He and the E-streeters gave it another try in 1982, but with the pop-rock sheen of Born In The USA and its eye on concise songs, "Frankie" again got the boot. And in some ways, it is clarly a song from a different era that Bruce that he had left behind, but as a nice throwback to romantic mid-70s Bruce it's a really nice piece that deserves its place in the sun. Another temporarily lost classic, "This Hard Land" figured on early track lists of Born In The USA as its last track, before Bruce inexplicably discarded it, only to resurrect it as a a re-recording for his Greatest Hits album. Fittingly, maybe, it's now the closing track of Rockaway The Days. 

Rockaway The Days collects some of Bruce's finest, if unassuming, pop moments from the era like "Man At The Top" with a very vague country influence, the raucous "Lion's Den" originally recorded during a session for Gary U.S. Bonds (and having its horns anachronistically added in 1998 for Tracks, but we'll turn a blind eye on that, exceptionally). and "Janey Don't You Lose Heart", which like "Man At The Top" was brought out as a b-side. "Janey" also has the first recorded vocals of Nils Lofgren on a Springsteen track, who overdubbed his harmonies on the original 1983 version. 

"Protection", used here as a kick-ass opener for what would have been side b, isn't a finished studio track, but the still very shiny demo Bruce recorded and then gave to Donna Summer. He originally wrote another song for her, which arguably fit her style better, but Jon Landau more or less forbid Bruce to give it away. That song was "Cover Me", a song that I personaly never felt was particularly great, but it bacame a huge hit as Born In The USA's second single, so maybe Landau knows a thing or two more about what the record-buying public likes. 

Rockaway The Days - nine top song from mid-80s Bruce, some of which arguably are better than the weake numbers on Born In The USA. Either way, a very fine companion to the big blockbuster that came before it. 

 

Requiem For An Unknown Singer-Songwriter, or: News From The Slop Shop

Farewell, dear Jared, we hardly knew you. Come to think of it, we didn't know you at all, and you wanted it this way. But now that you have seemingly shuffled off your (im)mortal (digital) coil and have gone into the great beyond of other cyberegions, we salute you for...uh...your infatiguable work ethic, your high work standards and your sophisticated artistry of sounding like a couple of different people all at once. Rest In Power, Jared, no matter where that power comes from. New server rooms, maybe. 

Hey, you guys remember Jared Hutcherson, right? To some, he's the country-singer/songwriter that created dozens of albums as if it was nothing. To others he was the name of one of the most shameless A.I. slop generating programmer imaginable, pointing out modern country radio's hollowness by churning out hours and hours of inoffensive, bland country-pop pap that would go unnoticed among real artists on country radio. And now he's gone. I'm not saying my little article calling out 'Mr. Hutcherson' had something to do with that, though I'm not saying it didn't, either. Who knows how Youtube got wise to the systematic shenanigans behind our beloved Jared, or whether the people behind Jared took the money and ran, while they still could. 

Jared getting deep-sixed by his creators

If you remember, 'Jared' was notoriously productive, as A.I. slop machines tend to be, churning out albums, and long albums at that, contrary to real artists, whoe albums get shorter and shorter, due to the Tik Tok-isation of the younger generations of music listeners. And now his thirty albums are seemingly gone from all music streaming services, having also quit Apple, Amazon and the rest of the bunch. Jared you are gone, but not forgotten. 

Music recommendations straight from the slop shop are of course continuing. a couple of weeks ago, together with some albums from the early 70s that go well with my All Pearls, No Swine project, Youtube proposed me a band called The Rash Cooper. I liked two of their songs, though they didn't sound much alike, and wanted to find out more about the band. a Google research yielded absolutely nothing besides that album: no web presence, social media, even a mention on a website somewhere. If an abum with non-descriptive artwork is the absolute only thing a 'musical artist' has out there, there's a pretty much 100% probability it's A.I. So, I kept a tab on these guys, and guess what. Almost exactly a month after the first one, the second album of the 'band' dropped, again with nothing but the album and its obviously A.I.-generated cover to show for it. Goodbye, The Rash Cooper, you sloppy A.I. slop. 

This is what you get when you let A.I. (no emphasis on the I.) write its own epitaph

The stories of A.I.-generated slops and sloppy fakes are becoming legion and getting worse - music streming platforms now have to delete thousands if fake songs every day - and that is, when they're trying, which considering their business model they don't have a real incentive to. But they really should, as the scammers have upped their game, now skimming both sides of the aisle. As seen in the article I linked to, A.I. now steals or 'creates' fake tracks by fake artists, which then get streamed thousands of times by A.I. bots on a loop, allowing the scammer to goose the streaming numbers for a half-way decent payout. It's not much money per se, a low four digit figure, but it's like phishing mails. You repeat this often enough on a small scale involving small local bands to rip off, and you got yourself a salary. The loss, however, is on the scammed artists, not the streamers, so it'll probably take some turns for the worse, before the wave of A.I. slop & scam music really gets monitored and persecuted as it should. 

