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1st Record/1st Concert

I wish I could say the first record I bought was something super cool and vintage but no, it was David Bowie’s Pin Ups. I was 12. I had heard "Sorrow" emanating from my older sisters bedroom and I thought it was so cool so I bought the record. I didn't know if Bowie was a girl or a boy, when I saw the cover but I didn’t care - I just had to have that song so I could make my older sister think I was hip.

Until that pinnacle moment, I had been raised on a steady diet of my parents’ record collection. Mom had a bunch of 45s and I spent hours grounded in my room listening to Ricky Nelson’s Be Bop Baby, Elvis's Don’t Be Cruel and Connie Stevens’ Sixteen Reasons on an old turntable. Now those records are a permanent part of my juke box and there they will remain. My folks also had soundtracks galore so I learned all the words to the King and I and Oklahoma! They also had Bobby Darin, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett and lots of Sinatra so I didn’t have to buy too much of that swingin stuff. In my teen years, there was a record store at the corner of Avenue 55 and Figueroa where you could buy 45s for 49 to 99 cents. I started saving my babysitting cash and really got into what I call "vato oldies." My neighbors were the Rodriguez family and it was at their house, I started hearing bands like the Fifth Dimension, The Stylistics and The O'Jays. Later, at Irving Junior High, I hung out with cholos and discovered Thee Midnighters, Deon Jackson, Rosie and the Originals and King Floyd. I bought tons of 45s by all of those artists and they still reside in my 1964 Seeburg Jukebox (which i now share with my ex husband Thomas Yearsley of the Paladins.)

My first concert -- again -- not so cool, Three Dog Night at the Anaheim convention center. I went with an older girl, a friend of my sisters, who had an extra ticket. I wasn’t really a fan but I did leave the concert humming "Joy to the World." My next concert, that same year was even lamer -- The Osmonds -- with Donny as the lead singer. It made sense then, to go to the concert - again at the Anaheim convention center. I was a 12 year old Mormon girl, trying to escape the verbal abuse and lunacy of my own dysfunctional hippie household thru Mormonism. Like all dutiful Mormon girls, I had a crush on Donny Osmond. I screamed so much that night, I couldn’t speak for days.

Later, when I appeared on Donny and Marie’s daytime show, I brought my Osmonds lunchbox, which I purchased that night, for their autograph. They were very impressed.

-- Candye Kane

Raised in Northeast Los Angeles, Candye Kane is a singer/songwriter/blues diva and pancreatic cancer survivor. She tours 250 days a year with her jump blues band and makes her home in Oceanside, California. She is the mother of two grown sons - Tommy; a jazz piano major at UC Berkeley and Evan, a drummer who plays in her road band.



Another Fein Mess
A.F. Stone’s Monthly
July 2010

Hollywood Nights 1

There’s two tangible things that make me feel ... lucky. One was my treasured 1992 SAAB convertible. I never had a car I liked til we got this one in 2001 I felt like a champ in it.

Sad day, then, was June 26th when someone slammed into the rear of it, Baby Jessie (19) driving, or rather sitting in a lane with the left turn signal blinking, in Running Springs, a town-stop after a long hill climb on the way to Big Bear. On this straightaway drivers want to open up despite the presence of businesses and do. One headed straight for us and swerved at the last instant. The guy tailgating him went “Wha?” and swung tardily, crushing the right rear quarter of the car and reducing it, at $2000 book value, to ‘totaled.’ I drove it home (the push didn’t affect the rear wheel well) with a heavy heart, grateful of course that we didn’t get slammed in the side, pushed into oncoming traffic, flipped over, etc.

The other thing still makes me feel good is where we live - a nice part of Los Angeles. At 11:30 p.m. on June 30th I took Phoebe the dog for a walk around the circular road atop the hill above our house. It was an unusually humid night, with dense air and a low ceiling. We felt like we 2 were on the top of the world. The temp was 70 degree perfection, the lights down in the city were haloed. Twice Phoebe spotted skunks but the varmints glided by peacefully in eerie white-striped beauty. This night nobody else was walking, running, or walking their dog. (People drive here to do those things.) This night, at this time, was all for me and Pheobe. When people put down L.A..I just smile.

1 A great Bob Seger song. I mean great. All growlers are great: Fogerty, Seger, Burton Cummings.

2 What you mean ‘We,’ human? -- Phoebe

PHOTO -

The reason that I Sob

Jessie and Phoebe

R.I.P.

