Category: MISC

Back To Skoal: A Tribute

 
Before cigarettes, there was chew, or “chaw,” as it is known in some parts of the Deep South.

Most of us got our start with chew. It was our archway to the great kingdom of tobacco. In our early pubescence we came to know the wild ecstasies the leaves of North Carolina and Virginia could provide, contained within the perfect circle of a little tin can.

Back then, we all had the same supplier, in the form of Billy Whittaker. Every Monday, Billy walked into the Big B Drug Store on Old Shell Road and stuffed a whole galaxy of chewing tobacco into the front pouch of his red L.L. Bean anorak. He only swiped certain brands. He knew what his customers wanted: Beech Nut Original, Levi-Garrett, Red Man Original, Red Man Golden Blend, and Beech Nut Wintergreen. If you knew the man with the plan he would take care of you. This was back in the early ’90s, mind you, during the glory days of Joe Camel, when stores left tobacco out on the floor so as to encourage stealing among the delinquent. Even so, Whittaker was a very talented thief and never so much as got questioned.

Levi Garrett was the most popular brand for seventh-graders. It was mild, large-leafed, boasted a good, salty flavor, and did not deliver so much nicotine as to make one sick. It also came in a handsome-looking pouch. You felt like a rugged individual when you chewed Levi.

Skoal bandits (either mint or wintergreen flavors) were also popular. They came in little brown pouches and sported the really cool bandit logo on the can. They delivered very little juice so you would really have to work the pouch around in your mouth if you wanted to get the full effect. The more rebellious among us stuffed four or five pouches in at once. It became something of a competition to see how many pouches one could hold. There was also a brand of snuff called Hawken which “tasted like candy” and registered low on the nicotine meter. The logo featured two interlocking pistols and looked pretty cool. But let’s face it, Hawken was for wimps.

As a baseball player, you were around smokeless tobacco constantly. One teammate from Little League (or Dixie Youth League, as it was known in Mobile) used to pack Skoal Wintergreen in a Bubbletape container and bring it to practice. He was the Dixie Youth version of Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing” character from the movie Major League. The boy could throw smoke from 46 feet. And everyone knows that a fresh dip on the mound adds roughly five extra mph to an eleven year old’s fastball.

Once you got to JV baseball, the abuse became widespread. Players could get ejected from a game if an ump caught you dipping, though outfielders were usually safe if they wanted to enjoy one in the late innings. And you often needed that dip to get you through a 13-inning game out in the wilds of Bayou La Batre, when it’s 10:30 at night on a Tuesday and the whole town smells like dead fish and you still had that problem set from Algebra 1 to finish.

* * * * *

During high school, a new locker room was built for the varsity teams. The new pad was nice, a shangri-la of a place that was a major upgrade from the old petri dish we used to dress in.  Bigger lockers, for one. And if a high-school bully wanted to lock a middle schooler into one of the lockers, well, at least the victim could breathe and had room to move around for the 47-minute class period.

The new locker room was so nice that it became a hang-out lounge for the hard-core dippers (not unlike the Hookah bars of the Middle Eastern sort). This band of hardballers indugled in Kodiak Wintergreen, the strongest stuff on the market and rumored to be cut with fiberglass and god knows what else. These rebels were so brazen that they quit using cups as repositories and began spitting on our bright-shining linoleum floor. Smokeless tobacco had obliterated their sense of judgment, as well as their gum-lines. They were soon discovered, and two of the trespassers got sentenced to fifteen years of detention. No word on whether they still dip.

Stuff That Works

For an old Southern town, Nashville surely doesn’t feel old. Unlike other spots in Dixie – New Orleans, Charleston, Richmond – you don’t feel a strong sense of history walking Music City’s streets. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. For one, “Nash Vegas” has an entrepreneurial pulse that other Southern cities lack. Here, the health care sector booms, hi-rise condos sprout on every other corner, and a new convention center squats in the middle of downtown like a spaceship.

But despite all the glitz, there is a real history here that still breathes, in the form of our songwriting heritage. And the best of Nashville’s writers are versed in it.

