Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – July 9, 2024: Remembering Kinky Friedman

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU, 93.1 FM, in Ottawa on Tuesdays from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

This episode of Stranger Songs was recorded and can be streamed on-demand, now or anytime, by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/65896.html

Theme: Remembering Kinky Friedman (1944-2024).

Richard Samet Friedman – or “Kinky” as he became known as a university student – was a noted singer, songwriter, novelist, essayist, occasional politician, animal rescue activist, and a larger-than-life character who died on June 27 at age 79.

Kinky Friedman at the Texas Book Fair in Austin (2013). Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Kinky Friedman- Me & My Guitar

Circus of Life (Echo Hill)

Willie Nelson- Ride ‘Em Jewboy

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Delbert McClinton- Autograph

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Lee Roy Parnell- Nashville Casualty & Life

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Kinky Friedman- Somethin’s Wrong with the Beaver

Kinky Friedman (ABC)

Asleep at the Wheel- Before All Hell Breaks Loose

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Kinky Friedman- Song About You

Circus of Life (Echo Hill)

Kinky Friedman- The Ballad of Charles Whitman

Sold American (Vanguard)

The Geezinslaws- Twirl

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Dwight Yoakam- Rapid City, South Dakota

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Guy Clark- Wild Man from Borneo

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Kinky Friedman- Top Ten Commandments

Sold American (Vanguard)

Kinky Friedman- A Dog Named Freedom

Circus of Life (Echo Hill)

Marty Stuart- Lady Yesterday

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Chuck E. Weiss- Ol’ Ben Lucas

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Billy Swan- When the Lord Closes the Door (He Opens a Little Window)

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Kinky Friedman- Jesus in Pajamas

Circus of Life (Echo Hill)

Kinky Friedman- Circus of Life

Circus of Life (Echo Hill)

Lyle Lovett- Sold American

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Tom Waits- Highway Café

Pearls in the Snow: The Songs of Kinky Friedman (Kinkajou)

Kinky Friedman- Resurrection

Resurrection (Echo Hill)

Kinky Friedman- Ride ‘Em Jewboy

Sold American (Vanguard)

Next week: A Salute to Nora Guthrie.

--Mike Regenstreif

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday March 15, 2022: Jack Kerouac at 100

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoons from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

CKCU can be heard live at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and https://www.ckcufm.com/ on the web.

This episode of Stranger Songs was prerecorded at home and can already be streamed on-demand by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/55531.html

Theme: Jack Kerouac at 100

This week is the centennial of the birth of Jack Kerouac, the great beat novelist and poet. Kerouac, who died in 1969 at age 47 from a hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis due to long-term alcoholism, was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac to French Canadian parents in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12th, 1922. Kerouac’s parents were among the nearly one million French Canadians who migrated from Quebec to the New England states to find work there between 1840 and 1930. Kerouac’s mother tongue was French and he didn’t learn to speak English until he went to school at age six. And, apparently, despite being born in the U.S., Kerouac identified as Canadian.

In the 1990s, the late Kate McGarrigle worked on – but didn’t finish – a musical about Jack Kerouac. “Jacques et Gilles” is about French Canadians – like Kerouac’s parents – who migrated to New England.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle- Jacques et Gilles
Matapedia (Hannibal)

Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen- October in the Railroad Earth
The Kerouac Collection: Poetry for the Beat Generation (Rhino)
Tom Russell- October in the Railroad Earth
October in the Railroad Earth (Frontera)

Mike Regenstreif & Jimmy LaFave (2017)

Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen- MacDougal Street Blues
The Kerouac Collection: Poetry for the Beat Generation (Rhino)
Jimmy LaFave- Bohemian Cowboy Blues
Blue Nightfall (Red House)

Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen- Goofing at the Table
The Kerouac Collection: Poetry for the Beat Generation (Rhino)

Mike Regenstreif & David Amram (2017)

Jack Kerouac with The David Amram Ensemble- Washington D.C. Blues
Jack Kerouac reads On the Road (Rykodisc)
David Amram with Lynn Sheffield- Pull My Daisy
No More Walls (Flying Fish)

Bob Martin- Stella Kerouac
The River Turns the Wheel (Riversong)
Lyle Lovett- Babes in the Woods
Step Inside This House (Curb/MCA)

Tom Waits- Jack & Neal/California Here I Come
Foreign Affairs (Elektra)
Aztec Two-Step- The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty
Live at Caffé Lena: Music from America’s Legendary Coffeehouse 1967-2013 (Tompkins Square)
Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen- Readings from “On the Road” and “Visions of Cody”
The Kerouac Collection: Poetry for the Beat Generation (Rhino)
Eric Taylor- Intro Dean Moriarty/Dean Moriarty
Live at the Red Shack (Blue Ruby)

Next week: Garden Songs

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Guy Clark – My Favorite Picture of You

GUY CLARK
My Favorite Picture of You
Dualtone 
guyclark.com

I started writing about music for the Montreal Gazette back in 1975 and one of the LPs I reviewed that year was Old No. 1, the first-ever album by Guy Clark, who was already a favorite songwriter of mine thanks to having heard some of his songs sung by Jerry Jeff Walker and Bill Staines. Since then, I’ve written about almost every album Guy has done over the years. I’ve also hung out with him a few times at folk festivals and interviewed him twice – once for the Gazette and once on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program when he came up to Montreal to play a concert with Jesse Winchester at the Outremont Theatre in 2001.

