Category Archives: Music

BBC to Beam Country Boy Eddy to the World

Ringing a cowbell, playing a fiddle, and braying his famous “mule call,” Country Boy Eddy (aka Eddy Burns) was more reliable than a barnyard rooster as his daily 5 a.m. television show woke up households across the Southeast. For some WBRC Channel 6 viewers, the day couldn’t begin without coffee and the purest country music ever heard. For others, it was the perfect way to end an all-nighter.

Sunrise was never the same after “The Country Boy Eddy Show” was canceled in 1994. Burns was as proficient doing advertisements and delivering one-liners as he was strumming a guitar while reading funeral announcements. He advertised everything from mobile homes to Eagle Seven Rat Bait (“If you love your rats, neighbors, don’t give ‘em this stuff, ’cause it kills the ol’ rat dead!”). He continually poked fun at his regular cast of sidekicks with a devious grin. While interviewing a chimney sweep who had arrived at the television station to plug his expertise at “reaming out chimneys,” Country Boy turned to one of his ever-revolving cohosts and asked, “Bobby T, you ever been reamed out?”

In the mid-1960s, a blond hairdresser named Wynette Pugh, barely out of her teens, shyly walked into WBRC studios and asked Burns for an audition. “She looked over at me after she finished that song and asked, ‘Do you think I’m good enough to be on your show?’” Burns laughed and said, “Yeah, you can be on anytime you want to.” Pugh became a regular, eventually moving to Nashville and changing her name to Tammy Wynette.

The British Broadcasting Corporation recently paid Burns a visit at Fox 6 studios to interview him for a BBC special on Wynette. The program is scheduled to air in January 2003. “They wanted to see the studio we performed in. They wanted to do a little story about it,” said Burns, who added that he had never been to Britain, nor had he ever seen any BBC programming.

These days, Burns still makes occasional commercials and performs at churches, nursing homes, restaurants, and mobile home centers. “One guy up in Cullman pays me $500 to come sit on the porch with my guitar and greet people when they come in to buy a mobile home. I say, ‘Come on in folks!’ and give ‘em a mule call and a cowbell ring. We sell the heck out of ‘em!”

George Jones

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George Jones

By Ed Reynolds

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Having relinquished his reputation for being too drunk to appear on stage, George Jones had gotten as predictable as April rain over the past 20 years. However, Jones’ performance at Oak Mountain May 25 was anything but predictable. Though still relegating his best hits to medley-status, the 70-year-old singer abandoned his uptight sing-and-get-the-hell-off-the-stage philosophy for a more relaxed approach, as though he were entertaining at a backyard barbecue. Stylishly attired in white boots and a western-stitched powder blue suit, Jones bears a striking resemblance to the late Charlie Rich. His silver hair remains considerably long, meticulously brushed into place, as if manicured rather than sprayed.

In the past, Jones’ voice has been as precise as Pavarotti’s. The classic nasal whine and resonating bottom tones are strong as ever, but on this night, Jones struggled with high notes, often singing flat through entire phrases. Instead of detracting, the loss of vocal control added an intriguing accessible element that complemented the singer’s admittedly simple approach to performing: “We don’t need anybody flyin’ around on a rope. We’re just a plain, ol’ country music show.”

A plain, ol’ country music show, indeed. Before Jones came on stage, a video screen behind the band’s instruments hawked a recent George Jones recording, urging fans to simply raise their hands and the latest CD would be delivered to their seats for 10 bucks. During the show Jones bantered with the crowd, bemoaning the current state of country music, “Ya’ll notice that they don’t write songs about drinkin’ and cheatin’ any more?” he asked at one point. The crowd vocally shared his dismay. Moments later, a young, obviously intoxicated fan leaped onto the stage to hug Jones and tell the singer how much he loved him. Jones replied, “Well. I love you, too, son.” As security personnel dragged the besotted fellow from the stage, Jones asked them to take it easy on the kid. “He’s a good boy. I remember those days,” he laughed.

Proudly admitting that he was drinking “spring water, though I don’t know how much spring it has in it,” Jones acknowledged several birthdays in the audience. With surreal abandon, he sang “Happy Birthday” to a couple of people instead of squeezing all the names into one version. An American flag was brought out toward the show’s conclusion, as Jones introduced a husband and wife duo that had opened the concert. “They’re gonna sing ‘God Bless the USA’ by Lee Greenwood or Ray Stevens or whatever his name is,” Jones said flippantly. “I get ‘em mixed up. All I know is, one’s funny and the other one isn’t.”

Buddy Miller

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By Ed Reynolds

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	Buddy and Julie Miller

Buddy and Julie Miller have been harmonizing for 20 years with a passion not heard in country music since the heyday of A.P. and Maybelle Carter. Julie’s little-girl voice contrasts with husband Buddy’s sandpaper howl in an eerie yet soothing style that brings to mind the grand duets of Porter Waggoner and Dolly Parton; Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty; and George Jones and Tammy Wynette. As a guitarist Buddy Miller is widely considered a musical wizard, his unique “less is more” style earning him the role of lead guitarist and bandleader for Emmylou Harris as well as contributions to Lucinda Williams’ classic album Car Wheels On a Gravel Road. The couple recently released their first “official” recording under the family name, “Buddy and Julie Miller,” which was up against the likes of Bob Dylan, Lucinda Williams, and Gillian Welch for best contemporary folk album.

Black & White: Where did you and Julie meet?

