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Luther Wright and the Wrongs
Rebuild the Wall
Parody is an odd musical world to inhabit. Weird Al has made a career out of it. The classic Dr. Demento Radio Hour coasted on it for years. Hayseed Dixie make a living doing bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs; Dread Zeppelin had a good go of it doing reggae covers of Led Zeppelin songs with the added panache of an Elvis impersonator on lead vocals. It’s an odd space because you really can’t ever transcend the source of the parody. You’re always defined in the shadow of the original, and you have to have fun with that. You have to mock and pay tribute at the same time, which is a difficult line to walk.
Luther Wright and the Wrongs don’t so much much walk that line as teeter drunkenly down it. Rebuild the Wall is a start-to-finish cover of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, done in a bluegrass/country style. Like Hayseed Dixie, they’ve taken a simple gag and stretched it out beyond all reason and sense. If nothing else, you have to admire the attention to detail. Not only have they covered every song on the original album, but they’ve faithfully spliced in appropriate sound effects to retell the story in a country-western vein. Buzz bombs have been replaced by galloping hooves; distressed moans have become distressed moos.

Does it hang together? Yes — Rebuild the Wall is relentlessly coherent. Does it have listening longevity? Not really. It’s a fine joke, but once you’ve got the punchline, there’s not much to bring you back for more. Because, like other parodies, it just can’t transcend the source material, and ultimately it can’t be more than a footnote — which may be all it was intended to be in the first place.

Crooked Fingers
Dignity and Shame
If my web site (or is it a blog now? I think the kids are calling it a blog these days) were to be believed, I’ve listened to nothing but Crooked Fingers’ Dignity and Shame for the last two years. Records are apparently different than books this way. I tend to read books serially — that is, one at a time, start to finish. I’m not usually one of those people who has a whole stack of books that I’m reading all at once. And when I finish a book, it goes on the stack until I’ve written something about it. And while there is always a backlog, eventually I sit down and knock a couple off the stack.

Of course, records don’t work that way. And the more digitally-dependent I become, the less they work that way. Gone are the days when I would endlessly flip a cassette on the school bus until I had the album memorized. Now it goes into a digital shuffle of thousands of other albums: a playlist 60 days long and growing. Other folks have already adequately lamented the death of the album, and how we’re returning to the days of 45s, except that the 45s are now called MP3s. It’s not quite true in my case; I still buy albums, but they invariably get dissected into their constituent parts and tossed into the Great Shuffle. Which means (among other things) that I hardly ever review albums any more.

But if I did, I would be obliged to point out that Dignity and Shame is a good one. Eric Bachmann has certainly had some musical changes over the years. I remember seeing him first at the Black Cat in the Archers of Loaf days when he was a tower of a young man awash in a sea of electric guitars. And then again at Lounge Ax in Chicago a couple of years later, sombre and solo with only a guitar and an digital delay pedal. And then once more at the old OttoBar in Baltimore with Crooked Fingers, for an acoustic set complete with cello and banjo. Dignity and Shame sets out in the full band direction again, going further beyond the mariachi horns of Red Devil Dawn into full-on orchestrated rock. Not the awash-in-electric-guitars sort of rock of the Archers, but a studio-produced sort of rock awash in mature songwriting and textured instrumentation and the trademark Bachmann gravelly vocals. And I guess maturity ain’t always a bad thing.

“I would change for you, but babe, that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be a better man…” — Crooked Fingers

Various Artists
20 Years of Dischord
It’s hard for me to imagine my musical upbringing without Washington-D.C.-based Dischord Records. While I was too young to know about or appreciate Minor Threat in their heyday, I was exactly the sort of kid who had Fugazi and Dag Nasty lyrics scrawled on my bedroom walls. I also vividly remember sweet-talking my underaged self into the Mercury Lounge in New York City in 1996 to have the opportunity to have Lungfish destroy my hearing for several days following. And when I finally moved to Washington DC a couple of years later, Q and not U were just starting to make the local rounds. I got to see them and the likes of Faraquet in the following years, usually as openers for The Dismemberment Plan.

Now that I’ve been living in the mountains for a few years (and haven’t seen a DC show in nearly as long), it felt just a little bit strange as I found myself pulling up to the Dischord house in Arlington to deliver a letter-press from my neck of the hills back to Washington. During all the time that I had lived in Arlington, less than a mile from the Dischord house, I never once had reason to stop in. Now here I was, punk-turned-hillbilly, delivering 150 pounds of lead and iron to the house where some of my earliest musical influences were born, so that they could hand-print flyers to coax a new generation of kids to come out and see bands that I have never heard. After a fair bit of grunting, cursing, and finger-smashing, we’d moved the letterpress into the Dischord basement. The guys at the label wanted to compensate me somehow for my trouble. Did I want a CD or something?
Thing was, I didn’t even know what Dischord was doing these days. Too long in the mountains. “Do you guys have any sort of comp with the current bands on it?”
And so I found myself the proud owner of 20 Years of Dischord, the Dischord Records 20th anniversary box set. As it happens, not only did I not know about fantastic bands that Dischord currently has signed, but I also didn’t know about fantastic bands from Dischord’s past that I had missed along the way. This compilation is knock-out good, with too many great tracks for any of them to particularly stand out. I do know that I need to track down some albums by Circus Lupus and Smart Went Crazy. I also need to make sure that I don’t get so caught up in old-time music as to forget what else is out there.
A big thanks to the guys and gals at Dischord for the complimentary compilation, and a double-big thanks for making such a great comp in the first place.