No such stuff here on One Buck Records, pbviously, though nowadays I have to be careful as hell as well when sourcing the All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series. So far, no A.I. has made it past ol' OGB's quality control, but the enemy is getting stronger and better. Still, all human-made music right here, of which there is more coming up very soon, same as it ever was. 

Like a ghost rider in the sky, Jared will return someday...on a burning horse!

Allez, Enfants De La Patrie De Tous Des Perles Et Aucun Cochon!

Bonjour chers amis de la France, pays des mangeurs des grénouilles et d'escargots et des fromage un moitié pouris...it is the national holiday here in France and this morning followed with a quarter eye the big-ass military parade through parisian Boulevards that the wife and kids watched on TV. The real national celebration will of course hopefully happen tonight, when the French national team beats Spain in the Football World Cup semifinal. I'm not the biggest fan of the squad, though family loyalty means I have to be rooting pour les bleus, but I certainly don't want to see the sneaky Spaniards squeek into the finals. I have yet to be impressed by that squad, other than the individual brillance of Lamine Yamal, who is as good as advertised, and see them underwhelmingly make round after round...the worst of course would be to have Spain meet Argentina, who have also squeeked through in even less impressive ways. They have basically played every game a little worse than the preceding one, yet somehow are two games away for the title. I might even have to swallow my usual discontent for the Brits - more aimed at their asshole fans than the team itself, they are the absolute dirt worst - and root for those guys to go to the title match. 

Wait a minute, you say, did I go to the right place? Since when has One Buck Records turned into a sports blog. It hasn't, of course, but I feel like chatting about this and that, because, well, this newest installment of All Pearl, No Swine has me with little to say. after having done forty of these suckers, you run out of useful things to say -  you know what these are and how they work. I could annotate some of the artists, but that would be relatively random, and if one of these songs makes you want to investigate the guilty party, you can hop on Google or Discogs and find out more for yourself. So I'll just talk a bit about why I compiled this volume as I did and then I'll be out of your hair and, uh, let the music do the talking...

You will find that there's little of the usual folk and country rock on this album - since I was compiling in the moment, I was in the mood for something a little funky, even in its mid-tempo songs, so this is a volume of All Pearls, No Swine that moves a lot more than some of its mellower siblings. For variety purposes we do get a belated return appearance of fey folkie James McCarthy - it's ok, James, no need to declare that you are "Born A Loser" - and of soft acoutic duo Joe And Bing (cf. the two sensitive gentelemen above). And since Bonnie Tyler just died a couple of days ago I thought it would be neat to have something from her on here as well, so I put "Hey Love (It's A Feeling)" on here. 

So, what else is going on around here? A bunch of midtempo groovers from folks like Redeye, Shawn Harris, Riverson, Carmen, and others. There's also a bit of a psychedelic bent to some of the songs here, whether ir's Dory Previn's ballad "The Game", Creme Soda's "Tonight" or Major Arcana's "Wsteren Wind". And did I mention crunchy guitars? Oh yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have crunchy guitars. Power-poppers Bram Tchaikowski set the tone with the opener "Lullaby On Broadway", we get the punk-ish "You're The Disease" from The Outcasts, Luke & The Apostles' gospel-ish "You Make Me High" gets high on electric guitars, and finally Kiwi prog rockers Ragnarok - having previously been compiled here on One Buck Records, and pictured below - show their roots as a bar band playing covers by bringing out a super-heavy version of Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" that brings things to an end in suitably thunderous fashion.

So, twenty underappreciated quality tracks from the 70s. You know what to do. 

 

The Return Of The Ozarker

 

When last we saw Israel Nash - and that was a while ago - he was wearing unkempt hair and a long cowboy poncho, having seemingly stepped right out of Laurel Canyon in the early 1970s. The music he brought with him was also of that exact time and place - Israel Nash's Rain Plans sounded like a long-lost Neil Young record, which of course meant that together with my reworked Harvest of Uncle Neil Rain Plans became the most popular item on this blog, and - if the three popular items on the bottom of the front page tell true - still is, at least in terms of page views. Rightfully so, 'cause it's a great album, but Israel Nash is not one to sit still and dwell in what's done. His earlier album Barn Doors And Concrete Floors - whivh I picked up after Rain Plans - sounds a lot more of its time, reminding you of Son Volt and the whole No Depression scene of the 90s that it was influenced by. 