One of those albums I’ve written about was called Old Friends. And, indeed, almost all of Guy’s albums and songs feel like old friends. They feel like old friends when you pull out one of those albums that you haven’t played for a while and they feel like old friends when you hear them for the first time. There’s something familiar and inviting about his songs when you hear them for the first time – maybe it’s “that old time feeling” Guy sang about on Old No. 1 – that turns his new songs into old friends.

And so it is on Guy’s new album, My Favorite Picture of You: 10 new Guy Clark songs (and a version of Lyle Lovett’s “Waltzing Fool” that he makes his own) that fast turn into old friends.

The title track is among the most affecting of these new songs. You can see Guy holding the particular snapshot of his wife, the songwriter and painter Susanna Clark, who passed away last year, taken maybe 40 or so years ago. In the lyrics, Guy reflects on the photo, describing her and her mood when it was taken, and turning it into a touching but powerful declaration of love.

I remember Guy telling me in one of the interviews we did that Mexican folk songs were among the first things he learned to play as kid growing up in Texas. I was reminded of that listening to “El Coyote,” another of this album’s most affecting songs – this one about impoverished Mexicans trying to find a better life only to be preyed on, exploited and deserted by human smugglers.

Guy also writes compassionately about American soldiers who came back damaged from the war in Iraq in the poignant “Heroes.”

Another highlight is “Death of Sis Draper,” co-written by Guy and Shawn Camp, a sequel to their earlier song (“Sis Draper”) about a traveling woman fiddler from Arkansas. This time, in a song that borrows the traditional fiddle tune melody to “Shady Grove,” Sis meets her maker when she’s poisoned by a jealous waitress and is buried as her guitar playing partner, Kentucky Sue, plays “Shady Grove” one last time.

Accompanying Guy on the album are such fine acoustic musicians as Verlon Thompson, who has been playing with him on stage and recordings for many years, Shawn Camp, Bryn Davies and Chris Latham, and harmony singer Morgane Stapleton.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Various Artists – Quiet About: A Tribute to Jesse Winchester

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Quiet About It: A Tribute to Jesse Winchester

Mailboat Records

jessewinchester.com

mailboatrecords.com

In July of last year, I reported here that Jesse Winchester, my old friend of 40+ years, was battling cancer of the esophagus. And I was very happy to report here the following September that his rounds of chemotherapy and radiation and his surgery were successful and that he was on the road to recovery – a recovery I was able to see for myself this past March when I visited with Jesse on his trip to Montreal to play a concert date there (at which he was as superb as ever – and where he will return again next April 13).

While Jesse was battling cancer, a number of artists from several genres of music, spearheaded by Jimmy Buffett and Elvis Costello, decided it was a good time to put together a tribute album to show their appreciation to Jesse for his many decades of great songwriting. The album, Quiet About: A Tribute to Jesse Winchester is now available from Jimmy’s Mailboat Records and hearing these folks sing Jesse’s songs in their individual (or group) styles is the next best thing to hearing Jesse sing them himself.

Four of the 11 songs are drawn from Jesse’s eponymously named first album – songs I was hearing Jesse sing in Montreal a year or so before that album came out in 1970 when I was a young pup on the Montreal folk scene. Jesse began that first album with “Payday,” a rock ‘n’ roll celebration of the time to go out and blow some dough and James Taylor kicks off the tribute with a version that is part folk, part rock and a good part the Memphis soul that Jesse grew up listening to.

Rosanne Cash follows with a lovely version of “Biloxi,” Jesse’s dreamy reminiscence of time spent on the Mississippi Gulf Coat written at a time when Jesse had no expectations of ever being able to get back there.

Lyle Lovett offers a sublime version of the classic “Brand New Tennessee Waltz.” Listening, I was reminded of being with Jesse backstage at a festival in the 1980s – I think it was the Winnipeg Folk Festival – when Lyle, then an emerging Texas artist, came over to meet Jesse for the first time.

The fourth song from that first album is the neo-gospel “Quiet About It,” performed as the CD finale by Elvis Costello. This new version is quieter than Jesse’s original – which is kind of outside-the-box because Jesse is generally a much quieter artist than Elvis – and a perfect ending to the tribute.

Third Down, 110 to Go, Jesse’s second album – and still one of my very favorites of his – yields “Dangerous Fun,” performed wonderfully by Rodney Crowell with sublime harmonies from Emmylou Harris – who has recorded wonderful versions of several of Jesse’s songs on her own albums and who has also sung harmony with Jesse himself – and Vince Gill.