I read in the handy punmaster.com newsletter 3 of the death, of heart disease, of guitarist Tony Peluso in Los Angeles.

I am a praiser. That was the purpose of my tv show, to illuminate people’s good work in their presence. So my one meeting with Tony Peluso was very satisfying.

In 1977 I went to Nashville on the dime of Elektra Records, my employer. I went to a Guy Clark 4 recording session 5, and in passing heard Peluso’s name. “That’s him over there” someone said.

------------

Paul Body, Dolly Parton, and me stand outside the Troubadour, taking a break after Guy Clark’s appearance there. 1975.
---------------

I introduced myself and said simply “That long solo you did at the end of the Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye To Love’ is the greatest guitar solo I ever heard.” 6 (Tactfully, I didn’t add my usual proviso, that I know nothing about guitars or guitar playing.)

He was taken a little aback and said thanks. But I felt great!! And I’m sure he did too.

3 The Punmaster (whose column contains no puns) corrals press releases and cetera about 60s/70s music, and ten years in either direction. It has a slight Frisco bent and includes missives from a lot of musicians you’ve heard of, if you’re who I think you are.

4 I “knew” Clark from meeting him at the Troubadour in 1975 and later my forgetting to show up to interview him at his hotel. He and his wife waited all afternoon. Every subsequent meeting he was OK about it, but I feel crummy to this day.


Guy Clark at RCA office, Hollywood, 1975

5 The session was canceled when someone (Not me!) spilled coffee or Coke on the recording console.

6 I split my vote. The solo in “Take And Give” by Slim Rhodes on Sun is also the best, but it’s played on a steel guitar.

M-M-M-My Carlena

My time with Carlene Carter spans four stages.

1. In 1977 she came in to Elektra Records with her mgr. I said Hi, and got her some records and said “Doing anything tonight?” She said “Call me.” I called her at 7 and she said she had to wash her hair.
Subsequently we were sometimes in the same place at the same time.


At Music Machine 1978

2. Five Years Later. I got to England with the Blasters and got on Nick Lowe’s bus for the Nick/Blasters UK tour. Carlene squealed “Art Fein! My gosh, Nick, Art and I had the most passionate affair!” NO WE DIDN’T I shouted hoarsely. “Now, now, son, don’t worry. There many more like you” said Nick. I gave up. (Years later Al Kooper said he got the same runaround - and story!)


At Oki Dog 1978

3. In 1989 I went to Las Vegas with my mother. I noticed that the Johnny Cash show included the Carter Family singers, and called Carlene’s room and asked for a couple of passes and got’em. After the show me and ma went backstage and Carlene came out to greet us. Mom was thrilled. I was pleased.


At Yamashiro - Nudie walks in behind us . 1978

4. June 24, 2010 I walked up to the dressing room at the Echo where Syd Straw was talking to Carlene. “Oh. My. Gawd.” she said and we hugged hello. I met her husband, reminded her about the Las Vegas show (she didn’t remember) and bugged out happy.



Me n’ Carlene, the Grand Ole Echo June 2010


Carlene Carter, Cindy Wasserman, Tiffany Lowe, Sarah Borges, Dave Alvin and Syd Straw singing “Will The Circle Be Unbroken.” At the Grand Ole Echo, June 24.

I Go To The Store

None of the Viva towel packs at Target were marked, so I lugged a load to a scanner. Twelve bucks for eight rolls is no bargain, but the package says the rolls are ENORMOUS -- equal to 12 rolls.

Unless you weren’t born yesterday. Five years ago the standard sheet count was 55 and the jumbo 75. Then one day they were 50/70, without a “Now Fewer Towels” campaign. I checked the jumbo roll; 66 sheets. So I guess the ratio is now 44/66. What a friend we have in Cheatex - I mean Kleenex.

I Watch TV

I fight the notion that the “wings” (the two ends tacked on new tvs for widescreen) must be filled in order to get full value from your set. Stretching a 4:5 ratio image sideways makes faces, cars, telephone polls look like wide-stretched nutty putty images. The button to restore the true ratio is called, on some machines, “Normal.”

Recently I saw visual madness on a KLCS show. The top and bottom were blacked like a Cinemascope movie and the 4:5 image stretched wide. That is, 30% of the viewing area was removed for widescreen simulation resulting in distortion. It’s like stretching red plastic over your black & white tv screen and calling it color tv. (What’s a black and white tv? Move on.)

