Why the heck would Ronnie Fauss call his new album “Mulligan”? In golf, a mulligan means a do-over. It means you screwed up so bad people feel sorry for you. I don’t feel sorry for him and this ain’t no do-over.
Fauss’s first EP, New Songs for The Old Frontier, was damn good (see my review). But his new stuff is nothing like his old stuff was. It’s better. Rocks more. Rougher voice. I like that. Got a fiddle on some of it. I like that too.
I can’t get the first song, To Ease My Mind, out of my head. Very catchy tune. And It’s a Long Long Way is a funny talking blues song (think Todd Snider’s Talking Seattle Grunge Rock Blues) explaining the direction, or lack thereof, of a guy growing up in the post-Nixon era. I’m pretty sure that anyone who rhymes “riches” with “bitches” is headed in the right direction.
Wish had me fooled. I thought it was a sweet little love song but then I really listened to the lyrics. It’s more like a hate song. There’s a lot of bitterness packed in that one, with amusing lyrics to boot. And the mandolin and harmonica just make it that much better.
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Denver, Colorado – February 3, 2010
On a cold winter Wednesday night in a small room in downtown Denver, with a warm fuzzy warm up from the beautiful Angie Stevens, Hayes Carll thrilled a focused crowd. This was not your typical shit-stirring, body-bumping audience. These fans mostly knew the words, sang along or silently stood in ‘rapt-attention’ mode. I know I did, anyway.
Hayes just seems like the kind of guy you wind up on a barstool beside and surprisingly find yourself as relaxed and at ease as you would with someone you’d known and conversed with for years.
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There is this Dallas band I’ve been hearing about. They’re called The O’s. And last week they came up here to Denver to play some fancy gig at the Brown Palace.
Turns out that gig was private and they felt bad that their other Denver fans wouldn’t be able to see them so they tacked on another gig after the fancy gig (thanks to Jay Bianchi of Owsley’s Golden Road for scheduling The O’s at the last minute).
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We here at SlackerCountry.com just updated our blog technology and noticed something interesting. See that tag cloud over on the right? The tag size is in 
proportion to how often we write about each artist and the Drive-By Trucker tag is suspiciously small.
This caused us to do some serious soul-searching because, really, we slackers (especially me and Gracey) are borderline obsessed with DBT and play them pretty much ALL THE TIME. We’ve all been to see them at least once (twice, three times) in the past year – basically anytime they are in the neighborhood. Much of Gracey’s conversation revolves around things she has read on the DBT fan board. . . . And then there is the whole problem of keeping Gracey from stalking the tour bus.
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The Gourds, Longhorn Saloon, Ft Worth, June 27, 2009
It was about 3:00 or so Saturday afternoon when I called our friends in Ft Worth to cancel out on the evenings festivities. It really did look pretty hopeless at that point; stranded in a 7-11 parking lot off I-30 in Arlington, sweltering in the 100 degree heat, waiting for a tow truck to come and take our badly overheated car back home.
Then I suppose it was due to the angels intervening on our behalf but things all started coming together in our favor. The tow truck showed up hours before we were expecting it and got us home just in time for a neighbor to offer to loan us his car and just like that, it was on again!
So after all the high drama we still made it out to the Fort Worth Stockyards and got to the newly re-opened Longhorn Saloon plenty early enough to score a choice table.
It’s a very nice room, that Longhorn Saloon, with a couple of levels, three bars, reasonably good sound and it’s got a whole lot of history too. After Saturday night’s Gourds show, they can probably add another chapter
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