Many AS readers dream of moving to Nashville and jump-starting their career as a songwriter. I’ve met several who, after spending a little time in Music City, were so moved by the spirit of the place – and that sense of musical history – that they quit their desk jobs back home and put down stakes here, often with spouse and kids in tow. Of course, it’s not easy to make it as a musician; the financial rewards are usually minimal. Leonard Cohen, whose song “Bird On The Wire” we break down in this issue, made his pilgrimage to Nashville in the mid-’60s with hopes of furthering his music career. I guess he did all right.

Guy Clark, who is back with a new album this month, is a crucial part of Nashville’s songwriting history. Since the release of his debut record Old No. 1, he has produced a body of work that remains immune to any trends. It’s “stuff that works,” to borrow one of his phrases. If you haven’t seen it, check out the movie Heartworn Highways, a documentary shot in Nashville in the mid-‘70s, and you’ll see that, even his 30s, Clark was a master craftsman and something of an old soul.

When I visited him in his workshop two years ago, he told me that he has a high yardstick when it comes to writing. But the man who penned “That Old Time Feeling” is not overly sanctimonious about the process. “It’s not brain surgery,” he said. “They’re just songs. They’re supposed to be fun.”

Throughout his life, the Texas native has also been a gracious teacher. In this issue, the novelist Alice Randall recounts the time she spent with Clark in the mid-’80s, when she was hell bent on making it as a songwriter. Randall also tells a great story of a guitar pull she witnessed involving her mentor and Garth Brooks, an event that she describes as a “clash of two very different kinds of titan.”

Co-writing a song with Clark is a rite of passage that a only a few lucky young songwriters in town can lay claim to. A young artist named Drake White played a few songs at our office last month and then gushed about a recent writing session he’d had with the old bard. And Ashley Monroe told us about writing the title track to her new album with Clark. “After everything I played him he would just go, ‘Hmm,’” she said. “I would get real nervous and then I would play something else. And he would go, ‘Hmm’ … [then] I told him my life story … I was telling him every detail of everything I’d been through. And I go, ‘But look at me, I came out like a rose.’ And he goes, ‘Well, why don’t we just write that?’ ‘Good idea, Guy Clark. Why don’t’ we just write the truth.’ And we did.”

So it isn’t brain surgery, after all.

State Of The Union

Country music is not known for courting controversy. It is, for the most part, an apolitical music. But when a popular country artist dips their toe in political waters, the move usually turns heads, if only because the feat’s so rare. Country artists shy away from hot-button issues for commercial reasons, for the most part. Just look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks: the once-popular band signed its own death warrant – at least career-wise – when lead singer Natalie Maines spoke out against President Bush and the U.S.-led Iraqi invasion, back in 2003. Country radio black-balled the next Dixie Chicks album, 2006’s Taking The Long Way, which proved to be their last as a group.

Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muscogee,” released in 1969, is still a song that is up for debate. The speaker in the tune represents Nixon’s “silent majority” and stands up for conservative values in the face of ’60s flower power, preferring not to “take his trips on LSD,” and opting for “manly footwear” over “beads and Roman sandals.” Loretta Lynn’s 1975 song “The Pill,” a tune about birth control, got people talking despite being banned on most of country radio. And Toby Keith’s “Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue” (which originally was intended to be heard only by a military audience) certainly took a political stand in the wake of September 11th, and remains one of the more polarizing songs of any genre during the last decade.
Brad Paisley’s new tune Accidental Racist” (featuring LL Cool J) has triggered a discussion on race, one that has ricocheted far beyond country music’s usual chat rooms. Some critics have praised Paisley for simply addressing the issue, while others drubbed him for what they deemed to be a clumsy handling of an impossibly complex issue, using symbols like “doo rag and red flag,” “gold chains and iron chains,” to make his point.

Though not an overtly political singer, Kacey Musgraves has made quite a splash in country music with her debut album Same Trailer, Different Park. Musgraves’ songs document the pitfalls and trappings of small-town life, and address topics like drug use and homosexuality. She has garnered some far-flung fans in the process, including gossip blogger Perez Hilton, and yet she’ll be opening for Kenny Chesney this summer, playing to stadium-sized arenas all across the country. In our feature story on Musgraves, songwriter Shane McAnally says that his experience working with Kacey was unique in that her first goal was not commercial success, which tells you everything you need to know about the world of pop country.

