Our annual look back at the biggest names and stories of the last 12 months — from Alejandro Escovedo's rock 'n' roll roar to Jessica Simpson's country crossover, and a little bit of everything else in between.
Alejandro’s Rock 'n' Roll Dream
With Real Animal — and a little push from the Boss — a True Believer finally gets his due.
BY LYNNE MARGOLIS
Photo: Ross Halfin
“THANK YOU for all your support,” Alejandro Escovedo told Austin fans during a two-night stand at Antone’s in November. “It’s been a wonderful year for us.”
Escovedo might wish more of his first 56 years had been as wonderful as No. 57, but the periods of struggle undoubtedly sweeten the taste of his current success. And he’s having a helluva good ride. In March, he left his longtime manager, Heinz Geissler, and signed with Jon Landau Management, becoming one of that agency’s few clients besides the guy they’ve had from the get-go: Bruce Springsteen. Landau and his partner, Barbara Carr, reportedly have close ties at Escovedo’s label, EMI’s Manhattan/Back Porch Records, and Carr fell in love with Escovedo’s new album, Real Animal. (Carr, coincidentally, is married to Springsteen biographer and longtime Escovedo fan Dave Marsh.)
That connection led to some very cool developments for the widely revered but less widely recognized musician: In April, Springsteen invited him onstage during a show at Houston’s Toyota Center for a duet of Escovedo’s “Always a Friend,” a song that sounds like the Boss could have written it and which seemed tailor-made for E Street Band accompaniment. Afterward, Escovedo told Backstreets, the official Springsteen fanzine, “It was my best musical experience, ever.”
His recognition level shot up exponentially when the performance showed up on YouTube, and was later included on Bruce’s e-release-only Magic Tour Highlights EP of four live songs. “Always a Friend” was the leadoff single from Real Animal, which has been almost universally hailed as the best of his lengthy career — and gave him his first appearance in Billboard’s Top 200 album chart; he came in at No. 122. It also charted at No. 3 on the magazine’s Heatseeker/New Artist chart following its June 24 release. A travelogue of his musical phases set in the locales where they occurred, Real Animal was co-written with guitar whiz Chuck Prophet and produced by Tony Visconti, of David Bowie and T Rex fame.
A grueling tour schedule caused Escovedo to cancel all of his August appearances — including a slot on Late Show with David Letterman — citing exhaustion. Fearing he might rile the beastly hepatitis C virus that still may lurk in his body, he chose to chill. Apparently, it didn’t affect publicity surrounding the album; he’s seemingly gotten more coverage than ever, and he’s always had substantial love from the music press. Ten years ago, No Depression magazine anointed him as its “Artist of the Decade.”
The Jonathan Demme documentary of Escovedo’s life supposedly is still on track as well, but we haven’t heard much about its progress. (Demme wrote Real Animal’s liner notes.) We know Escovedo got to hang with President Carter, who was the subject of Jimmy Carter Man from Plains, a Demme doc Escovedo scored, while warming up the crowd for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. Escovedo and the band played “People (We’re Only Gonna Live So Long).”
Though he didn’t make Letterman, Escovedo and his band performed on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in September, followed by their first appearance at the Austin City Limits Festival, and more performances.
During that Antone’s show, he reminded his audience, “It all started here in Austin.”
But in year 58, it could go anywhere.
Gone Country… ish
“You like Jessica Simpson? Well, you deserve to die.” Or so they tell me.
BY MARK KEMP
ASIDE FROM hip-hop, country is the most wildly popular musical style people love to hate. The Bottle Rockets once wrote a song about a hipster girl who tells her boyfriend, “You like country music? Well, you deserve to die.” Robbie Fulks sang of people who claim they like “any kind of music but country.” Substitute “Jessica Simpson” for “country” and you get the same grievous injustice. Nobody wants to admit they secretly like the goofy Dallas blonde with the Colgate smile. And yet, somebody’s buying all those CDs. It’s like those people who loudly bemoan the decline of the daily newspaper but won’t cop to getting their morning news fix from their Yahoo! home page.
So when Jessica Simpson went country on her 2008 album Do You Know, the haters went into overdrive. Entertainment Weekly’s Mandi Bierly had her panties all in a bunch, contemplating violence in her Pop Watch blog. “If Simpson’s people try to market her ... as the next Shania Twain,” Bierly wrote, “I will be forced to hurt someone.” The infamous Perez Hilton, another blogger (you see where I get my news?) wrote that Simpson has “a long way to go before she’s any country star because even in her home state of Texas she’s known as ‘Yoko Romo.’”
Folks, stop hating! Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles and lovely Jessica has no power over the Dallas Cowboys. Her single, “Come on Over,” reached the Top 20 of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, and Do You Know went to No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart, and the sky has not fallen.