Ouch! In the Music category on Jeopardy June 14, the clue was “Not Andy or Roger, this Williams won a Grammy for her album ‘Car Wheels On A Bumpy Road.’” The three players, in their 30s, stood motionless til the answer, or question, was revealed.

On Colbert June 23rd Father Guido Sarducci came on and ‘mistook’ Glenn Beck for Jeff Beck. The young audience was as unfamiliar with Jeff Beck as it was with Sarducci.

The crooks of Time-Warner offered free runs of Turner Classic movies from a list that ran 4 pages. Now it’s one page, six movies. Their tv ads never say “We’re removing stations from basic cable and reducing free movies.” Where is the headquarters of T-W? Why isn’t it being stormed like the Bastille?

A NatGeo docu cites Italian Mafia and Jewish Mafia presence in postwar Las Vegas. Was it a closed club? WASPS need not apply? I love Jerry Lewis, but more than once - always - he’s waxed nostalgic about Las Las Vegas “when the bosses made sure there was no crime.” The murder rate was low in Nazi Germany too, Jer.

The cable ID under the Science Channel “How It’s Made” lists its subjects - Golfballs, Tires, Jello - twice. I think it’s because the first word, in parentheses, is “Repeat” and the annotator took it literally.

Sweets For My Sweet 7

I went to buy a friggin’ ink cart for my printer and brought in an empty. “Where’s the $3 discount” I asked when the formerly $17 item now $23 rang up at $26. “Oh you’ll get a gift certificate in the mail.” No thanks I said, I’d like the $3 back right now. “That’s not how we do it.”

Of course, as Staples does, Office Depot does. (Not that they collude, that would be criminal.) So now rather than cash back, I get a coupon good for nothing in that store but a bag of M&Ms. And if they sell it for $3, it must cost them 75 cents, it’s all gain for them. It’s government-approved monopoly capitalism at work ...

Speaking of M&Ms, isn’t that brand impossible to upgrade? Their putting 3 oz. of ‘special’ chocolate in a small bags for four bucks doesn’t fly. Can’t overcome it, any more than you can believe Hersheys Deluxe ...

7 A really fine Drifters record.

Music Life

Looking at punk-rock photos I am overcome with sadness at the hack-haired girls with black smudges on their face and torn fishnet stockings. It was playing dress-up sadly... Loading Frank Sinatra stuff onto the iPod, I recalled going to see him at the Universal Amphitheater with indifference: in the ‘older’ vein I like songs more than singers. After the Warner Bros-comped show, Richard Meltzer said “What was that all for? Isn’t this the music we wanted to get rid of?” I pretty much agreed with him then, though now less ... Concrete Blonde is back, played a gig here recently. In their bios I never see mention that Jeanette worked at the front desk at Gold Star studios. She left after a dispute with a temporary manager ... I have a friend who didn’t mark the cassettes he made. Too much trouble. They’d be strewn across the floor of his car and he had to remember how far each was played to identify them ... At the end of “Love Is All You Need” at the flower-strewn Beatles love-in in 1967, you heard a distant “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah” that telegraphed they were way beyond that simple old stuff. So Ringo was telling the truth in Hard Day’s Night; they were mockers ... Stephen Holden’s 6-30 NYTimes review of the October 2008 Phil Spector documentary comes down hard on Phil for his ego. Looking down on Spector puts Moldin’ Holden not on par with him but above. (As Phil would say, “Can you IMAGINE?”) Indeed, the people who come off unscathed are the film’s director and Mick Brown. It’s no reach to say that Holden is on even ground with them ... George Thorogood, an old friend of Chuck E. Weiss, was at Chuck’s June 19 show at the Piano Bar. I mentioned that I had placed two Chuck E songs in the 1983 movie “Roadhouse 66” (I was music supervisor) and rather than be surprised (nobody knows that film) George said “I know all about that movie. I did a screen test for it and they said I was perfect, then I never heard from them.” Director John Mark Robinson had done a Thorogood video ...

PHOTOS


The Famous Volcanoes, from Minneapolis. Grand Ole Echo, 6-19


The Damn Sons, sizzling hot at Grand Ole Echo 6-24


Chris Laterzo and Buffalo Robe - Grand Ole Echo 6-27


Paul Body and Don Heffington watch the backyard band.