But Ozarker is something else entirely, once again. Eagle-eyed and even half-blind visitors have seen that Israel Nash's return is tagged with the Born In The USA Appreciation Month tag, and there's a reason for that. Namely, that Ozarker sounds not much like Rain Plans, but it does have distant echo of - you guessed it - Bruce's mega album of the 80s. Ozarker, despite the gaudy album cover which makes you think that Nash has gone full glam, is his version of a heartland record, and, notably, a heartland record recorded in the mid-80s. You can think John Mellencamp or maybe Tom Petty, but good ol' Bruce should definitely cross your mind when you listen to this. It definitely crossed Nash's when he recorded this. 

I have a theory concerning musicians of roughly my generation and slightly older. They all listened to bits and bops - if not the entire thing, of Born In The USA when they were kids, mainly because that record with its seven top ten hits was so inescapble at the time. After, when these boys grew into rock'n'rollers and and country rockers and such, they left all embarrasing memories of ever having liked "Born In The USA" or danced around to "Dancing In The Dark" behind, and focused on their more srious endeavors. But hidden deep in the lizard part of their brain is an abiding love for Born In The USA, and even its - shall we say divisive - audioscape. And that love will out, sooner or later. 

Ozarker is, as the title indicates, a return to the roots. Israel Nash spent most of his life in Texas, but was born in Aurora, Missouri, and spent his childhood there. The album is, in many ways, a reflection on his growing up, the family and its roots - the title song chronicles the love story of his grandparents - and, obviously, the music that he listened to when he grew up. And if you grew up in Missouri in the early 80s, you definitely heard some heartland rock. Gripka has mentioned that he listened to two albums in the run-up to Ozarker, Tom Petty's Damn The Torpedoes and, yup, Bruce's Born In The USA. Nash even writes his own, updated  version of "Born In The USA", chronicling the return of veteran's in "Lost In America". The jungles of Vietnam have been replaced by Middle East deserts, but the sentiment of being, well, lost and sold out, and full of regrets, are the same: "It was God and country, cash in hand / for a one-way ticket off to them far east blowing desert sands / I won't forgive and I can't forget / All that I saw an those thigs that I did". Another long-gone daddy in the U.S.A, now... 

Listen to opener "Can't Stop": Once you get past the moody, synth-backed opening and the chorus kicks in, you'd think this is a Tom Petty outtake. As in, a really good Tom Petty outtake. "Roman Candle" fleetingly makes youthink of another heartland rocker, good ol' Bob Seger. But let's be very clear: These aren't Ryan Adams-style pastiches of things he likes, these are Nash's songs cast in the shadow of those heratland rockers you would hear in a small town in the Ozarks in the early and mid-80s. There's even some 'Sha-La-la's' on the title song that seem to be imported directly from Bruce's record, and "Pieces" sound like it could have been written as such by the man himself. Considering the records that inspired this, Ozarker's sound is slightly synthetic and huge, as it should be. You go mid-80s heartland rock, go fuckin' hard and really freakin' big. 

Ozarker is a fantastic album, if you like Petty, if you like Springsteen, or if you just like damn good rock music with an honest country heart. A concise ten track, 45 minute set of wonderful country-tinged heartland rock, that shows again why Mr. Nash is an underrated American treasure. 

My Bonnie Is Over The Ocean...

 ...well, so to speak. You know, that big-ass dark unknowable ocean that we all have to cross someday. Well, today was Bonnie's day. Gloria Gaynor a.k.a. Bonnie Tyler died yesterday. I knew she had been sick, and had just come out of a medially induced coma last week or so, so I figured she was doing a little better, but, uh, nope...another one of the old crew gone. And Bonnie Tyler was definitely someone I heard a ton on the radio when I was young. By that time, she was already - like her sister in roaring vocals, Tina Turner - in her MOR/AOR phase, which made her a perfect fit for my parents' preferred radio station, fitting in neatly amongst your Elton John and Rod Stewart and Bryan Adams. Her biggest smash, "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" was still played all over the radio, as were the old classics "It's A Heartache" and "Lost In France" and her frecent work  also got some air waves. 

Now, unlike for Tina - for whose comp I did serve up a number of MOR/AOR classics - I had compiled a pretty neat compilation of Tyler's early years, before the frivolous hairspray and equally frivolous production took over. There's no shame in liking that Bonnie Tyler - and I really do - but her early, grittier, earthier work deserves another look from a lot of people put off by the puffy hair, the cocaine-addled videos and the really mainstreamy production of the 80s. 

That's why you should check out Really Cool Antiques, if you didn't at the time. 20 early tracks before folks like Jim Steinman and *shudder* Dieter Bohlen got their hands on her. The two early classics, plus gritty takes on classics like "Living In The City", there's lots of stuff to like in here and remember our sweet Bonnie over the ocean... 