Ashley Monroe is another alterna-queen of country whose album Like A Rose is one of the year’s best offerings. A member of the group Pistol Annies, Monroe has written and worked with artists across a variety of genres, including Guy Clark, Trent Dabbs and the band Train. Like A Rose is an honest, fun, stripped-down semi-autobiographical record. Released on Warner Nashville, a mainstream country label, Monroe’s album has yet to see any rotation on country radio, but has been widely embraced by Americana and rock circles.

One of the best type of country songs is the duet, which reached glorious heights with George and Tammy, and Conway and Loretta. Our cover subjects for this issue, Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, make a nice pairing on Old Yellow Moon, an album that has taken them half a lifetime to make. Rodney, who is one of Nashville’s most respected songwriters, got his start playing in Emmy’s Hot Band back in the ‘70s, when Harris launched a solo career after the death of Gram Parsons, the man responsible for turning the former folk singer on to country music. Their album features four new Rodney-penned tracks as well as some older numbers. You can’t distinguish the old songs from the new ones on this album, which is a good thing. In its purest form, country music, like baseball, can exist outside of time.

Kristofferson

“It was only the real songwriters and pickers that went in there,” Kris Kristofferson says of The Professional Club, his favorite watering hole on Music Row back in the ‘60s. “It was never any civilians. Two [new] guys came in once and I guess they wanted to crack the music business or something. They were so uncomfortable they left after 15 minutes … Those were great days, though. Everybody was living for the song. You didn’t care about fame or fortune or whatever. The old guys who were playing on the Opry they would come in, too. I was in heaven.”

Kris Kristofferson is back in Nashville, chatting with me at his manager’s office on Music Row. He’s here to perform at a tribute concert for his friend Cowboy Jack Clement, and to promote his new album, Feeling Mortal. It’s a stirring collection of songs produced by his long-time compadre Don Was, the man he credits with rescuing his career – and life – from a pit of despair in the early ‘80s, when he was still reeling from his divorce from Rita Coolidge, as well as the fusillage of negative criticism that had been hurled toward Michael Cimino’s film Heaven’s Gate (in which he starred), widely considered one of the biggest cinematic flops in history.

As an actor, Rhodes scholar, athlete, etc., Kristofferson boasts Renaissance man credentials, but it’s as a songwriter that he really shines. His body of work, which includes “Me And Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Help Me Make It Through The Night,” occupies an august and substantial niche in the American songbook. But despite his hall-of-fame success, Kristofferson is not one to rest on his laurels, and, at age 76, he’s turned in an impressive new album, full of songs as vital as those he was writing as a young man in his 30s.

Sitting here in an office building on Music Row, he appears to get a twinkle in his eye when our talk drifts to the subject of the old days. He says the scenes in “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” are set on the same street we’re now on. “I wrote that about Music Row because they closed the bars on Sunday,” he says. “I think it hit a lot of people who drank as much as I did … You couldn’t buy liquor by the drink back then … you were supposed to bring your own bottle and drink it.”

When he performs the “Sunday Morning Coming Down” for us, which you can hear on Americansongwriter.com, he accidentally sings the original version, which contains a line that he says he was forced to take out. “I’d smoked so much the night before my mouth was like an ashtray that I’d been licking.”

Music Row was certainly a wilder place in the ‘60s, to hear Kristofferson tell it, and few vestiges of that less-commodified world remain today, with the possible exception of Bobby’s Idle Hour, a smoke-filled den just down the streets that serves cheap beer and hosts weekly songwriter nights for “knowns and unknowns.”

Kristofferson himself was an unknown when he first showed up in Music City, and, after kicking around for a few years, working stints as a janitor, bartender and commercial helicopter pilot, the former Army brat began to make a name for himself, and started palling around with simpatico songwriters like Mickey Newbury, Shel Silverstein and, of course, Willie Nelson. As far as Nashville songwriters, he says Willie was the one they all looked up to.

“We thought he’d never be famous because he was too deep for the average music audience and he had his own style and his own way of singing. I never met him the first four years I was here. But we all kind of idolized him. And he hasn’t changed a bit; he is the exact same guy that he was then.”

Kristofferson doesn’t appear to be exact same guy from yesteryear. Feeling Mortal reveals a more contented man than the one whose voice we heard in all those early classics. But in a sense he is the same kind of artist, making music that he believes in, still living for the song.