The David Brothers on the Grand Ole Echo’s outside stage.


Powerhouse Dan Janisch, Grand Ole Echo, 6-27

Where Credit is due

I saw ‘cineapplause’ in the “new word” section of a 1923 Dictionary. It referred to the specific applause given to a film, i.e. a lifeless mechanical projection. That word didn’t make it much past 1924.

Now I submit “preplause,” and deride it. More than once at SXSW someone said “Let’s give the band a hand” before they played.
Shouldn’t we refuse and shout “Play something first!”?

Groovin’

* I used my video camera a lot at SXSW. But when you shoot a show you miss it. I didn’t realize til I played the stuff back the next week sitting in a quiet room, concentrating on the Coal Porters, that I was enjoying it for the first time. The real first time I was making sure things were in frame, sorta, and fearing that my arm would collapse from holding the video cam.

* At a recent show, a band was channeling Neil Young with its new songs. I mentioned to a musician friend that I never owned a Neil Young album, but now his music sounds pretty good as a puzzle-piece from a time.

“You know,” he said, “I hated disco when it was out, but compared to the electronic music today it’s good to hear the musicians playing hard on those records.”

Baseball

The ‘network’ (dunno which) announcer for one Dodger game in Boston was a guy I’ve noticed for years. He says things like “The Dodgers would like him to get home runs.” Oh. “But if he gets hits that score runs they’ll be satisfied.” Uh huh.

I first heard him years ago saying something like “All those pitches failed to hit the strike zone and that’s why he walked.” This particular Sunday he used the word ‘defense’ as a verb, as “that’s how they defensed it.”

Maybe his named is Nat, so his nattering is natural.

Picky, Picky

* Julie Bosman’s front-page NY Times story about a successful Swedish author opens with the tale of another:

“Camilla Lackberg has written seven blockbuster novels in her native Swedish, but, until now, no one bothered to translate and publish any of them in the United States. And she has a tattooed, secretive, bisexual computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander to thank for it.”

What Bosman thinks she’s saying is that Lackberg’s work had not been translated until the success of another Swedish author’s character - Salander - sparked a run on Swedish authors.

But what she wrote is that she had no success being published because of that character.

* The gal in the famous Times Square V-J Day photo died. But in her 6-24 obit, L.A. Times snide reporter Dennis McLellan smirches her memory citing a doubter who emerged in ... 2008. (Thanks Denny, hope someone vets your obit.) And the cutline identifies her as “then-nurse.” Without “then-” would we think she was STILL a nurse at 91? Then why isn’t he tagged “then-sailor”? Or is he still a swab?

But wait. Every Halloween men in nurse outfits march through West Hollywood, and many of those same blades dress in sailor suits so shouldn’t the couple be identified as “purported-then-nurse” and “purported-then-sailor”? You can’t be too careful.

Note To The Times: time is up for “iconic.” It’s stale and stinky.

New (York) News

* Tina Susman, “Reporting From New York” in the LATimes, screws up her face in astonishment that a stabbed man died after being ignored for 40 minutes lying on a NY sidewalk. She is shocked by such indifference in “one of America’s safest big cities.” First I’ve heard of that! It’s a good place, a great place, but known for brotherly love? That’s Philadelphia. The same week as this incident the NYTimes wrote that some NYC bus drivers get hardship leave because patrons spit at them. Since Tina sees her city as Paradise On Earth, outside eyes should oversee her reporting.

* Speaking of NY, the 5-22 LAT Business section carried a story about home prices in ‘The Hamptons.’ I’ve kidded about not knowing the east side from the west side, but seriously -- Where are/is the Hamptons? Are they many, or a name for one place? I could look on a map, but why should I? It should be explained, if run at all. Could I write “El Segundo” in the NYTimes without explanation?

* In the June 22 LAExtra section we learn of a new bakery opening in downtown L.A. Martha Groves writes with a straight face “Many Angelenos are drooling in anticipation” of the place’s “first location outside New York.” The many must be from NY. They salivate about vanilla cupcakes with banana pudding filling because no one here is capable of making such a thing. The news is that city ordinance demands a certain number of parking spaces for a new business and the NY owner is flummoxed - “for me - it’s a new problem.” 8

Dribble-chinned Martha is outraged that this law is being applied to the Cupcake King! It is rued 9 that the city is doing nothing to CREATE parking spaces for him. The owner is suprised by the “vitriol” of “activists” angry at a rule-flouting new business trying to float unimpeded into their overcrowded district.