R.I.P. Gaynor "Bonnie Tyler" Hopkins

1961 - 2026

I Feel Like Ol' Michael Corleone And Here's Why...

 

"Just when I thought I was out - they pull me back in". 

Yup. I do feel like Michael Corleone being dragged back into the mafia life. Except here the Cosa Nostra is them Bluegrass Chartbusters. I mentioned in my write-ups that this series is in constant revision. I also said that with this ever-expanding series I was done setting somewhat artificial limits, but admit that secretly, I did. I thought I'd wrap up the series in 25 volumes, but had too much overflow at about 27 voumes and then said to myself 'there's no way we're gonna go beyond 30'. Thirty seemed like a total resonable number to go with, I figures if I come across three or four stragglers, I'll swap them in for a couple of numbers on the last volumes et voilà, my work is done. 

And then reader Kyra Dean pointed out in a comment on the last volume of the Bluegrass Chartbusters that two all-female bluegrass bands, The Fly Birds and Della mae, would possibly make fine additions to this series. Damn you Kyra ! Thank you Kyra! These are indeed excellent bands and they also have some very sweet cover versions, especially The Fly Birds. So both bands will obviously become regular contributors to this series, starting with their lovely cover of James Taylor's lovely "Sweet Baby James". 

But, of course there is not only enough overflow tracks now to go past thirty, this discovery brought out the hunter and gatherer in me once more. I don't know what it is especially about this series, but I'm like a freakin' shark having smelt a tinsel of blood in the water, now scoring the internet and the Youtube once more for cool bluegrass cover of popular rock and pop tunes. Happily I have found another batch of songs and bands /artists I missed the first time around, but of course this means that I have to rework the next, oh, twenty volumes of this series. Just when I thought I was out...

The tons of volues still to come also explains the relatively quick turnaround between volumes this time. And need I specifically point out that volume eleven has another excellent line-up of artists and songs lined up? I don't, but I will anyway! As the last volume before the re-make/re-model work begins, this one is still very much in the old school 'mostly CMH/Pickin On... artists with a growing number of other artists mixed in' mold. Pickin On...'s most popular band Iron Horse have a whooping four numbers here, including their epic take on "American Pie" as a run-out groove. The Sidekicks cover Jimmy Buffet for the firt time with "Son Of A Son Of A Sailor". Brad Davis makes us forget about Huey Lewis, or almost, with his take on "The Power Of Love". Cornbread Red are back with "Be My Yoko Ono" and "Sweet Emotion". 

As for the relative newcomers, Love Canon are back with great takes on "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" and "Danger Zone", The Infamous Stringdusters have an off-the-cuff version of The Killers' "When You Were Young" and Bourbon Revival cover another song ready-made for Bluegrass, Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide". Greensky Bluegrass, not in action since volume 8, check back in with a take on Dylan's "When I Paint My Masterpiece". And as for real newcomers, in a one-off we welcome Theo & Brenna and their wonderful take on The Ronettes' classic "Be My Baby".

As you can gather, another 20 song program full of great tunes, well-played and sung with the quality stamp approval of your truly. Have a quality hoedown with these, same as it ever was. 

Gene + A Bunch Of Djangos = A Very Good Time

It's been an unconsciously long time that I posted something from Gene Clark, and this will not stand. So I'll post my favorite bootleg of Geno, backed by the Django Band, a short-lived troupe that came out of Gene's long-running 'Tribute To The Byrds' road band. As a matter of fact, outside of this bootleg I have never heard of the band being called The Django Band, but I'll trust the taper on them being dubbed as such. Whatever their name, they were a sympathetic backing band for Geno, led by Michael Curtis of the short-lived Curtis Brothers Band that I have previously featured here, and guitar slinger Billy Darnell who by this time was a four-year veteran of Clark's backing band duty. The line-up is completed by Greg Thomas on drums, and was essentially a mash-up of two different, equally dubious Byrds tribute bands, with Curtis comng over from Michael Clarke's Tribute To The Byrds (and then, his fake Byrds). 

So he has a very fine backing band which does make a difference. While solo acoustic Gene, and sometimes band-backed Gene, would slow down allsongs to dirge-like tempo, here The Django Band prevents that from happening and Gene, who seems to be in especially good humour - alcohol-related or not - hs a blast with these guys, who bring the groove. Like, literally, during a section of "Mr. Tambourine Man", where the classic melody and rhythm are upended by a short groove riffing part. They give a bit of a Calypso feel to "She Darked The Sun" and play "Set You Free This Time" as f it were an old soul song. Several of Gene's old warhorse sound a bit different than thier usual presentation, which obviously freshens them up a bit.