So I am hereby writing (in this more traditional news source of paper and ink) to publicly defend Miss Simpson, to out myself as having never, ever hated her, to admit that she’s irresistible, that she takes my breath away, that I think I’m in love with her — that, in fact, I wanna love her forever.
How can you hate a gal who flubs up a Dolly Parton song at a Dolly Parton tribute in front of Dolly Parton herself? How can you hate someone who happily admits on national TV that she thought tuna was chicken? Jessica told the whole world about her teenage acne problem. She tried out for the Mickey Mouse Club and was cast off by the very same folks who welcomed young Britney and Justin. People, Jessica is not one of them — she’s one of us!
More importantly, Jessica’s country is easily as valid as Faith’s or Carrie’s — or Hootie’s, for that matter. In “You’re My Sunday,” she mixes mandolin, Hammond B3 organ and a cheesy rock guitar solo into a hurricane of a chorus, creating what David Allan Coe might call “the perfect country-pop song.” And when she sings “I could have been your June Carter Cash” over the fiddle, mandolin and pedal-steel guitar of the pensive “Sipping on History,” by golly, you almost believe her. But it’s Jessica’s pronunciation of ice cubes like eyes cubes in “Come on Over” that makes anything Shania Twain’s ever sung sound about as country as Pat Benatar.
Don’t tell it to those country fans in Wisconsin, though. According to the hecklerspray.com blog, they “booed and jeered (Jessica) for not being country enough.” They probably drool over Canadian Twain and Aussie Keith Urban. But think about it: Wisconsin fans jeering a Texan for not being country enough? Well, there you have it.
Here’s not country: Alaska-born carpetbagger Jewel. Let’s see, now: Who is the last woman from Alaska to travel down South in an attempt to woo the redneck populace? (Hint: rhymes with Waylon.) And Jewel is about as credible a country singer as Sarah Palin is an American foreign diplomat. When Jewel, a former wannabe Joan Baez whose lyrics are about as deep as a mud puddle, moved to Texas to be with her cowboy sweetheart Ty Murray, she, too, decided to “go country.” Chucking her cosmetically leftist former musical style for ultra-conservative producer John Rich (the Nashville star who penned the McCain campaign anthem “Raisin’ McCain”), Jewel recorded Perfectly Clear, an album on which she makes absolutely nothing at all perfectly clear.
But Jewel knows how to sell herself, and she sells her “country” about as well as she sold her “homelessness” back in the mid-’90s. When she twangs it up over the steel guitar-fueled “I Do,” on lines like, “Love is a game until it’s played, and if it’s lost it can’t ever be saved” — whew! Man, that stuff sounds so deep it don’t matter if it don’t make no sense. Which must be why Allmusic.com’s reviewer saw fit to give “Texas” Jewel’s country album three stars and Texas Jessica’s just two. Me? I like any kind of music but Jewel.
When he was a pre-teen, North Carolina-born Mark Kemp, author of Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race and New Beginnings in a New South, also liked Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley P.T.A.” more than he did Joan C. Baez’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
Heathen Chemistry
The Band of Heathens finds its collective groove.
BY DOUG FREEMAN
IT’S DIFFICULT for the members of Austin’s Band of Heathens to pinpoint exactly when the group first formed, but if pressed, they cite a show in late December 2005 as the genesis of something beyond the simple supportive backing of songwriters in the round. Over the course of weekly performances upstairs at Momo’s, Ed Jurdi, Colin Brooks and Gordy Quist increasingly supplemented each other’s sound during solo sets, until Wednesday nights became more of a collective jam session.
The three songwriters, along with bassist Seth Whitney, soon became a force within the local scene, even garnering Best New Band accolades from the 2006/2007 Austin Music Awards. Yet it has only been during the past year that the Band of Heathens has begun to consider the project as a committed endeavor.
“I think that what we were getting out of playing in the band, the power of that, was really undeniable,” Jurdi says. “You’re kind of put in the position where to give something a proper chance to really see it through, you need to invest all your energy and resources into it, and that’s what kind of happened with this. As we played more, everyone just started to realize that this was really a great vehicle to present this sound that we all felt was a unique sound as a band.”
That sound is a swaggering blues- and country-based rock that appropriately recalls the rollicking tunes of their iconic predecessors, the Band, and, bolstered by the addition of John Chipman on drums, cuts with a funky southern jam power that stomps after Little Feat. The backbone of the group’s appeal, however, still resides in the effortless melding of the songwriters’ individual styles into a coherent whole. Brooks’ rough blues impulses slice into the soulful side of Jurdi’s country and Quist’s darker narratives.