Looking Out Our Back Door

I pulled up to the Mercy Lounge not long before show time. I did not wan­t to pay for parking at the venue, so I dropped my girlfriend off and then drove across the street and found a spot near Third Man Records, the laboratory of mad scientist and rock titan Jack White. By the time I got back there was no line at all. I grabbed our tickets and we walked upstairs to The High Watt – a new addition to the Mercy Lounge venue complex – to hear Andrew Combs, a transplanted Texan with good pipes and even better writing skills.

The crowd upstairs was decently-sized and littered with musicians and Nashville industry types. The blond girl who plays Scarlett on the ABC drama Nashville walked by at one point. Later I ran into musician and photographer Joshua Black Wilkins. “I’ll be the guy in the front row singing every word,” he said.

I ponied up to the bar and ordered two glasses of George Dickel, No. 12, the crème de la crème of Tennessee whisky, in my opinion. (The bar was out of Dickel so we had to settle for Jack Daniels, alas.) A band from New Orleans called Sam Doors & The Tumbleweeds kicked off the night. They were good but we were anxious to hear Combs, one of several young country-folk artists on the scene that excite us (Caitlin Rose, Jonny Fritz, Robert Ellis and Daniel Romano are others). The songwriting of these young guns is rooted in tradition but remains fresh and inventive. They have studied the craft of their heroes – Combs worships Guy Clark and Fritz bows to Billy Joe Shaver – and applied those lessons to their own songs. Combs delivered a great show. His band was tight and the songs he played had a maturity about them that belies his young age. In fact we were so impressed that we asked Combs and his guitarist, Jeremy Fetzer, to join us that week for a visit to Gruhn Guitars, a world-renowned shop in Nashville that boasts a wide array of vintage instruments as well as new models from boutique American guitar makers. There we picked on several “legendary” guitars, including a 1939 Martin D-45 that goes for a princely $185,000.

* * * * *

We like to the connect the dots between young and old at American Songwriter, and John Fogerty is the perfect subject for that theme. This month he releases an album of classic CCR hits that he re-recorded with younger artists like Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert, and Foo Fighters, among others. Fogerty says he is not a “legend” but assigns that tag to Dylan and Springsteen in our interview. He talks at length about his musical education and discusses the genesis of writing rock staples like “Born On The Bayou” and “Green River.”

Later in this issue, Jonny Fritz – who else? – interviews Billy Joe Shaver. Shaver tells the strange and twisted tale about how he got his songs to Waylon Jennings, an event that ended up changing the way Nashville made albums in the ’70s. Elsewhere, Gregg Allman talks about his songwriting achievements, something he says he has not always been acknowledged for. And Crosby, Stills & Nash discuss their storied career, one that is still going despite the occupational hazards of playing in a rock band for more than three decades.

As we close out 2012, the print edition of American Songwriter is still strong, contrary to industry trends. During the past few months we’ve put a lot of work into the “Legends” issue. We even gave the magazine a shot in the arm, in the form of a larger-sized book and better-grade paper. We will publish the magazine in this new format going forward. We hope you like it. And thanks to all the songwriters and music junkies out there who read this magazine and remain part of our tribe. We enjoy reading your lyrics, engaging with you on Facebook, and picking tunes with you in late-night hotel rooms in Austin and around midnight campfires in the sticks of North Carolina. 2013 is sure to be a banner year for us and we’re excited to have you aboard.

Toilet Paper Blues

John liked summer camp. But he hated the toilet paper they supplied, if you could call it that. It was a near translucent sheet that barely qualified as single ply. It stuck to your butt in the clamping heat and made a good wipe improbable. The cafeteria food often gave you the runs so in a way it was a double whammy. John would toilet during rest hour after lunch. His parents paid good money to send him to camp. Where the hell did that dough go? Not to bathroom supplies. A man’s time on the john is a sacred time, a time for reflection. But in those stalls there was only distress. It was even hard to tear a square from that massive roll. It would snap off before you could get a ply. Years later, whenever he used a public john, whether at an airport in Rhode Island or a DMV in Tennessee, he compared the supply to what he had to work with that summer. Nothing was as bad as the camp rolls.

 

Tower of Song

Simone Felice looks like a grizzled road dog as he makes his way into our office the morning after his Nashville show. He’s still wearing the striped black-and-white pirate shirt he donned onstage the night before at the Cannery Ballroom, where he opened for the L.A. folk-rock band Dawes to a spirited and packed house. Felice may be in need of a shower, but he seems genuinely excited to be here despite the early hour. We’re setting up the mics and discussing Levon Helm, whom Felice got to know as a fellow Woodstock resident. Our talk drifts from the subject of the old masters to artists of a more recent vintage.

