Bloodshot Briefing

By Matt Harness

In the news.

1. Bloodshot alum Neko Case must have made up with the Grand Ole Opry folks after she was banned for life when she took her shirt off during a performance on the Opry plaza seven years ago. She is scheduled to appear on stage at the famed Ryman Auditorium for the first time as a solo artist on Saturday.

"For an aspiring alt-country singer, Neko Case made a major faux pas," Rolling Stone wrote at the time. "She took her shirt off at the Grand Ole Opry plaza party. 'I wasn't trying to be sexy or rebellious - I was just getting heatstroke up there,' she says of her now-infamous topless performance last year, which got Case permanently blackballed from the same Nashville auditorium where Hank Williams and Patsy Cline launched their careers."

Case recalled the incident to The Guardian earlier this year:

"I was pretty depressed for a couple of months after that happened, but I got over it. Ultimately I realised there's nothing I could have done differently - I was playing on a black stage in Tennessee in July. It's one of the hottest places in the country, I'm standing in front of a barbecue pit and I had heatstroke and I went to get water and they wouldn't let me leave the stage and I kinda flipped out. I apologised profusely, I wasn't trying to be cool, I wasn't trying to be Johnny Cash kicking out the footlights."

2. Exclaim is calling Scott H. Biram's "Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue" the country song of the year.

The one-man band plays the Empty Bottle on Sunday.

3. "Over the course of a handful of albums and EPs, Pickett and the Eggs (later the MC3) whipped up a noisy stew of roots music, garage rock and punk that placed them in a pot with better known acts such as X, Jason and the Scorchers, The Gun Club and The Beat Farmers," writes My Old Kentucky Blog.

Charlie Pickett isn't scheduled to come to Chicago any time soon, but is on the bill for several of Bloodshot's anniversary parties across the country.

4. Another moniker for the music of Split Lip Rayfield: thrash-grass.

5. Wayne "the Train" Hancock fills up the notebook of a Colorado Springs Independent writer, telling him he's surprised Michael Jackson lived as long as he did and calling American Idol "like watching a bunch of clowns on the Bozo Show."

6. "Like every good, honest independent label should, it allows artists on the roster to propose their own contracts, which can range from 50/50 oral deals to more formal, long-term investments," IndiePit writes. "And that carries over to making records as well: Artists can turn to Miller for production help, as countless bands have done in the past, or hand-deliver their already-finished albums directly to the label - like Robbie Fulks recently did."

Plus, there's this, from the label:

"All Bloodshot recordings are created without the use of pesticides, toxic fertilizers or ionizing radiation. They are 100% free of antibiotics, hormones and extended bass solos. All our artists are free-range and have access to the outdoors 24 hours a day where they can roam freely on our expansive mixed-grass pasturelands."

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Bloodshot Briefing appears in this space every Friday. Matt welcomes your comments.

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