Why can’t they just bend the rules for him? “Many” have signed petitions for him. I wonder what color pen Martha used.

8 How could that be? Doesn’t the NYTimes plaster its pages with reports on LA restaurants, theater, politics, subways, local tv, city ordinances? I thought for every NY article in the L.A. paper they ran one in NY!

9 Not ‘rude” - dat’s New Yawk you’re tinkin’ of.


The living room sessions. I get interviewed for a documentary about the Poker Party. June 22.


The lineup. Poker Party vets today, for the docu.
Name them and win a VHS reel of my shows to analyze for me.

Going-On’s

Saturday June 26 I got an email from slight friend (she’s not very big) Michele about a Ranch & Roll, a custom furniture gallery opening on Fountain near the big blue Scientology Center. I hopped in the remaining car, the ‘86 Volvo with 389,000 miles on it, and went to this bash and had a swell time talking and slapping backs. Big Sandy was there, Julien Nitzberg the director, several gals with the 50’s look that’s lasted a lot longer than it did the first time and I spent a bunch of time with Dave Alvin catching up on stuff. I got a ritual snub from Lucinda Wiliams, who's friends with people I know and has been in a room with me a dozen times - she wedged her back between me and Dave Alvin to talk to him.

I’m sure someday she’ll notice me. This year I’ve met several people who’ve been in my same karass for 10, 20, 30 years. After I spoke at the Doug Fieger memorial a drummer of note came up and shook my paw and said “That was great, Art.” I had been in the same place with him thirty times and’d been met, sort of, with a head-snap in another direction. Also, at the Rhino store in May I was introduced by a mutual acquaintance (“Art, you know Whozits, right?”) to a guy I had seen, and we’d seen each other, for 35 years. It wasn’t a momentous meeting, but a welcome one. Doestoefsky has a short story about seeing the same person over and over and becoming enraged that the person doesn’t acknowledge him. I know that feeling, except for the enraged part.

Conversational highlight was with a woman who did crossword puzzles. We compared short off-kilter words that showed up repeatedly. I cited Esai, as in Morales, and the number of different ways puzzle makers defined ELO. She came back with Ott (baseball player Mel) and said “See, someone great from San Francisco.”

She, a former San Franciscan, was playing off my humorous suggestion that only pretentious blowhards objected to “Frisco.”
But Mel Ott could not have stumped me more.
“He was born in San Francisco, like Dimaggio?”
No, he PLAYED for San Francisco.
“No,” I said calmly and a little fearfully (how wacky was she?), “he played in the 1930s.”
Yes! she said, for the Giants.
She didn’t know the Giants moved there from NY in 1958 .
But maybe they don’t tell you that in The City.

No photos of this party as I lost the battery charger for my camera. (Remember when they used AA batteries?)

Visual Art

* Filmmaker Julien Nitzberg, mentioned above, has begun L.A. screenings of “The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia,” his documentary about a spirited, in every sense, West Virginia family. I attended the L.A. debut June 25th and was thoroughly depressed, though it was good.

At the Q&A I asked Nitzberg how Hank III got involved (his songs are in it, as is he) and he said that the songwriter scion was as taken by the Whites as he was. But fish out of water I was, as I could tell that nobody else in the filmy audience knew who Hank III was.

* Photog Donna Santisi has issued “Ask The Angels,” a book of photos from the punk era here. I’ve known Donna since we attended Heaters shows together between 1977 and 1983. It is a very L.A.-centric book, to the good.

From Bob Paton

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3id9ffa2b8a3ae072d3cb930c1cae5668a

Maybe Dick Clark realizes something, ANYTHING he can get out of American Bandstand rockabilly clips is better than nothing.

Bob- That’s funny. In 1989 I had lunch with him and Art Laboe, re a CD comp they issued, and said “You have a lot of clips of unknown 50s rockers, don’t you? Why not issue tape of that stuff?”

“Look,” he said, “the one with all the stars, Connie Francis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jan & Dean, sold only 20,000. How many would yours sell?”

“Do it for rock & roll!” I said, and stabbed him.

Journals

* Sitting in the doctor’s office, opened a May copy of The Economist and was stunned. Here was interesting writing without cliches or shallow thinking - a big change from my diet of the LA and NY Times.