Buddy Miller: In Austin. She’s from there, and I auditioned for a band that she was the chick singer in. In trying to be discriminating, she told them not to hire me. They hired me anyway, and we became pals after that.

B&W: Did she give a reason for not wanting you in the band?

Miller: She was a teenager and she wanted to appear like she had good taste. So she just said, “No, he’s no good.” But they hired me anyway.

B&W: I was impressed to see that Little Jimmy Scott had recorded one of your songs.

Miller: Yeah, one of Julie’s songs. In Nashville, a lot of the things that get recorded are by Nashville artists, and we’ll hear about it in advance. People that have our songs will be real excited and call us up and say, “Hey man, so-and-so’s cutting this song.” So I was on a gig out in L.A. with Emmylou and somebody said, “Hey, Little Jimmy Scott cut Julie’s song ‘All My Tears,’” and I just looked at him and said, “Nah, you must be wrong.” And later on at the gig, the guy went out and bought the record and brought it to me, and I flipped. It was such a cool version of the song. I took a red-eye home, and got back at seven in the morning. Julie was still asleep, and I just put it on the record player in the bedroom, and she didn’t even recognize her song until about a minute into it.

B&W: Is there anyone who you would like to hear record one of your songs?

Miller: It sounds funny to say it ’cause he’s so fashionable, but we’ve always been such huge Ralph Stanley fans. That was one of the things that we had in common when we met way back when. Julie actually wrote that song “All My Tears” with Ralph in mind. And we did get to sing it to him on this last “Down From the Mountain” tour back in his dressing room. We were in Emmylou’s band for that whole tour.

B&W: Has the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Down From the Mountain been a boost to your career?

Miller: I don’t think so. Things were going OK before that kicked into high gear, and they’re going OK now. It probably is, and I just don’t know it. I think it’s helping everything a little bit. If people hear good music, I think that can only be a good thing. I don’t know if it’s changed country radio. When I’m flipping television channels — I don’t watch that CMT thing — I see the little 15-year-old video disc jockeys talking about bluegrass every once in awhile.

B&W: Nashville has a pretty vibrant scene that’s apart from the typical country stars.

Miller: Yeah, we live right down the street from all that. We’re real close to Music Row. We’re so disconnected from that. There’s such a great community of singer/songwriters and folks that are so like-minded with us. It’s a great town; there’s so much going on.

B&W: Do you and Julie have similar tastes in what you listen to?

Miller: It’s funny. Julie can write a great country song and sing great. But she just wants to rock if left to her own devices. Whenever she comes down into our music room when we’re working, she wants me to put on Social Distortion. So, we kind of have our little feuds, but I love singing with her.

B&W: I heard someone say that you can play guitar every bit as well as Richard Thompson, but you’re funky.

Miller: [Laughs] Well, I wish I could play like Richard Thompson. He’s just unbelievable. I did get to meet him once, but I’m sure he wouldn’t remember. We’re huge fans of his songs and his guitar playing. I love guitar players who go out on a limb and don’t even think about it. It’s just what they do. They get out there and if they get back, great. If not, great. Richard Thompson, Daniel Lanois. Dave Rawlings, I think, might be my favorite guitar player. He plays with Gillian Welch.

B&W: Ever see George Jones and Tammy Wynette perform together?

Miller: Yes. The night I saw them, they closed the show with “The Ceremony” [a 1970s hit where George and Tammy basically sing wedding vows to one another], and when he got to the line about “I’ll take this woman” he pointed to a girl in the front row. When I got in my car to drive back home, the news came on and said, “Tammy Wynette filed for divorce today.” [Laughs] It must have been 1972 or 1973 and they still had the bus that had “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music” on the side.

B&W: You’ve done the Grand Ole Opry with Emmylou?

Miller: Yeah, a couple of times. I did it at the Ryman and did it at the new Opry. It was a real thrill. I’m a big Porter Waggoner fan. He was so far ahead of his time. When I went with Emmylou to play the Opry, I was really sick. I told her, “I’ve never asked anything of you, but I want to meet Porter Waggoner.” But I was too sick and I think she spaced out. She was having a gig and her drummer kinda disappeared. You know, the Opry is a tightly run ship, and she has her 10 minutes or whatever on stage. When it’s time, you’re on stage and playing, whether you’re there or not. She’s introduced and we’re up there, and we’ve got no drummer. She was a little upset at him after that. Well, actually, she wasn’t. She’s very forgiving, but she had to tell a joke on stage while [the drummer] was chitchatting with Grandpa Jones at the Coke machine. &

Buddy and Julie Miller perform on the Blockbuster Stage on Saturday, May 18, at 6:35 p.m

Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll

By Ed Reynolds

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	Nashville Rebel: Waylon Jennings, 1937-2002.

Waylon Jennings was addicted, no question about it. Skipping meals and going for days without a bath, Jennings spent hours wallowing in self-absorbed, hedonistic pleasure as bells rang and colors flashed before his eyes. Life was getting out of hand. He’d drive all night after a show in Louisiana just so he could wrap his fingers around his favorite Nashville pinball machine. His habit eventually reached $35,000 a year — in quarters.