The other thing I love about this boot is the set list, covering a ton of classics - including an abundance of Byrds songs that betray the group's origins as a Byrds tribute band -  but also songs that at this time were rarely playd, "Backstage Pass" and "She Darked The Sun" for example. There is a rare live showing of "Shades Of Blue" that he only ever recorded as a demo. Actually the first set opens with a very nice surprise. As he often would, Clark opens with a short acoustic segment, but here "Here Without You" and "For A Spanish Guitar" are augmented by a mandolin, played by Curtis. And Curtis gets a solo lead vocal showcase in that first set to sing "Southern Cross", a track familiar for longstanding One Buck Heads from that aforementioned Curtis Brothers comp. 

The Django Band also gets busy during the intermission between Gene's two sets, playing a couple of Curtis tunes (including the classic, Fleetwood-Mac covered "Blue Letter") and a cover of "Iko Iko"sung by Billy Darnell, while Gene is away, presumably at the bar, before he joins them for another run through classic Byrds and solo tunes, including a reworked version of "Gypsy Rider" that Curtis would then later cover on a solo album. 

The sound of the boot is pretty good, vocals are slightly distant, but nothing too distracting. I did a bit of work to improve the presentation, mainly cutting out dead space, though I also rearranged the setlist a little. On the original boot, the Django Band solo set was attached to the end of the first set and disc, which I felt made little sense. So the intermission is now opening the second disc. And I moved "Eight Miles High" from its third-from-last place to the closing number, as the 14 minute+ jam isn't all that good, and I tend to like these longform songs as run-out grooves rather than being stuck with them in the middle of a program.

So, enjoy this very lovely Gene Clark program, one of his last moments of glory, and a wondeerful way of relistening to the many classics the man wrote.  

Bruce's Inadvertently Controversial Blockbuster - Listen Again Without Prejudice

Welcome to the month of July, the first (and last) ever Born In The USA Appreciation Month here at One Buck Records. Why?, you ask. Because why the hell not, I say. So, what is Born In The USA Appreciation Month? Well, during the next weeks I will post a bunch of stuff more or less related to that album. Some will be Bruce, some will not. There's at least two albums by younger artists that I want to post that show a clear sonic influence of Bruce' landmark album. There's a tribute album, and at least one alternate album that tries to  recontextualize the tite tune and Bruce's other Vietnam tales. But of course if we start the festivities, and that means starting with the riginal album. I don't know when - if ever - you have listened to Born In The USA, but listen again - without prejudice...

Born In The USA was famously or infamously was boorn out of the same sessions that birthed Nebraska, and it would take only a little bit of tinkering to make it a lot more...Nebraska-esque. In the same way that his electric Nebraska demos - finally revealed to the public last year - showed how Nebraska could become more like Born In The USA if the Boss had chosen so, the demos and bootleg cuts show that Born In The USA could have been as big a downer as Nebraska, had Springsteen chosen to do so. Instead he went for the biggest, shiniest sound of his career, and things got...muddld...and complicated. But you can hear the pessimism and downbeat atmosphere of Nebraska through the haze of Max Weinberg's thunderous drus and Roy Bittan's keyboard fanfares. There's hints everywhere. Of a deep and dark uneasiness. Of tragedy disguised as comedy. Of depression disguised as upbeat dance tunes.

One of the infamous memories of Bruce's Born In The USA era is him jiving akwardly with a teenage Courtney Cox to "Dancing In The Dark". When Jon Landay told Bruce that what was missing from the album was a hit, and Springsteen went home and wrote a piece that delivered on that front, you culd accuse Springsteen of seling out, or what not. But when was the last time you really listened to the lyrics of "Dancing In The Dark"? "I take a look in the mirror, I want to change my hair, my clothes, my face / I ain't nothin' but tired / and I'm just tired and bored with myself." Like the lyrics from the title tune, there is an obvious disconnect between the upbeat, joyful music and the downbeat sentiments. It's possibe to look at "Dancing In The Dark" as one of the first expressions of what we now know were bouts of depression that Springsteen was battling with. 

Now, about those production choices. Springsteen approved them, and owned them, and in some ways he continued the 'one for the large audience, and one for me (and the critics)' principle he had established with Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River, then Nebraska and this album, and arguably continued with the subdued Tunnel Of Love and the glossy Human Touch. And it's just so easy to get caught up in the soun dof things. The album came with a lyric sheet, so people could have (and should have) easily sussed out the bitter Vietnam veteran tale in the title song, but Max Weinberg's huge drums - sounding, according to Bruce like handgrnades, which is correct and like the sound of panic, which isn't - and Bittan's triumphant keyboard melody covered the lyrical concerns up real good and real quick. 