There are two songs from Jesse’s third album, 1974’s Learn to Love It, another of my favorites of Jesse’s albums. Jesse performed regularly at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s, and his first three concerts there were the week Learn to Love It was released. Mac McAnally does a nice version of “Defying Gravity” and Lucinda Williams does a perfect, drawling version of “Mississippi You’re On My Mind,” another song that in which Jesse paints a vivid picture of a place he knew well growing up and probably thought, when he wrote it, that he’d never get to see again.

Little Feat, with help from such friends as Larry Campbell and Sam Bush, rock out on “Rhumba Man,” from Jesse’s 1977 album, Nothing but a Breeze. I can just picture Jesse listening to the track and dancing around his living room at home the way I’ve seen him do countless times on stage during this song.

Vince Gill nicely captures the Memphis R&B grooves that are the essence of “Talk Memphis,” the title track of Jesse’s 1981 album and a tribute to the great music by Elvis Presley and other Memphis music legends he grew up listening to in his hometown.

The two most recent songs on the album come from 1999’s Gentleman of Leisure, Jesse’s first new album following a 10-year break from recording and touring. I was honored back in ’99 when songs from that album were first heard publicly when Jesse was my guest on Folk Roots/Folk Branches, the radio show I hosted on CKUT in Montreal from 1994 to 2007, a week before the album was released.

The title song, “Gentleman of Leisure,” is a nice choice for Jimmy Buffett who captures all of the song’s sly humor, and Allen Toussaint, the great New Orleans pianist and songwriter, does a wonderful version of “I Wave Bye Bye,” Jesse’s beautiful evocation of and farewell to the Old Montreal neighborhood he lived in for several years before leaving Montreal for a new home in the Eastern Townships (and, much more recently, back to the U.S. to make a home with Cindy, his new bride).

It is quite obvious that all of the artists on this tribute album are there as a testament to the love and respect they have for one of our greatest singer-songwriters, my friend, the great Jesse Winchester.

Pictured: Jesse Winchester and Mike Regenstreif at La Sala Rossa in Montreal (2006).

I'm now on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

I'm also on Facebook. www.facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Eric Taylor – Live at the Red Shack

ERIC TAYLOR

Live at the Red Shack

Blue Ruby Music & Records

bluerubymusic.com

Back in the 1980s, Nanci Griffith was a regular performer at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I was running in those days. Like many of the artists who played the Golem, Nanci stayed with me and we’d often sit up, late at night, talking about music, musicians, singers, songs and songwriters. One of the people she told me about was her ex-husband, a great songwriter, troubled in those days, named Eric Taylor. I’d had a bit of an introduction to Eric via his song, “Dollar Matinee,” which he performed with Nanci on her first LP, There’s a Light Beyond These Woods.

Eric grew up in Georgia and arrived on the Texas folk scene in the early-1970s. Following in the footsteps of songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, he was one of the best of the next wave of singer-songwriters in a scene known for its great writers. Eric released his first LP, Shameless Love, in 1981, and then pretty much disappeared for more than a decade.

I was doing the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show when Eric re-emerged in the mid-1990s with the eponymously named Eric Taylor, a CD which re-established Eric’s place in the front ranks of contemporary folk-based singer-songwriters. That album, and a series of excellent releases that followed, were staples on the radio show for its entire run.

For Live at the Red Shack, Eric took some songs from his extensive back catalogue – including a couple that have only been available on Nanci Griffith or Lyle Lovett albums and another that was (so far as I know) previously unrecorded – into the Red Shack, a Houston recording studio, and performed them live to a small audience of invited guests. Backing Eric throughout the album are Marco Python Fecchio, an excellent, atmospheric electric guitarist and James Gilmer, a very tasteful percussionist. Nanci, Lyle, Denice Franke and Susan Lindfors Taylor provide duet and/or harmony vocals to some of the songs.

Something I’ve always loved about Eric’s work is that he’s not a navel-obsessed songwriter. Many of his songs are from the perspective of a character completely, or at least seemingly, outside of himself. In one song, he’s a guy from Indiana who just happened to be a tourist in the crowd when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. In another, he’s a guy in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota when news about the death of Crazy Horse comes through in 1877. And, in yet another, he’s a character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road talking about Dean Moriarty. And in all of these settings, and others, he seems to be singing with complete honesty and authenticity.

Without question, these are all great versions of great songs, but I’ll call attention to a few of my favorite tracks.

One is certainly the afore mentioned “Dean Moriarty,” doubled in length by a spoken word into that sounds like it could have been written by Kerouac back in the day. Another is “Mission Door,” with chorus harmony from Nanci, a beautifully constructed portrait of skid row life. And yet another is a gorgeous duet with Denice Franke on “Blue Piano,” which captures a scene from many years ago of Bonnie Brown playing the painted-blue piano at Anderson Fair, a legendary Houston music club.

It was also great to hear Eric and Nanci reprising their version of “Dollar Matinee,” first recorded on Nanci’s debut album in 1978, and to hear Eric and Lyle team up on “Memphis Midnight, Memphis Morning,” an Eric Taylor song Lyle recorded on Step Inside This House, an album he made in tribute to influential Texas songwriters.

If you appreciate great singer-songwriters, you should be listening to Eric Taylor.

--Mike Regenstreif