Jennings’ childhood in Texas epitomized the drama of country songs. He picked cotton from dusk to dawn, his mother openly wept every time she heard Roy Acuff sing “Wreck on the Highway,” and an alcoholic uncle regularly consumed grapefruit juice with brake fluid. Jennings was an outlaw long before his music was literally marketed as such. Refusing to conform to ideals defined by the Nashville music establishment, Jennings grew his hair long and boycotted the Grand Ole Opry for 10 years because the show did not allow performers to use a full set of drums. His disdain for the music industry took root in his teens when he played with his Texas pal Buddy Holly. Jennings gave up his seat on the doomed airplane that killed Holly, J. P. Richardson [the Big Bopper], and Richie Valens. Holly had teased Jennings about being afraid to fly to the next show 400 miles away, laughing that he hoped the bus Jennings and others were traveling on would freeze. Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” Guilt and remorse about the remark haunted him for years.

The promoter found a local teen who had won a talent show to fill in for Buddy Holly the night of his death. Jennings was convinced to play the show with assurance that he would be flown home to Texas the next day for Holly’s funeral. The flight home never materialized, and the tour proceeded for another three months across the Midwest. At tour’s end, Jennings received only half of what he had agreed to play for; promoters had short-changed the musicians since the stars had been unable to appear.

Jennings revolutionized music, creating an irreverent blend of country and rock ‘n’ roll that introduced a generation of drug-addled hippies to a warped version of 1950s cowboy singers Roy Rogers and Tex Ritter. Music critics branded the sound “Outlaw.” A string of duets with Willie Nelson, including “Good-Hearted Woman,” “Luckenbach, Texas,” and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” drew an audience that Nashville had failed to snare with its marketing of “folk-country.” In truth, Jennings had never set foot in Luckenbach, and absolutely detested the song because he thought it sounded too much like “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.”

“I left all my ex-wives. They didn’t leave me,” Jennings bragged in his autobiography. “I went through my marriages like Grant went through Richmond.” The singer boasted that all of Hank Williams, Sr.’s, ex-wives had hit on him, and claimed to have often had several women in one night, hiding them on different floors of the same hotel. Jennings even tried to pick up newscaster Jane Pauley when she interviewed him on NBC’s “Today Show.”

Getting high became a way of life for Waylon Jennings. The Telecaster Cowboy, as he often referred to himself, ate a couple dozen amphetamines a day for 15 years, citing Johnny Cash, Roger Miller, and himself as “world champion pill-takers.” Loretta Lynn used to walk Jennings around the dressing room when he got too high before a show. A friend finally convinced him to take up cocaine to kick the pills. Over the next decade, Jennings spent $1,500 a day feeding his cocaine habit. He ignored a White House meeting with President Jimmy Carter to do drugs with a Washington Redskins football hero, and he shared his cocaine with members of the Oakland Raiders at halftime while the Raiders were trailing the Chiefs 6-0 during the Kenny Stabler years. The Raiders scored 54 points in the second half to win. Jennings played poker and drank beer with Mother Maybelle Carter, introduced Nashville to the 12-string electric guitar, narrated The Dukes of Hazzard (“I aimed the narration at children and it made it work”), and once had a run-in with Grace Slick while filming a television special, calling her a communist for her criticism of America.

In 1984, he took his fourth wife, Jessi Colter, to Arizona, where the couple leased a house in the desert so that Jennings could end his years of cocaine addiction. Jennings, forever the outlaw, kicked the drug his own unique way. Stashing $20,000 worth of coke on his tour bus parked in the driveway of his temporary desert home in case the cocaine urge got too strong, Jennings quit cold turkey. One of his favorite anti-drug quotes was from former boss Chet Atkins at RCA, Jennings’ record company for over 20 years. “You’ve only got so many beats in your heart. Why shorten the number?” &

For Insomniacs Only

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For Insomniacs Only

By Ed Reynolds

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	Peter Noone (far left), the one-time lead singer for Herman’s Hermits, opens the holiday shopping season at The Galleria on November 23.

Patience may be a Christmas lesson drilled into wide-eyed kids yearning daily for Santa, but for salivating holiday shoppers, it’s merely an old-fashioned term at which they scoff. Christmas bells officially begin ringing at the ungodly hour of 1 a.m. on Friday, November 23, at the Riverchase Galleria. So much for the long winter’s nap. Thanksgiving leftovers won’t even be cold by then.

The only thing remotely old-fashioned about this yuletide shopping spree is the presence of Peter Noone, more famously known as Herman, one-time lead singer for the 1960s hit-makers Herman’s Hermits. With 23 Top 10 hits and 52 million records sold, the band was among the monarchy of the British invasion that included The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Dave Clark Five, and a host of other limeys.

Herman’s Hermits’ classics such as “I’m Into Something Good,” “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” and the frivolous “I’m Henry the VIII” glued a generation of teens to AM radio and television shows such as “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig.” Along with their repertoire of irresistibly catchy pop hits, Herman’s Hermits were renowned for being one of the few British acts that sang in a heavy British dialect. “You had to have your own sound back then. You couldn’t sound like The Beatles or The Dave Clark Five. That’s why we did the first English accents on rock ‘n’ roll records,” Noone explains on his website.

Noone was 15 years old when Herman’s Hermits began topping the record charts. The squeaky clean Hermits image that alienated more serious, worldly teenagers was apparently no put-on, according to Noone in a 1999 interview with the Globe Correspondent. An admitted innocent, Noone recalls, “I hung out with the guys that knew what was going on, like The Beatles and The Stones. They were much more fun than the guys in my band.”

Peter Noone’s last show in Birmingham was 10 years ago at the Alabama State Fair, with local players enlisted as Hermits for the evening. Noone was every bit as enthusiastic and endearing as his showbiz persona, though the choirboy image took a couple of blows. Local drummer Leif Bondarenko recalls that Noone personally delivered a case of beer to the band before the show. Don Tinsley played bass that night, and recalls Noone’s penchant for cursing. “A very good-natured cuss word every other word,” Tinsley laughs.