The hints of a darker, less mainstreamy album remain, if only in hints, on the album. "Glory Days" started as a one-verse-and-chorus fragment during the Nebraska home recordings, decidedly differently, in that the chorus stated that the protagonist never had any glory days. But even if the final singalong version inverses sentiment and feel of that original idea, if you think about it, "Glory Days" just isn't as glorious as it pertains to be - and again it's easy to get suckered in by the boisterous chorus. But no amount of sha-la-la's can cover up that the heart of the song, with the baseball player's and waitress's lives peaking in high school and then - like John Mellencamp's Jack and Diane,getting on a long downhill slope, is sad, whether acknowledged or not. Like a ton of other protagonists, these folks are on a downbound train. 

Soringsteen did his best to dress up these tunes. "Working On The Highwy" gained a singalong chorus and lost the rather sordid backstory of its original incarnation titles "Child Bride". And "No Surrender" and "Bobby Jean", both songs that adress hois colleagues - the E-Streeters in the former, and the departing Steve Van Zandt in the latter - stay beautifully anthems to friendship and persistance. But yeah, you listen closely to this album and through the extremely Eighties production, and the album suddenly seems to be a lot more complicated than its popular reception and misappropriation of the Reagan administration among others, suggest.

When Bruce had finished the album, his friend, rock critic Dave Marsh, told him that the sound and sensivity of the album's title track and iconography would cause him trouble, but Bruce just laughed the idea off. He would learn the hard way how right Marsh was. But that doesn't stop Born In The USA from being a highly fascinating album, on a number of levels. So, listen again - without prejudice...

I Am...I Said (No Neil, But Lots Of Other Diamonds)

 

I am The One Buck Guy.

I said that once I completed the next decade of All Pearls, No Swine, I would post an All Pearls, No Swine Megapack to permit people to pick up missing volumes, notably 31-34. 

Well, I Am...I Said...And here it is.  

Not to turn this into repost city, but a promise is a promise. And this I promise as well: I'll be back with new music shortly... 

Of Indians, Italians, Germans And Pirates: Terry Dolan's Later Adventures Revisited

Making a hackneyed joke about how all the Germans love the music of David Hasselhoff is akin to maing a joke about Nickelback being the bane of any real fan of rock music - there is some truth to it but boy, is that joke worn out. Oh, also: Did you lnow that Germans love The Hooters more than almost anyone else? And, since you've read the title and checked the artwork, you'll probably know where this is leading. One country loved the best bar band ever - or at least the most accomplished bar band ever - more than any other country, although Italy fought them really hard/ Why it's ze Germans, of course. You might or will hopefully remember Terry Dolan from making one of the all-time great one-offs (or rather none-off, but that's another matter) with his shelved self-titled debut. Having given up on a solo career, Terry Dolan formed Terry & The Pirates, a.k.a. the best bar band ever. 

Led instrumentally, as Terry Dolan originally had been, by the twin-guitar attack of Greg Douglass and John Cipollina, Terry & The Pirates became a local legend in the Bay Area and consistently drawing in its musicians. But being a great bar band with a really good songwriter like Dolan and a guitar player extraordinaire like John Cippolina didn't mean that the record comapny industry had a use for an aging (urban) legend like Dolan, and his merry band of pirates. They could fill the local bars and watering holes around, but despite Cippolina's somewhat legendary West Coast status and Dolan's proof of talent, they couldn't get a record company to bite on them, after Warner Brothers ditched Dolan. Enter ze Germans. Though to be fair, and chronologically correct, entra en scena: gli Italiani. 

Now that's some pirate crew ya got there, Terry...

Why exactly Germans and Italians latched onto Dolan's good-natured Westcoast rock, while the band couldn't make an impression anywhere else, is a mystery. But Italy and Germany it was to get Terry & The Pirates a forum. The Italians were first with a live album (1979's Too Close For Comfort), but to bring out an honest-to-goodness studio album, Terry & The Pirates had to cross the Rubicon Rhine. Their 1980 debut The Doubtful Handshake and 1981 follow-up Wind Dancer were only issued in Germany, 1982's Rising Of The Moon was at least also issued in Italy a year later. Given their popularity in Germany, it's not surprising that the band was flown over for a very short visit in the same year, but long enough to show up on Germany's legendary Rockpalast concert series, that were televised.    

I mentioned this towards the end of my write-up on Terry Dolan's classic that never was, that his music career didn't end there, and that I might look at his later career a little further on. Well, the time is now. Native American Trilogy is inspired by the artwork of those three albums - as well as the content of a number of songs - and compiles the best moments of those records, which for all intent and purpose are the only records the band did during the Eighties, arguably their high-time as a performing outfit. By the time of Rise Of The Moon, the band had shed their late 70s West Coast rock sound for a typical 80s production, ultrasynthetic and booming-sounding. That's why the title song of that album is here in a nicer, tougher-sounding live version from that Rockpalast concert, together with an instrumental Cippolina showcase called "Cobra". 