Forest Fires Collective
Forest Fires Collective
A little self-reference is a dangerous thing, particularly where art is concerned. In the visual arts, I suppose things really didn’t come to a head in this regard until the Modernist age. I mean, to some extent, art has always been about art. But it also used to be representative of something in the world — nature, politics, religion, the human condition, something. Then it became more and more about the artist, and then about the object, and then mostly about art itself. Of course, I’m generalizing here — there is obviously still a great deal of art about the world and things in it. But (as I found out while living and working in the New York “art world” a few years ago), there’s also quite a lot of it that’s only about itself.
And so it’s interesting to me how hip-hop seems to have been that way from the start. Was hip-hop ever really about anything other than hip-hop? I leave the answer in the capable hands of the Sugar Hill Gang, from the 1979 “Rapper’s Delight”:
I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
To the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop
The rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie
To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat


Thus began twenty-five years of rappers rapping about how well they rap. Riveting stuff, that. But you know what? They’re still doing it, most of them with all the creativity of Def Leppard singing about a girl they’d like to have sex with. “What? You like girls? Yeah, sing about that some more. Man, I never get tired of songs about thighs.”
All of which makes it that much more of a treat when somebody actually tries something novel — which is what Forest Fires Collective does so well. Sure, there’s some of the standard hip-hop doper-than-thou posturing, but it’s mostly buried underneath rhymes about squirrels, nuts, and Smokey the Bear, overtop of beats that are, well — squirrely. For the most part, the novelty and sharp lyrical wit of the FFC make up for the somewhat frivolous content. At which point the pundits will quickly point out that expecting hip-hop to be about anything is missing the point. It’s supposed to be all about the style. I’ll sympathize with that to a point, in much the same way that I’ll sympathize with a good-looking stupid girl. Nice to spend casual time with, but nothing you’d want to invest a lot of your life in. Combine smart content with stunning style, and now you’re talking commitment. Which is what FFC pull off when they’re at their best.

The Skillet Lickers
Old-Time Fiddle Tunes and Songs from North Georgia
Now that I’m back in the good ol’ Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I’ve of course been playing old-time music again. Lots of it. Nearly every night, in fact. (This week, I took Sunday night off. I’ve jammed with people every other night.) And, having traipsed about Ireland for a bit participating in sessions there, I’ve got a bit more perspective on what I do and don’t like about jams in this part of the mountains.
What I do like, of course, is the music. I heard some really terrific Irish music while I was traveling — much more energetic and aggressive than the watered-down parlor facsimile of Irish music that we tend to hear around here — but it still couldn’t quite stack up to the energy of a good old-time string jam. I also like the fact that people here dance, which was something that I only saw at one of the sessions that I went to in Ireland (and only one person, at that). A good driving jam with good dancing is a pretty transcendent experience.

That said, there was at least one thing that I found at the Irish sessions I went to that is sorely lacking at most old-time jams I’ve seen. In those sessions, the direction of the session was very much a community effort. Everyone took turns picking tunes — my old-time American self included. The piper would lead a set, the fiddler would lead a set, the accordion player would lead another set. Even the novice musicians were explicitly offered the chance to lead sets of tunes (which they usually politely declined). If there were singers around, the tunes would stop every so often so that somebody could sing a ballad. There was very much a sense of the music not being owned or run by one person, but something that everyone had a hand in.
Contrast this with the Alpha Fiddler syndrome of nearly every old-time jam I’ve ever attended. In most old-time sessions, there is the One True Fiddler — the Old Silverback Gorilla to whom everyone else defers. The Alpha Fiddler picks the tunes; if there’s any singing, the Alpha Fiddler usually sings the tunes. If anyone else leads a tune, it’s with the Alpha Fiddler’s permission. There may be a very real sense of community in the jam, but there is nearly always the One True Fiddler who stands just a notch or two above everyone else. And it bothers me, even when that Alpha Fiddler happens to be me. Which isn’t to say that I never give in to Alpha Fiddler temptation — I certainly do. But I’d be perfectly happy to play behind a good melodic banjo player given the chance. And I’d certainly be happy to have the guitarists sing some ballads to give the dancers a break every few tunes. So I think I’m going to embark on a conscious experiment — to use my own Alpha Fiddler powers for good, not evil. We’ll see if it throws too many sessions into disarray, but I suspect it will just make some of them a lot more fun.
OK, but about The Skillet Lickers — a good case of Alpha Fiddler syndrome if ever there was one. One some albums, the band name appears as “Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers”. Gid Tanner being of course the Alpha Fiddler, and The Skillet Lickers being his Skillet Lickers. Sure, people also know of the legendary guitar playing of Riley Puckett, but you’ll never see an album of “Riley Puckett and His Skillet Lickers”. Don’t get me wrong — Gid Tanner is a great fiddler — one of the best — but that ain’t all there is. Without those sweet guitar runs, these tunes wouldn’t fly nearly so well. The Skillet Lickers — the band The Skillet Lickers — are knock-out phenomenal. Too good to fit within one man’s reputation.