12-String King

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12-String King

By Ed Reynolds

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	The Byrds in 1965: (left to right) Michael Clarke, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, and Gene Clarke.

Through his widely influential band the Byrds, Roger McGuinn inspired a generation of rockers with his often-imitated 12-string electric guitar. A dedicated folk music addict, McGuinn turned up the volume and added an irrepressible backbeat to the storytelling genre perpetuated by folk pioneers Pete Seeger and Bob Gibson, among many others.

After seeing the Beatles’ A Hard Days Night, the Byrds ditched their acoustic act and borrowed $5,000 to purchase electric guitars, amplifiers, a drum kit, and matching black suits with velvet collars. John Lennon prompted McGuinn to adopt the Rickenbacker guitar, but it was McGuinn who got Lennon hooked on sporting tiny sunglasses. The rest is rock ’n’ roll history.

Black & White: Tell me what started the Folk Den you offer on your web site.

Roger McGuinn: There were a lot of folk music songs getting lost in the shuffle. And in the commercial music scene there wasn’t a lot of interest in traditional folk music anymore. The old folk singers are gettin’ kinda old, and I wondered what would happen in a few years when they’re not around anymore. So I thought I’d do my bit to keep those songs alive by recording them and putting them on the site (www.rogermcguinn.com) — one a month. And I’ve been doing that every month for six years. Folk had experienced tremendous popularity in the middle ’60s, and I think that it had become overly commercialized at that point. Rock ’n’ roll came along, the Beatles. We didn’t help folk much by mixing it up with rock ’n’ roll in the Byrds. Gradually people kinda forgot about it to the point where now they don’t even know what it is. If you say “folk,” they immediately think of some kid with an acoustic guitar who’s playing their own songs that they just wrote last night. They don’t know what you’re talking about when you say “traditional songs.”

B&W: Was being a fan of [early folk pioneer] Bob Gibson what got you interested in folk music as a kid?

McGuinn: That’s right. I was in high school, and I was into rock ’n’ roll at the time. Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, that whole rockabilly sound out of Memphis. I hadn’t listened to folk music at all. Maybe I’d heard a little bit of Burl Ives when I was a kid but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Bob Gibson came to our high school and did a 45-minute set on a five-string banjo. Blew me away. I just loved it. I couldn’t believe it. It was so energetic and he’s doing all these fancy picking things on the banjo. These great melodies and stories and songs. I went, “What’s that?” I asked my music teacher, and she says, “That’s folk music. There’s a school that just opened up in Chicago. You ought to check it out. It’s a folk music school.” So I went over there to Old Town School of Folk Music and enrolled. I studied there for three years before I got my first job as accompanist for the Limelighters.

B&W: How did you and Tom Petty get to be pals?

McGuinn: When I first heard Tom Petty I was looking for songs for an album I was gonna be doing. And Tom was just coming out with his first album. I didn’t know who he was. My manager was playing me songs from different writers. One of them was [Petty’s] “American Girl.” And it sounded so much like me, I kidded my manager and asked, “When did I record that?” And he said, “It isn’t you. It’s this new kid Tom Petty.” So I said I wanted to meet him, because I loved what he was doing. And he came over the next day to the house. We got to be friends, and we’ve been friends all these years.

B&W: Tell me about your years working with Bobby Darin.

McGuinn: That was cool. Bobby was a very talented guy. He was very multi-dimensional. He could play the vibes and dance and play piano and guitar and sing and tell jokes. He was an old school kind of showbiz guy. Almost a Vaudevillian. One of the things he did was incorporate a folk music segment into his act. He was scouting around looking for somebody to back him up on that. He was in California at the Crescendo Club to see Lenny Bruce. I was with the Chad Mitchell Trio at the time, and we were opening up for Lenny Bruce. So he saw me and offered me a job and I took it, ’cause it was better money.

B&W: That must have been an experience, opening for Lenny Bruce.

McGuinn: Yes it was. Lenny was so amazing. I’d say the guy was a genius. He was very bright. You never knew what he was gonna do. He was kind of coming off the top of his head all the time. And there was always this mystique that he was kind of stoned or something (laughs). He was really amazing. We looked upon him with a great deal of amusement. It’s funny, he was actually put in jail for some of the stuff he said on stage.

B&W: I didn’t realize that you wrote songs with the Brill Building crowd (legendary New York songwriting group that included Carole King, Neil Sedaka, and Neil Diamond, among others).

McGuinn: Yes. Bobby (Darin) had rheumatic fever when he was a kid, and his heart wasn’t very good. At one point, performing became difficult for him, so he decided to concentrate on his other business, which was a publishing company he’d bought into. We all moved to New York, and he hired me as a songwriter at the Brill Building. My job was to go to work everyday, like a nine to five thing, and write songs.

B&W: Are the descriptions of life in the Brill Building pretty accurate — the cubicles with a piano in each?

McGuinn: Absolutely. That’s what it was. A cubicle about 12 feet by six feet. Almost a jail cell with a piano in it (laughs). Barely enough room for an upright piano and a couple of chairs. You’d sit in there with another guy, he’d work on piano, I’d play guitar, and knock out songs all day.

B&W: From reading your statements on your web site, you seem to always be up on the latest technology. Were you ever involved with developing guitar gadgets?