Notice ze German-speaking sticker on ze album cover, ja?!

As for the songs, most of them are good old fashioned rock songs, some with a country feel, like the ballad "Montana Eyes" that he cut two times across these three albums, and both versions are equally good, so I kept both. Also on board of this pirate ship is the first issued studio version of Dolan's classic "Inlaws And Outlaws", that had been in his repertoire for the past seven years or so, before making its debut on Too Close For Comfort and, in a muscular version, its studio album debut on The Doubtful Handshake. While not earth-shaking or suer-innovative, these are very fine songs that deserved to be heard by more people than just ze Germans et gli Italiani. 

And now of course you can be some of the lucky non-German and non-Italian folks listening to more Dolan, as we all should. 

P.S. For more John Cipollina, check out Jim Murray's The Ladies Man, if you haven't already... 

Hey There Bubba, Get Yer Fiddle, Time For Another One Of These...

X To The B To The G To The C, y'all! Word! Oh, uh, I'm sorry, wrong genre. Howdy y'all, my fellow musical country bumpkins and Bluegrass lovers - it is indeed the time of X, as in, the tenth volume of our Bluegrass Chartbusters series. That would be a neat achievement for many a series, but as I hinted at before, for this particular series it's fair to say that we've only just begone... 

Nothing new 'round these parts in terms of what you'd expect and what you'd get: another set of twenty handpicked covers of yesteryear's chart entries, as brought to you by the same fine batch of musicians that populated the first nine volumes. We sadly say goodbye to the long-defunct Grass Cats, who leave this series with a very fine rendition of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine". And we say hello to a new band of contributors, the ominously named Grassmasters.

Bye Bye Cats, it's been god knowin' ya!

Grassmasters sems to have been the short-term rival project of the cheapo comp and lapsed copyright release specialist Synergy Entertainment for the subgenre's undisputed king, CMH's Pickin On...-series. They brought out three dozen albums between 2004 and 2010, with most of them cmoing out in 2005 and 2006, or around the prime of the Bluegrass cover album genre, probably to compete with the Pickin' on offerings. And while CMH was using this boom period to branch out into a ton of less conventional artists and genres, The Grassmasters stayed with the classics, covering Dylan, Clapton, Aerosmith, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Fleetwood Mac and Elvis. The latter's "Heartbreak Hotel" is included here as their introduction to the series. Most of their work is instrumental, though they would occasionally add vocals to some selections and we will see them again a number of times. 

Lots of good stuff covering artists we haven't had on the series before: Jackson Browne! Poison! Daft Punk! The Raconteurs! Urge Overkill! The Dream Academy! My personal fave from this collection is Love Canon's wonderful take on Bruce Hornsby's "Just The Way It Is", which for me brings out the emotional nuances of the song better than the original. I'm also quite taken by Steve'n'Seagulls' take on AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long", which captures the song's ridiculou single entendre's perfectly. And long-time reliable series contributors The Petersens, mainly working in the ballad section, surprise with a groovy take on Alain Toussault's "Southern Nights" (made famous by Glen Campbell, of course) in which Julianne Peterson really let's the Southern drawl shine through. For, you know, that extra Southern feeling. 

So, folks, throw this on for another smokin' good time with them Bluegrass Chartbusters, as ever, only and exclusively brought to you by One Buck Records and the One Buck Guy...

Get Into The Spirit Of Spirit...Once Again

Someone asked, the One Buck Guy delivers. In spades. Indeed, all original Spirit links are dead, as these have been around for a while. Short reminder: You want a re-up, just ask for it, as 'Unknown' did. Now, if he had given himself a nickname to sign his message, in the name of convivility, that would have been even better, but we're off to a good start. So, here's the sprited Spirit Five Pack,

including

- the reimagined one album version of sprawling double whopper Spirit Of '76, one of this blog's first 'classics' which you can find more about here.   

- the Spirit Of The Seventies comp that compiles the rest of the worthwhile 1970s Spirit material post-Sardonicus into much more listenable form, with more info over here. 

- Radio Aqua Blue, the power quartet albumm that Spirit could have brought out in 1979 during a lean period in Spirit land (which, by now you have guessed, you can read about more here).  

- Possible follow-up Rock Of Ages, featuring lots of guitar power from the once again power trio (I don't post a link since the write-up is really short and relatively inconsequential). 

and finally

- the Spirit of The Eighties comp that compiles the band's uneven 1980s material into a very listenable compilation, that I talk about here.

The words, wit and wisdom of the One Buck Guy (ahem...) are over there, the music will be right here. 