- In Malaysia, the defense in a sodomy trial said that the plaintiff’s anus was not distended. The plaintiff “protested that he could not see his own anus. The judge concurred.”

- In Boise, Idaho “Crime is as rare as the colossal steaks.”

And the real joy: Writers are not named so preening and posturing is missing. Like 1900, when the publication alone was responsible for the content.

* Was I the only person who saw the LA Weekly headline “Mad Lib Mystique” and thought “At last Roger Price is getting his due”?

* And ick. In the 3-2-10 New Yorker, lead editorialist David Remnick writes “but the remark is less readily dismissed when one recalls reports (later denied) that the Prime Minister himself has referred to (X and Y) as self-hating Jews.”

“One” (not Remnick, no) who “recalls” “reports” sans source that were “later denied” asks readers to swallow too long a line of half-assedness.

Quick Thoughts

“We” don’t have a Lawrence Welk.
Well, maybe the Grateful Dead.

People born in ‘46 are now 64. And vice versa.
People born in ‘55 are now 55.

I’m too lazy to follow this further.

Words

I read that the Villa Nova, on Sunset Strip, was where “Joe DiMaggio met Marilyn Monroe on a blind date." 10

It was not a blind date. She didn’t tell him “I’ll be wearing a yellow dress” and he didn’t come to the restaurant and ask what Marilyn Monroe looked like. It was an arranged date.

10 I not only read it, I wrote it, in The L.A. Musical History Tour.

- 57 -

Mark On the Move

The last day of the annual Kate Wolf Memorial Festival in Laytonville, CA was filled with splendid music. 77-year-old Rosalie Sorrels opening the main stage with a set of stories (about her friend Hunter S. Thompson among others), jazzy excursions, and political songs. As ever, her small band followed her changes in tempo as she felt her way through each number. She discovers what to sing and how to sing it anew with each concert and delightfully wanders rather than driving her shows forward.

John McCutcheon followed her with the opposite approach, a carefully designed and focused blend of stories and songs that is half-classroom, half folk-revival. I’d seen him before and thought his approach overly-determined and stiff, but this time his intellect didn’t overtake the emotional heft of his tunes. He started with a banjo-driven “John Henry,” saying he heard it first in elementary school detention, recited the baseball poem “Catch” from his superbly-titled album Sermon On the Mound, did his World War I tearjerker “Christmas In the Trenches” and ended by teaching the crowd a Soviet Union lullaby in English, Russian and American Sign Language.

I’d never heard of the Toronto-based singer-songwriter David Francey (he’s done eight albums since 1999!) before catching his set on one of the smaller stages, and was mightily impressed. A droll Scot (his family emigrated to Canada when he was twelve, but he hasn’t lost his accent) he writes like a combination of Richard Thompson and Woody Guthrie, informed by his long career as a construction worker and self-described “chain-smoking, skyscraper-building” member of the working class. He’s another guy who tells long and loose stories about nearly every tune (told he had 10 minutes left, he said “good, that’s enough for two stories and half a song”). Francey’s accompanist, instrumentalist Craig Werth, did two of his own, including a tribute to zucchini.

My favorite Francey was “Under the Portland Weather,” written to his wife while while on the road. He composed it in a friend’s back yard while facing a statue of The Virgin Mary (“I’m a Scottish Protestant and growing up was forbidden to see representations of The Virgin Mary, just in case”). “Fourth of July,” about his ambivalence about 9/11 leading to the Afghan and Iraq wars, and “Working Poor,” about hard times, were also standouts.

Francey, McCutcheon and Sorrels shared a small stage late in the afternoon and traded songs for an hour. It was heaven. They reacted to each other nicely, never competing, bringing out their best. McCutcheon did a funny song about the large Cuban family of his wife, Rosalie sang a murder ballad, and Francey led the crowd in a singalong of his simple spring anthem “Red Winged Blackbird.”

I’d already gotten my money’s worth before The David Grisman Bluegrass Experience, Steve Earle and Ani DiFranco even took the main stage to round out the festivities. Somewhere Kate Wolf is smiling.


-- Mark Leviton

(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Wednesdays 10pm-Midnight PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org )

THEY HATE L.A. ©

An occasional column by Gene Sculatti

June 18, L.A. Weekly.