McGuinn: Not really. The only thing I ever did with that was use after-market stuff and kind of build it into my guitar. I would take the VOX treble booster — it came in a chrome package — and I took the electronics out of that and installed it into my Rickenbacker. I did kind of develop what later became the pig-nose amplifier [a small practice guitar amp]. I had one of those back in ’65; I’d just make them for my friends and give away.

B&W: Tell me about the Rock Bottom Remainders.

McGuinn: I met Carl Hiason. He wrote a book called Sick Puppy, and named the dog McGuinn — after me! I went to a book-signing of his because I wanted to meet him. We got to know each other a little bit. He mentioned that he sometimes played with this band with [columnist] Dave Barry and Stephen King, and asked would I like to do that sometime. And I said, “Yeah, that sounds like a ball.” So he lined it up and then we all did it. I was going to do it this year, but I got too busy with Judy Collins going on the road.

B&W: How did you come to testify at the Senate hearings regarding MP3.com?

McGuinn: MP3.com was an outfit that I hooked up with a couple of years ago. They saw my Folk Den and said, “Why don’t you bring some of this stuff over here, make some CDs, and we’ll pay you 50 percent on ‘em.” So I said, “Good deal,” because record companies never pay more than 10 percent or something like that. When all this lawsuit stuff came out and the hearings and everything, like Napster and that whole furor about that, the record companies got a vigilante mentality, and they were going after everybody that had the word MP3 in it. So I went to the Senate to defend MP3.com because I thought they were the good guys ’cause they were paying royalties to the artists.

B&W: How long have you been doing solo shows?

McGuinn: Oh, since ’81. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot got me into it. I was on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour with Bob Dylan, Ramblin’ Jack, and Joan Baez. One time Ramblin’ and I were hanging out, and he said, “You know Roger, the best fun I ever had was when I’d just throw the guitar in the back of the Land Rover and hit the road and play all these little places, and it’s so much fun.” And I was in a band situation where you got trucks and all these logistics of people and you got to worry about the drummer being drunk and stuff like that. So I was looking to get out of that. It was too much trouble and it wasn’t as much fun as I wanted to have on the road. I wanted to take my wife with me and do it like Ramblin’ Jack said. It’s my favorite way to tour.

Roger McGuinn will perform on Saturday, October 20, at the Kentuck Festival in Northport (Tuscaloosa) Alabama. Call 205-758-1257 for details.

Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth

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Glorious Results of a Misspent Youth

By Ed Reynolds

Commander Cody

Adored by hippies and despised by the American establishment, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen introduced the world to a lethal combination of piano-pounding rock ‘n’ roll, electrified Texas swing, and truck-driving country and western. As the defiant idealism of the ’60s melted into the revolutionary decadence of the ’70s, the band, led by Commander Cody (George Frayne) from behind his piano, scored a Top Ten hit in 1971 with the irrepressible “Hot Rod Lincoln.”A noon phone call to Frayne’s Saratoga Springs, New York, residence was greeted with some reluctance by the Commander. “Give me your first question, and I’ll tell you if I’m going to do this.” He scoffed at the first query regarding the trucker aspect of the band. “I think we ought to straighten something out. I’m not the truck drivin’ guy, that’s [original Lost Planet Airmen guitarist] Bill Kirchen. I do two truckin’ songs per night.” Frayne agreed to field a few more questions, and soon was laughing through anecdotes about Communists, the FBI, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Black & White: Tell me about the first Commander Cody gig, when you were maced by police during a Berkeley riot.

Commander Cody: (Slightly irritated) Where did you get that from?

B&W: Your bio on your web site.

Cody: That was not our first . . . (Long pause) Actually, that is correct (laughs). It was a freebie for Cody’s Bookstore. And the only reason the guy hired us was because he saw my truck that said “Cody” on the side, so he figured he should give us a gig. It was July 4, 1969. They [students] started demonstrating, and moved down the street. The kids were coming with a wall of cops behind them. It was inevitable that the giant cloud of gas got to us sooner or later. It’s nice to know there’s still something correct in the bio.

B&W: I read that the band created quite a stir when you played a country-and-western convention in Nashville in 1973.

Cody: Yeah, we were the first hippies that actually went down there to play. We got a lot of “Get a haircut” stuff. They didn’t like us very much.

B&W: And you played the Communist Party festival in Paris that same year?

Cody: Yeah, it’s funny. The only way to get started was to play free things for everybody. There would be a free concert almost everyday in Berkeley. We did benefits for everybody we could. We did Black Panthers, we did White Panthers, we did Gray Panthers. So the actual Communist Party invited us; we were the only American act. The Communists had read in the Berkeley Barb, this hippie rag, that we were these revolutionary Commies from the United States (laughs). The American Indian Movement–the Russell Means guys–later took over Alcatraz, and they invited us out there. I don’t know why, cowboys and Indians or something. We stayed out there, met all the Indian guys, came back the next day, and the FBI was on my case from that point on.

B&W: Did Castro really invite the band to play Cuba?

Cody: (Surprised) Well, yes they did! The Cubans invited us to come down because they were trying to make contact with some kind of American group. Or anybody. Like the Communists finally got ahold of Jane Fonda to go do their shit for them, but I wasn’t exactly up for that. We were radical in the way that we were different from everything else, but so was everybody different from everything else at that time. And to put us in that quote/unquote “bag,” to use the nomenclature of the time, of being actual card-carrying Commies was a whole other deal.

