By Don Jacobson

I have a new nomination for the ultimate cool old record store.
After reading about it in the San Diego Union-Tribune, I’m kind of afraid that if I ever went into Folk Arts Rare Records I wouldn’t emerge until sometime in the latter part of this decade.
I’m not sure exactly what that says about me except that I’m a music dork who gets the same kind of satisfaction from digging out cool old records as others get from, oh, say, a life.
So now I’m talking to you, o record collectors, because only you will understand. Imagine a mighty fortress of vinyl – 90,000 hours worth – lovingly tended in neat rows by burly, bearded Lou Curtiss, a 70-year-old curmudgeonly Seattle native considered one of the country’s prime archivists of early recorded jazz, blues and country music.

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Posted on March 1, 2010

By Don Jacobson
The Del-Lords are a band that I probably should have known something about, given my geekish obsession/compulsion with anything smacking of ’80s cowpunk. And yet . . . the coming re-issue of their first three albums (released between 1984 and 1988) caught me by surprise. I thought I had heard the name, but it turns out I was confusing them with another influential ’80s band, the Del Fuegos. So I looked up the Del-Lords and I’m glad I did, because I discovered they occupy a key place in the holy roots rock/punk rock union from which much of our beloved modern alt-country/Americana comes from.

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Posted on April 25, 2009

By Don Jacobson
If U.S. Highway 61, which runs from the Canadian border in northern Minnesota to New Orleans, is “the Blues Highway,” then U.S. Highway 67 – which in its heyday ran from Iowa to Mexico – is the “Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway.”
In rock ‘n’ roll terms, the crucial stretch of Highway 67 was the part in northeastern Arkansas that ran through such burgs as Batesville, Newport, Swifton, Trumann and Walnut Ridge. Not too far from Memphis, where the rockabilly explosion was centered from 1955 to 1959 or so, Highway 67 boasted a swath of funky roadhouses and disreputable dives that appealed to the earliest crop of rockers, who piled into their Chevies and worked their way up and down this strip, leaving booze-fueled, pill-popping, duck-assed mayhem in their wakes.
The reason I’m bringing all this up is that the Arkansas Legislature is on the verge of designating the stretch of the road through Jackson, Lawrence and Randolph counties as “Rock ‘n’ Roll Highway 67,” which, Rep. J.R. Rogers of Walnut Ridge hopes, will spur tourism. Its history is indeed rich and its legend got a big boost from Joaquin “Hip Hop” Phoenix’s turn as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, in the scenes where he and fellow Sun Records rockabilly killers, like the 1950s icons they were, were all piled into a car, speeding along in the country darkness at night, dreaming big dreams of where their powerful music will take them.
They were probably hoping it was out of Jackson County, Arkansas.

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Posted on March 15, 2009

By Don Jacobson

Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and a whole heap o’ mainstream love for Americana and/or rootsy-rocky music: That was what the Grammys meant to me this year – the first time they’ve ever meant anything to me, I think. I generally hate awards and awards shows because, well, so many reasons, the main one being that they rarely reflect what’s really good in the industries they’re covering and are all either popularity contests, political bullshit, or, usually, a combination of the two. But the Plant-Krauss five-Grammy sweep for Raising Sand was different in that a usually meaningless awards show this time actually accomplished something worthwhile – moving Americana pretty solidly out of the tiny niche it’s been in and into a bit bigger niche that may help thousands of worthy artists get a listen.

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Posted on February 15, 2009

By Don Jacobson

The BoDeans are justly celebrated in Wisconsin. God love ’em. They are a great roots rock band. Their pairing with producer T. Bone Burnett on their landmark first album Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams remains a seminal moment in the development of alternative rock and, 22 years after its release, is still one of the best-ever debut albums.
The thing about the BoDeans, though, is they’re just so . . . Wisconsin. In fact, they are so Wisconsin, not everyone may know they are inextricably intertwined with the recent history of the state, as our handy timeline shows below.

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Posted on December 22, 2008

By Don Jacobson

1. The World’s Worst Roots Music Fest.
The head-shakingest roots music news of the week: A planned three-day Americana benefit music fest that was supposed to draw 100,000 people the weekend before last near Austin, Tex., collapsed in chaos, shutting down after the second day and leaving vendors, contractors and your sister’s boyfriend screaming to get paid.
As far as I can tell, the reason it fell apart is that the guy who was putting it on was charging $70 for a fest whose headliner was . . . Asleep at the Wheel.

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Posted on November 25, 2008

By Don Jacobson

I’m not from Cleveland so I have to admit I’d never heard of Upbeat before. But now I’ve got the Internets and so I’m clued in. Upbeat was to Cleveland what Shindig and Hullabaloo later became to teen America in the mid-’60s: The TV cradle of everything that mattered in rock ‘n’ roll. Everyone who meant anything to rock’s classic era played on that show, which was syndicated out of WEWS-TV in the mid- to late-’60s. The reason they did is that Cleveland, of course, was rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest testing grounds: If you could score a hit record there, the theory went, you could score one anywhere.

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Posted on October 22, 2008

If anyone out there has been foolish enough to “follow” the self-indulgent music ramblings that Steve Rhodes has been kind enough to let me post on this fine site, they’ll know that, unlike a certain prominent Chicago daily newspaper rock critic, I’m one of those mentally straitjacketed music fans who truly believe that the ’70s were indeed the be-all and end-all of rock ‘n’ roll, both in its best moments and its worst excesses. While there’s been plenty of great popular music since then, there’s never been the same level of great rock ‘n’ roll.
The combination of the huge baby boomer pool of young talent to draw from, the pervasive egalitarian political and cultural climate, the obsession with the blues and the freely available sex and drugs made for a musical Petri dish that we’ll never again have in this country. I don’t blame Generation X or Y for being somehow lacking because their rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t have the same power and meaning – it can’t, any more than, say, cable television pundits can have the same social impact as Walter Cronkite-era CBS News did. It’s about the times and circumstances just as much than the actual creative achievements. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to completely agree with the thesis and title of music writer Dave Thompson’s latest book, I Hate New Music: The Classic Rock Manifesto – I know where he’s coming from.

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Posted on October 6, 2008

By Don Jacobson

Backyard Tire Fire’s latest album, The Places We’ve Lived, on the New York indie label, HYENA Records, is taking the roots rockin’ Bloomington, Ill., band in a new direction. Who could have guessed Ed Anderson, the band’s songwriter and chief creative force, has turned out to be “the premier pop balladeer of America’s heartland?” But it’s true. Anderson and BTF are quickly becoming the most interesting and innovative guitar-based rock band in the Midwest, and because of their very extensive touring schedule, hopefully beyond.

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Posted on September 22, 2008

By Don Jacobson

1. No truer cowpunk is there this side of the Waco Brothers than Mike Ness of sublime bashers Social Distortion. Ness’s revelatory excursions into the dark, dark recesses of honky-tonkabilly angst on 1999’s Cheating at Solitaire was an eye-opener. Unlike some folks who succeed at rock ‘n’ roll and take a right turn into Hanksville, Ness wasn’t kidding around.
Now he tells the Chico, Calif., entertainment weekly Synthesis that there are several new projects in the work for both Ness the hillbilly hellraiser and Social D, probably the only pure punk band that really mattered after 1984. Get ready: after a year of resting up, studio albums for both groups are in the works for early 2009 – and there is talk of another Social Distortion documentary film (watch the first one, Another State of Mind, here).

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Posted on July 14, 2008