Few journo outlets can hope to touch the L.A. Weekly anymore, so tenacious is its pursuit of the edgy, the avant-garde, the outré and in-your-face, the—well, just plain transgressive. Like late June’s cover story “Chefs with Tattoos.” The knife-wielders and sauce-splatterers, you see, “turn to tattoos as a preferred expression of individualism, a form of rebellion against kitchen environments that demand conformity.” But I digress. This week it’s music writer Nikki Darling closing out a fawning Q&A with this month’s dour Brit singer-songwriter, Gemma Ray. Ms. Ray, now touring the colonies, throws caution to the wind to reveal that “I miss my sauerkraut really. You can't find much of it in the States… I just sort of am looking forward to getting to L.A. and not really doing anything.” When Ray thinks better of what might be read as a putdown of our town and adds, “I guess that isn't a very inspired thing to part on,” darling Nikki tut-tuts with a comforting “No, no, it's fine. L.A. welcomes you to come and turn your brain off.” Hey, that’s why we’re here, right?

June 15, KPFK-FM, Los Angeles.

Pacifica Radio is a lot of things. In sum it seems a repository of the best political-analysis going (Ian Masters’ various shows), authoritative roots-music shows (Folkscene, Bill Gardner’s R&B series, etc.) and some of the kookiest transmissions from the fringe (various “spirituality” shows and conspiracy conclaves). But Pacifica’s local outlet also carves out a safe place for the corny and trite. During last week’s pledge-drive edition of The Harrison Show, host Harrison, urging listeners to cough up dough for subscriptions (I’ve been a public-radio beggar; it’s a demeaning gig, and the guy has my sympathy), confronted us locals with our dirty little common secret: “C’mon, you spend money on a therapist, don’t you? I mean, everybody in L.A. has a therapist!!” I headed straight for the couch.

Gene Sculatti hosts, as DJ Vic Tripp, the online radio show Atomic Cocktail at www.luxuriamusic.com, Thursdays, from 5 to 6 p.m. California time.

Belated Obit for John Davis Chandler
by Dick Blackburn

Character actor John Davis Chandler first came to my attention in the late 50s in "The Young Savages" when he kicked over a baby carriage. Later I dug his greatest creep out perf in "Once A Thief" where he looked like a blind cave fish raised on heroin and talked like a gone hipster. Later yet on "Columbo" I remember him taking Mickey Spillane out with a molotov cocktail while the Mick was speaking his latest fiction into a Dictaphone. Publisher Jack Cassidy, who had ordered the hit when he learned MS was jumping to another publishing house, fetes JDC on poisoned champagne. Early in his career he was cast as the lead in a nasty little B film called "Mad Dog Coll" based on the real life hitman. John held his own against some up and coming character actors including Terry Savalas and Jerry Orbach.

He was, for a while, part of Sam Peckinpah's unofficial stock company of players, appearing as one of a trio of loutish brothers in the director's breakthrough movie "Ride The High Country. Later, Sam taking John's unwillingness to play a part offered him as personal rejection, refused to cast him again, even though, it was later explained to Peckinpah, that John had felt he wouldn't be able to give the iconic director what the part required.

A self-confessed "ridge runner" from the hills of West Virginia, John had a look all his own: scrawny with large pale eyes, tombstone teeth (often bared in sneer or snarl) and bone white hair slicked back against a bony skull. Add to that a cloudy, smoker's rasp of a voice and he became an unforgettable presence in whatever flick or tv episode. Art Fein and I had lunch with him unsuccessfully asking him to appear on Art's cable tv show. Even so, he regaled us with some great anecdotes.

One of the best was about the shooting of 1965's "Once A Thief". Apparently Zekial Marko, who wrote the screenplay from his own novel, implored director Ralph Nelson to cast him as a shaggy pot smoker who shares a holding cell with Alain Delon. Nelson knowing the scribe was, like the part he coveted, a total weed head, refused until Zeke became so adamant the director at last relented, threatening him with all kinds of harm if he didn't a) learn his lines and b) make the early call for the scene to be shot inside L.A. County Jail. Came the morn and when Marko didn't show after an hour Nelson, fuming, ordered an assistant to get to a pay phone, call the front office and get a substitute down to the location immediately. As the fellow was negotiating his way past several cells he heard an inmate call his name. He halted, walked over and there behind bars was the missing writer-turned-thesp who had been hauled in on a grass bust the night before. A call to the jail's main office and Zekial was transferred to the cell they had lit for the scene, played his part and then was straightaway re-jugged.