B&W: Tell me about David Letterman kicking you off his show because you were drunk.

Cody: Yeah, I was drunk on the “Letterman Show.” I was on the show three times because they couldn’t get anybody to be on in 1983 when they were first starting up. So I would go (laughs). The last time, I was supposed to be on Monday but wasn’t. So I went out and found a bunch of friends of mine, and we partied. I was supposed to be there on Tuesday, but they wouldn’t put me on. Finally they put me on Wednesday, and by that time I had been partying for three days. Letterman at that time was a 12-stepper [Alcoholics Anonymous], and 12-steppers and me don’t get along very well.

B&W: What about Hunter S. Thompson throwing bombs at you in a Florida hotel room?

Cody: I was booked with the Rolling Stone Lecture Bureau through a woman who worked for Cox Cable in 1977, when The Lost Planet Airmen Band had broken up, and I didn’t have anything to do. I did lectures for Rolling Stone, and the subject was “The Function of the Subconscious Mind.” It was about creativity, and I lectured at eight or nine colleges around the country. Hunter Thompson saw me on that last “Letterman Show” we were talking about, and at that time everyone wanted to interview him because they saw how wacky and zany he was. He said he’d do an interview with me, so Cox Cable flies me down to Key West, where Bill Murray and Hunter Thompson are holding forth, doing more drugs and alcohol than you can possibly imagine (laughs). The interview started, and Hunter took out a taser [stun gun] and fired it at the camera man, who immediately packed up and flew back to Washington, D.C., leaving me all alone. There was a woman there who had a giant bag of drugs, and she wound up in my room. Hunter and the owner of the hotel didn’t like me because I had on an F-18 T-shirt, and they were Navy guys and they didn’t figure I had been in the service. So they got in their little boat next to the hotel, and Hunter had taped together a bowling ball-sized object made of taped-together M-80s that he fired through the sliding glass door of my room. Sounded like a bunch of shotgun blasts, broke all the glass, and set the room on fire! The chick grabs her bag of dope and heads out the door, and, of course, Hunter was out there waiting on her (laughs).

B&W: Living in Michigan in the ’60s, did you know the MC5?

Cody: Yes, indeed. I was listening to Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, and a lot of those kind of piano players that are really important. But the MC5 I never liked because it reminded me of Ted Nugent and stuff that was too loud and too stupid. I can’t remember what the theme song of the MC5 was.

B&W: “Kick Out the Jams.”

Cody: Yeah! “Kick out the jams, motherf***er!” That describes the Detroit attitude perfectly: Kick out the jams, motherf***er! So I never got along with that kind of music, because we were serious about playing electrified western swing with a beat. We loved it, and tried to play it modern enough so that people could dig it. And I think in the long term we were successful, because we spawned Asleep at the Wheel, and they went on to be very successful.

B&W: Did you spend much time with Janis Joplin?

Cody: I met Janis and hung around her at the same time when Kristofferson met her. She was a wonderful, wonderful person. She had the body of a 14-year-old girl and the face of a 45-year-old woman. And she was, like, 22 at the time. She had a lot of problems with self-confidence and stuff like that. You’d look at her face and go, “Jesus, this is a hardened hag,” but she was not at all. She was actually a sweet kid. She found her own way to get out of it, and blew it.

B &W: Do you miss the hippie days?

Cody: Well, yes and no. They [hippies] have their own built-in minority support group, you know what I mean? They started that whole politically correct crap: You gotta be nice to everyone no matter what. So no, I don’t miss the hippies (laughs). I wasn’t really a hippie. I never grew my hair that long. We were just in it for the “crazy chicks” part of the hippie movement. So was everybody else (laughs). Get some of that free love, baby! A lot of us just quit our jobs and said, “What the f***, let’s see what happens.” And we lucked out

Commander Cody performs Sunday, September 16, at Spanky’s On Valley. Call 945-1414 for details.

Struck by White Lightning

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Struck by White Lightning

The hard-livin’ world of George Jones

By Ed Reynolds

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	George Jones’ personal and career escapades are the stuff of countrymusic legend.

The first five times I went to see George Jones, he didn’t bother to show up. In those days, promoters rarely knew in advance where the unreliable Jones might be come showtime, so road trips became crapshoots. Our enthusiastic, traveling fan club frequently placed bets on whether or not Jones would appear. On one evening in 1981, the Jones’ hit “Tonight, I Just Don’t Give a Damn” blasted from the car stereo as we drove to Meridian, Mississippi, to give him another chance. There at the city auditorium a posted sign read “Tonight’s Concert Canceled.” A friend, who at the time managed the Longbranch Saloon in Avondale, later said that Jones and the band stopped in Birmingham for lunch on the way to Meridian that day. When asked to suggest a nearby place to drink, a waitress at a local barbecue joint recommended the Longbranch. By late afternoon, a Jones band member reminded the entourage that they had a show to play three hours away in Mississippi. An intoxicated Jones merely shrugged and laughed, “Well, it looks like we ain’t gonna make it!”

Jones disappeared on us again 20 years ago in Birmingham. Several thousand waited inside Boutwell Auditorium as his band played Jones’ introduction for the fourth time. Disgusted, the guitarist finally gave up and told the throng, “Looks like George ain’t gonna make it tonight.” The singer reportedly was out of his head drunk at a popular Southside pub the entire time.

