slackercountry.com

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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The Wildflower Festival in Richardson is one of the biggest music festivals in North Texas. It’s a big, sprawling three day event that usually features a fairly diverse lineup that’s maybe  a little heavy on the classic rock.

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I can still remember when I first heard the Jayhawks in the early nineties. A friend had given me a tape of Hollywood Town Hall
and my first response was “Neil Young could probably sue those guys.” I think I might have said that once or twice when the subject of the Jayhawks came up but after a few listens… and then a few more… those songs started working their way into my head on a cellular level.  I quit making snarky comments about them and started playing them all the time.

Over the course of three records they managed to forge a sound that was, at the same time, highly derivative and highly original and became one of my very favorite bands.

Yeah, they were more white-guy-folk-rock than the "alt country" label they were tagged with. Their early seventies “Southern Man” style riffs and long guitar jams merged with vaguely abstract lyrics and those ethereal harmonies between songwriters Mark Olson and Gary Louris, created a bunch of stubbornly enduring songs that could stick in your head like superglue.

After Olson left the band at their creative peak in ‘95, despite teaming up with his then-wife Victoria Williams, he kind of faded into obscurity while Louris kept the Jayhawks going, changing their sound pretty dramatically on the next two albums.

I caught an Olson solo show last year. It was a great night of quiet acoustic music with a few Jayhawks songs but there was definitely something missing. Obviously what was missing was Gary Louris.

So when Olson and Louris had put out a new acoustic record and booked a show in town, at the Sons of Herman Hall no less, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person around here who was overly excited at the opportunity.

Friday night they showed this town just what was lost when they went their separate ways long over a decade ago. You can take your Simon and Garfunkel and your Tweedy and Farrar and your Johnny and June and even your She and Him… If ever two people were born to sing together it was Olson and Louris.

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We did it. We finally went to a Swallow Hill Music Association event. I know, I know, it’s about time.

The place has been around 30 years and we just now get around to visiting. I can’t really explain how that happened except to say that sometimes it’s hard to get down to Denver from here. We won’t wait so long next time.

So anyway, the Swallow Hill Music Association held its 3rd Annual Roots Fest on March 28th at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, part of the very impressive Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA). Continue reading

So the Gourds played the Gothic Theater down south of Denver last Saturday night (March 14).

I shamed Gracey into coming with me. I’ve been trying to force her to listen to the Gourds for about a year. Truth is, it’s really hard to get her to listen to much besides the Drive-By Truckers and her local Wyoming bands (see Hogback). But there were other, more worldly, folks coming down from Wyoming (peer pressure still works) and I promised her some corn chips. That did the trick.

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Tom Waits at The Palladium Ballroom, Dallas 6/23/08

I don’t usually make it out to shows on Monday night. But in this case, Tom Waits (Yes, that Tom Waits) playing his first show here in thirty years, my first ever opportunity to see him live, I think I can make an exception…

The Palladium was already packed when we got there just a few minutes after eight. We took a spot on the floor where it was as hot and crowded as the bowels of Hell. Somehow, that seemed kind of fitting.

The stage was set up pretty minimally with a bunch of horn like speaker-phones of varying sizes mounted on a huge trellis in the back and three more big speaker-phones up front suspended with some lights hanging down on the left side of them, giving the whole thing an off-kilter, slightly cartoonish quality. It was perfect.

At about 8:30 or so, just enough time to grab a beer at the shortest bar line we could find, Tom Waits and his band came out and launched straight into “Lucinda” from his most recent 3 disc set, Orphans. He stood center stage, dressed in a dark suit and a bowler hat. He waved his hands around, shook his fingers and bellowed it out just the way you would imagine Tom Waits would do. He was totally mesmerizing.

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The Old 97s and The Drams
New Year’s Eve at The Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas

There’s something about the Longhorn Ballroom.

Something that hits you the minute you walk through the door. The room just permeates history from every corner and crevice. It’s an awesome place, in the truest sense of the word awesome. For one thing, it’s as big as an aircraft hangar. For another, it’s the real thing.

Any performer who was anybody in country music played there back in the day. Bob Wills owned the place in the 50s and 60s. Later, it was resurrected briefly in the 80s as a live music venue banking on its biggest claim to fame that it hosted The Sex Pistol’s Dallas show just a few short days before that band broke up.

Having seen a number of shows there through the years, I can personally attest that just being on that enormous stage, where so many came before and made history, seems to inspire bands to go above and beyond what anyone would expect of them.

I had all that in mind and more when we went there on New Years Eve to see The Old 97s, The Drams and The Boys Named Sue.

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