Hours of heavy rock'n'roll, beautiful ballads and endearing oddities from Randy California and his ever-changing - except step dad Ed Cassidy of course - line-up of sidemen.

This is your chance, folks, get into the Spirit of Spirit once again...

Summer's Just Around The Bend - And I Got The Music For It...

I guess four CDs are not that much in the grand scheme of things, especially the grand scheme of my music collection, which should be somewhere north of 2.500 physical albums. But if someone would read along the labels of albums and go by 'R', they would say, hey this guy really likes Rascal Flatts. Which I kind of do, although I'm not some sort of super fan. I actually came into the posession of these four discs by happenstance. There was a used & new music store in the Paris city centre which I usually visited twice per year. Yes, you guessed it, during les soldes, the special sales weeks that are coming up next week I believe. That music store had this back room full of CDs that they really wanted to get rid of, and they really wanted to get rid of them during les soldes, so the deal was 'empty out these racks of crap, and to make sure you'll do, you'll get 15 CDs for ten bucks'. Which, for year, I happily obliged. These 15 CDs would often break down in about 3-4 that you would genuinely be happy to have 5-6 from artists that you'd know and might like and about 5 free agent/take a flyer albums that you took to make up the count. 

It's been a couple of years, but during my - by that time probably only annual - visit, four of Rascal Flatts' albums fell in my hand during the 15 for 10 hunt. I had only heard the name, might've heard "Bop That Head" exactly once on the radio and knew that they were broadly classified as country music. So in the bag with those four! Clearly, the music store had drastically overestimated the Parisians' hunger for friendly coutry pop as clearly these discs were brand new. I guess the store had just quietly emptied out their Rascal Flatts section and moved these discs into the dreaded backroom purgatory, where Cds don't go to die, but to linger undead around for years. But no more! One Buck Guy to the rescue! 

Having brought my big-ass plastic bags of treasures home - there was the same deal for DVDs, so I normally arrived with fifteen new CDs and fifteen new DVDs, much to the wife's happiness, no doubt - how to proceed with this band I somewhat barely knew. So I went with the chronological approach, taking the oldest disc, Feels Like Today. A mistake, as it was the worst of the four albums, by quite a bit, full of sappy ballads and not much else of interest. But things got better, once we hit Me And My Gang, Still Feels Good and Nothing Like This. Here's the thing about Rascal Flatts' music: It's not great music and it's not very profound. But it is fun, especially if you weed out all those sappy ballads, which was the trigger for today's One Buck record of the day. 

Summer's Just Around The Bend - it's title taken from aline in kick-ass opener "Red Camaro" - is named as such, because that's what Rascal Flatts' midtempo and uptempo evokes: Rolling in a car with the windows down, fighting off the heat that comes right between the end of spring and the beginning of summer. There's tons of things Rascal Flatts' music is not good for - philosophizing for one thing - but this is great driving music. If only I could still have a car that accepts, you know, physical bearers of musical gifts. Not in the wife's Muskmobile, of course! Originally it was about fourteen tracks as a sort of best of of those four discs, but then I decided to go the whole hog, dropping two sappy-is numbers and filling it up with fun and uptempo numbers from throughout the band's career. 

They're rednecks and male models all in one - they're reddels. Oh, they also make some music...

There's a reason why Rascal Flatts' music got better and more immediate with Me And My Gang, and that reason is named Dann Huff. The long-standing Nashville producer and former member of AOR/hard rock band Giant. It's obvious what Huff brings to the table: more guitars, more stadium-ready choruses, a lot more punch to the proceedings. Also included is "Backwards", one of the rare 'country humor' songs that I really like, and that are funny - the yodeling honky tonk intro that makes Gary LeVox sound like Garth Brooks giving way to a frenetic rock-based list of all the things that you get back, when you play a country record backwards. Fun stuff! And then I made room for exactly one (1) sappy ballad, their cover of Marcus Hummond's classic  "Blesss The Broken Road" which is a wondeeful song, and as the closing number I'll allow it. 

I haven't had time yet to make fun of the dudes' names. Gary LeVox and Jay Demarcus can at least claim royal lineage or Cajun kin or something with those names, but how great of a redneck name is Joe Don Rooney? His parents were seemingly big fans of Walking Tall, which makes it even better and more Redneck-y! At least they didn't name him Buford! This willl almost certainly be the only Rascal Flatts album around here, so allow me to make some good-natured fun of Joe Don while I can! 

Oooh, moody, baby!

Anyway, let's cut the chit chat, and the mockery of poor Joe Don (...on second thought, let's not), and get down to business. Twenty Rascal Flatts tracks, one great comp to roll down the highways (or, you know, your diveway) and feel the sounds of the summer...