As early as 1967, Jones’ roller coaster life of unpredictability began to zoom out of control. According to the biography, George Jones: The Saga of an American Singer, during an alcohol-fueled argument, Jones shoved soon-to-be third wife Tammy Wynette down the aisle of their tour bus. The band had to lock Jones in the back of the bus, which was proudly emblazoned “Mr. & Mrs. Country Music,” eventually letting him out to force him onstage. The singer performed one song, then left, leaving Wynette to finish the show alone. Four days later, he resurfaced to tell her their impending wedding was off. The next morning he woke up sober, found Wynette, and whisked her across the Georgia state line for an impromptu civil wedding ceremony in the aptly named town of Ringgold. It was the third marriage for each.

The five-year marriage was not a pretty sight. Notorious for destroying the couple’s home on more than one occasion, Jones frequently smashed television sets, hurled whiskey bottles, and even once fired a shotgun at Wynette as she fled from their house in the middle of the night in her pajamas. Wynette once hid the keys to Jones’ fleet of luxury automobiles to prevent him from riding into town to his favorite bar. He simply hot-wired his riding lawn mower, to which the keys had also been hidden, and made the 10-mile trek anyway.

Jones’ steady diet of booze, cocaine, and amphetamines soon fueled even more notorious behavior. One night in Mississippi, Jones was pulled over for speeding. Arresting officers reportedly scraped a sizeable quantity of cocaine off the floormat of his Lincoln Continental. Less than 24 hours after his release from jail, the singer lost control of the Lincoln and barrel-rolled down the same Mississippi highway. Jones checked into Hillcrest Hospital in Birmingham soon afterward for rest and evaluation.

By 1980, Jones was homeless, living out of his car and seedy motels. He was once discovered by police after having apparently ridden around for days in a Cadillac littered with whiskey bottles, empty sardine cans, and a life-size cardboard figure of Hank Williams, Sr., sitting upright next to him. Jones eventually created a couple of imaginary friends named “Deedoodle the Duck” and “The Old Man,” imitating their voices (which sounded like Donald Duck and Walter Brennan) as he frequently carried on a three-way conversation with himself, often on stage.

In 1981, the entire country finally got to witness what transpires when George Jones descends into hell. Jones had been pulled over by Tennessee patrolmen for erratic driving. Caught on film by a Nashville television station cameraman driving by, an obviously drunken Jones, hair disheveled and eyes bloodshot, screamed and lunged at the camera crew. He was led away in handcuffs as millions looked on.

George Jones scored his first million seller in 1982 with his signature hit, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” It was a song he absolutely loathed. His career appeared to be on the rebound until an appearance with Tammy Wynette on “The Tonight Show.” Jones stopped midway through the couple’s duet of “Two-Story House” to confess to the nationwide audience that he couldn’t remember the lyrics.

After three years of trying, I finally saw George Jones in 1984 in Columbus, Georgia. Though inebriated, Jones’ voice was mesmerizing that night, his silver hair sprayed to immaculate perfection. No singer carries a note like Jones. His voice is devoid of the vibrato embraced by most crooners; listeners are treated instead to a pure nasal tenor that has been long-admired by vocal stylists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Waylon Jennings. (Jennings once told a writer curious about the diverse styles in country music, “Hoss, if we could all sound like who we wanted to, we’d all sound like George Jones.”)

Jones finally addressed his drinking problem, and through the ’90s became as reliable as a Chet Atkins guitar lick. An album of duets recorded in 1992 with a variety of musical heavyweights included rock ‘n’ roll’s poster child for decadence, Keith Richards. According to a Nashville recording engineer, Jones was late to the studio reportedly having driven around the city for hours to avoid the temptations that Richards frequently brought to recording sessions. Jones finally showed up just as Richards was wheeling a fully stocked portable bar into the studio (Jones later assessed Richard’s vocal performance as “so odd it sounded good.”).

Then two years ago he crashed his car into a bridge, blaming the wreck on a cell-phone conversation with his daughter. A half-empty bottle of vodka found beneath the Cadillac’s seat told the truth, however. Rushed to the hospital in critical condition, it was doubtful that Jones would survive this latest episode, as his long-abused liver was severely lacerated as a result of the accident. A couple of weeks later he walked out of the hospital, and was performing again in two months.

A friend’s grandmother once encountered Jones in the hallway of University Hospital’s psychiatric unit. It was in the early 1980s during one of the singer’s extended stays in Birmingham to get his life-long demons under control. The old woman stared and excitedly exclaimed, “You’re George Jones!” Jones slowly nodded his head and quietly replied, “Yes, ma’am, I am. And I’m a sick man.” &

George Jones will perform at Looney’s Tavern Amphitheatre in Double Springs, Alabama, on Saturday, September 1, 8:00 p.m. Lawn seats are available for $17.00. Call 1-800-566-6397 or visit www.bham.net/looneys for further info. Looney’s is located at 22400 Hwy 278 East. Jones is also scheduled to perform in Oneonta on October 27 at a venue yet to be announced. Check www.pollstar.com for further announcements.

Brian Wilson’s Big Night Out

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July 4, 7 p.m., on the TNT cable channel.

Brian Wilson’s renowned songwriting abilities have ensconced his name among the giants of popular American music. Wilson addressed a generation drunk on the celebration of life but lost in a land of alienation and self-doubt. Appropriately, the former Beach Boy penned stunningly melodic twists on standard three-chord rock ‘n’ roll while revealing through achingly beautiful ballads an unparalleled grasp of loneliness and fear.