“I think everybody really comes from a pretty similar place musically, but the slight distinctions kind of make it more apparent,” Jurdi offers. “As everyone started to see where everyone else was coming from, it became easier to insert some of the others’ personalities into each others’ stuff. It was organic forming, the kind of thing where the chemistry was there immediately and we wanted to kind of explore that space a little bit further.”
Following two live albums, the second packaged with a DVD performance, the band finally issued its debut studio effort last spring, to wide acclaim. The eponymous release — produced by Ray Wylie Hubbard — maintained the easy feel of their live sets, yet also proved more polished and devoted to a more collaborative process to match their new dedication to the group over their solo work.
“The next record we do could be totally different,” Jurdi admits with a laugh. “That’s kind of what’s nice about it — we really keep it open and let the songs dictate the way any specific project is going to go. I think that in that environment, a lot of things end up coming out that you didn’t necessarily expect, and usually that’s the kind of stuff we’re all happily surprised by.”
— DOUG FREEMAN
A Sorta Farewell
In the wake of band member Carter Albrecht’s death, the members of Dallas’ Sorta say goodbye with one of the 2008’s best albums.
BY MALCOLM MAYHEW
Photo: Bill Ellison
BY THE TIME you read this, Sorta will be no more. You can listen to their CDs, download their music and, on occasion, hear them on an adventurous radio show. But at this point — at the dawn of 2009, mere months after the band released what is easily its finest record — you can no longer see them live, hear them live or, especially, feel them live.
The Dallas-based roots-rock group disbanded in late 2008 following the recording and release of their self-titled fifth album. Sorta made good on a promise: to finish the disc and then split up. To them, carrying on without keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Carter Albrecht — who was shot and killed in September 2007 by his girlfriend’s neighbor, William “Smokey” Logg (who suspected Albrecht was trying to break into his house) — simply didn’t make any sense.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” says Trey Johnson, the group’s primary vocalist. “I think you just go with your gut. There was never a list of pros and cons. Maybe in a few years I’ll have enough perspective to pinpoint why.”
Johnson, bassist/guitarist/vocalist Danny Balis, steel/slide guitarist Ward Williams, guitarist Chris Holt, drummer Tom Bridwell and former drummer/longtime friend Trey Carmichael are still reeling from Albrecht’s death — and it’s hard to imagine, the band members agree, a time when that reeling will stop. It’s been the topic of all their recent interviews, hung over their final live shows and was unavoidable as they pieced together this last record, which the group started working on before Albrecht’s death.
“When I listen to the record, there are parts of it that are frozen in time before the shooting,” Johnson says. “There’s a lightness. And then there are other songs that, to my ears, carry a heavy weight. It’s difficult to just hear a song for what it is. There are some powerfully beautiful moments and I sometimes cry when I listen to it.”
If one diamond (apart from the record) can be gleaned from this pile of carnage, it’s the outpouring of local support. Texas-music fans have wrapped their arms around the Carter Albrecht Foundation (www.carteralbrechtmusicfoundation.org), an organization started by Albrecht’s family to help musicians young and old better their educations and improve the quality of their lives.
“The support in the community has been profound but not at all surprising,” says Carmichael. “That is both a huge testament to a community that takes a lot of misplaced heat for its perceived ambivalence, and a credit to Carter. He was not only a major talent, but a major personality, a committed and loving friend to most everyone he met and a constant source of encouragement to fellow musicians of all genres and abilities.”
Along with helping out with the foundation, the band members are working on other projects. Holt and Carmichael have formed a band called Meltdown with Dave Little, Justin Smith of Big Loo and Salim Nourallah. Balis is performing with King Bucks (with Carmichael’s brother, Chris) and working on a solo record. Williams has moved to Nashville to pursue music fulltime. And Johnson just finished recording a solo record with Don Cento.
“Everybody is still playing, plenty busy, still doing what we love to do,” Carmichael says, adding that Albrecht’s own posthumous solo album, Jesus is Alive and Living in London, should be released early this year.
You have to look back sometimes in order to move forward, and when the members of Sorta look behind them, they undoubtedly see what their fans see: an impressive body of work, but also a what-could-have-been question mark.
“I see a great rock band that left an indelible, albeit small, mark in the pantheon of legendary rock bands that not many people ever know about,” Ward says. “I see an amazing group of musicians who just barely grazed the surface of what they had the potential to become as a band. I’m proud of what we accomplished. It was real. It was organic. It worked. It wasn’t processed, pre-packaged, manufactured, mass-marketed, genetically modified, artificially colored, artificially flavored, derivative, denatured or fake in any way. It was real music that was the real food of love.”
More Year in Review 2008 in the Winter 2009 issue of Texas Music.