On July 4, TNT premieres An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson, a concert taped at Radio City Music Hall. Featured in the telecast is an ensemble of performers and actors saluting Wilson through interpretations of his songs and anecdotes about the power of his music on their respective lives.

The tribute opens with the Harlem Boys Choir singing in celestial harmony on “Our Prayer” from the 1968 Beach Boys album 20/20. The show immediately descends into embarrassingly sacrilegious performances of “California Girls” and “Help Me Rhonda” by Ricky Martin, whose shameless mugging and inane gestures make one pine for Mike Love’s endless summer of onstage charades. Paul Simon’s version of “Surfer Girl” is predictably boring. Simon has an uncanny knack for rerouting gorgeous melodies down his own improvisational jazz-influenced alleys.

The Go-Go’s finally coax the sun back onto the stage with a bare-bones, loud guitar rave-up of “Surf City” as singer Belinda Carlisle’s shimmering hips and guitarist Jane Wiedlin’s green hair inject a blast of rock ‘n’ roll that easily obscures the quartet’s penchant for singing flat. David Crosby, songwriting legend Jimmy Webb (“Wichita Lineman,” “By the Time I Get to Phoenix), and an impossibly sexy Carly Simon offer a haunting rendition of “In My Room.”

The big surprise of the evening is Vince Gill, introduced by David Crosby as the “purest and best voice in all of popular music.” Gill’s version of “Warmth of the Sun,” written by Wilson and Mike Love hours after the assassination of JFK, is nothing less than angelic. Billy Joel relates an endearing generation gap story about his teenage daughter Alexa’s discovery of “Don’t Worry Baby.” Dedicating the song to her, his over-blown vocal vibrato proceeds to pummel the delicacy out of Brian Wilson’s Phil Spector-influenced masterpiece. One wonders why Joel didn’t simply let Alexa sing it.

Old film clips of Beach Boys performances and recording studio clowning are disrupted by “candid” studio banter from tapes supposedly representing Wilson’s voice during recording sessions. But the voice is a little too much like David Crosby’s to be believable. Testimonials from Dennis Hopper, Cameron Crowe, and host Chazz Palminteri frequently sound like cue card lines read at the Academy Awards, though famed Beatles producer George Martin offers fascinating insight into the rivalry and mutual influence shared by the Beach Boys and The Beatles.

An emotionless, stoic Brian Wilson finally emerges toward the show’s end to sit at his piano and sing “Heroes and Villains,” offering a dedication loaded with twisted brotherly affection and macabre Beach Boy reality: “I’d like to dedicate this show to my brothers Dennis and Carl, who both died.”

Wilson, who never once smiles, encores on “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with Elton John, adding hilarious irony to the pair’s history of troubled lives as they sing together, “We could be married. And then we’ll be happy.” As the song concludes, the stage fills up with the entire cast of performers, with everyone joining Wilson, now standing and playing bass though still looking befuddled, for rowdy versions of “Barbara Ann,” “Surfin’ USA,” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.”

As the stage clears, Wilson momentarily discards his robot-like persona and quips, “Now that we’ve broken your eardrums with all that noise, we’ll send you home with a nice little love message.” Backed by the impeccable California band, The Wondermints (whose amazing vocal harmonies and precision playing flawlessly recreated a Beach Boys ambience that made up for some performers’ shortcomings), an orchestra, and the Harlem Boys Choir, Wilson closes the show with an amazing version of “Love and Mercy” from his first solo record, Brian Wilson.

The Men Who Should Be King

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The Men Who Should Be King

By Ed Reynolds

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	Elvis admirers strike a pose at Graceland.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Elvis Presley must be tossing and turning in his Graceland tomb, wondering where he went wrong. Maybe he’ll rise from the dead one day to set the record straight, but until then, the endless parade of imitation Elvis resurrections will continue to thrive as the most alluring sideshow in American culture.

On Saturday, June 16, an army of Elvis clones will invade the BJCC Ballroom to compete in the inaugural Elvis in Dixieland Impersonator Contest. The winner will jet up Highway 78 to Memphis in August to compete for the title True King in the “Images of Elvis Contest,” the most bizarre event of the sacred vigil known as “Death Week.”

The impersonator contest is sponsored by B&K Enterprises, “a household name in the custom costume world.” Internationally acclaimed for authentic reproductions of Elvis costumes, Elvis jumpsuits, and Elvis accessories, B&K Enterprises employs patterns and techniques handed down from original Elvis-wear designers Bill Belew and Gene Doucette. Jumpsuits go for as high as $4,000, capes up to $2,400, and belts for $350. The company also manufactures Elvis-style eyeglasses by Dennis Roberts, the original designer who created 488 pairs of eyeglasses for the King from 1970 to 1977. Roberts also created Presley’s classic “TCB with lightening bolt” necklace.

The host of the contest will be David Lee, who bills himself as “Birmingham’s Favorite Elvis Entertainer.” Lee is also a member of the Professional Elvis Impersonators Association (PEIA), an international organization that promotes “the advancement of Elvis Presley’s music and Style [sic] throughout the world. PEIA’s code of Ethics includes the promise to “not physically, mentally, psychologically, (or) verbally abuse or slander other performers or members.”

First prize will be $1,000 cash; other prizes include a replica of Elvis’ “Aloha” belt and custom-made “puffy-sleeve” satin shirts from B&K Enterprises. Part of the proceeds from the impersonator contest will benefit Grace House Ministries..” Advance tickets are $4 for adults, and $2 for ages 6 through 12. At the door, it’s $5 for adults.