“People always talk about the great old stuff, but in Bristol we were saying how much great music is coming out now.” Just a few days before, Felice had played the Gentlemen of the Road stopover, in Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee, with Mumford & Sons, Justin Townes Earle, Dawes and others.

 The tour, which was put together by Mumford, boasted some of the best young songwriters in the folk and Americana worlds. Some of these groups – in particular, The Apache Relay of Nashville – are kindred spirits of the London-based folkies. Ever since they formed as a band in 2007, Mumford has sought to foster a sense of community, of shared brotherhood, among simpatico artists. It’s not so much about competition as it is about getting together with like-minded musicians and having fun.

This was part of the appeal of the Gentlemen of The Road affair, a mini-tour that stopped at various small towns and hamlets that don’t crop up on a band’s normal tour circuit. The stop in Bristol was especially appropriate as it befit Mumford’s obsession with American roots music. The Virginia – Tennessee border town produced the historic 1927 recordings of a handful of the region’s “hillbilly” singers. Often called the “Big Bang of country music,” it was these sessions that introduced Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family to a national audience.

Notwithstanding their deep and abiding appreciation for roots music, Mumford & Sons is not a revival band but very much a new kind of entity. Their fan base is now legion – and was acquired in the span of just a few years.  In its first week of release, their new album – Babel – solda whopping 600,000 units (420,000 of which were digital), giving them the best-selling debut sales week of 2012 for any artist. And the record logged more than 8 million plays on the streaming service Spotify, a company that has come under significant fire recently for not paying artists what they’re allegedly owed. Mumford’s sales success – in spite of the album’s availability on Spotify – could alter the way big-time artists approach streaming services.

In our cover story, Mumford discusses the evolution of the album and says much of its inspiration grew out of various Nashville picking parties. The band clearly has an affinity for Music City and has spent ample time here during the past few years, even playing two special shows at the Ryman earlier this year. Mumford further cemented their Nashville connection when they joined forces with Emmylou Harris for a performance on the CMT Crossroads series, a format where the two artists trade off on one another’s respective songs. “They’re making the banjo respectable again, which is no easy feat,” Emmylou said of the group. “And they’re great harmony singers and have this great, driving groove with minimalist instrumentation. They just sound good.”

 We cap this issue with an interview with Emmylou, who sheds light on what makes a good duet. She should know. She’s contributed to a lot of them over the years, including Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina” from the album Heartbreaker. We look at the early days of Ryan’s seminal alt-country band Whiskeytown in these pages, via an excerpt from David Menconi’s new book Losering. We also interview Dwight Yoakam about his album 3 Pears, and review a bounty of great guitars, amps and mics for your X-mas wish list.

Happy holidays.

 

John Panther Mellotron, “Gold Grammys (Ain’t That Americana)”

“Gold Grammys (Ain’t That Americana)”
By John Panther Mellotron

There’s a white boy, wearin Ray Bans
Living in a hip neighborhood
He sings about hopping trains, picks a pricey banjo
He thinks man, I got it so good

There’s a young girl, in the kitchen
Smoking up a big fat bowl
And he looks at her and says I remember when Robert Plant was rock and roll

But ain’t that Americana, you and me
Ain’t that Americana , something to see
Ain’t that Americana, J.T.E.

A little gold Grammy for you and me.

There’s a young man, in suspenders
Listenin to a AAA station
He’s got pomaded hair and a pomaded smile
He thinks the Ryman must be his destination

Someone told him
When he was younger
Said, boy, Cash should be president
But just like everything those dreams just kinda came and went

But ain’t that Americana, a wagon wheel
Ain’t that Americana , a genre to steal
Ain’t that Americana, no layers to peel
Three or four chords, for you to feel!

And there’s string bands and more strings bands
And what do you know?
They go to work at their coffee shops
And then sing about the fields they gotta hoe

And there’s losers and there’s losers
But darlin don’t you know
That Buddy Miller wins all the awards at all the damn shows

But ain’t that Americana….

Music That Grows From The Ground

We tend to think of songwriters as fitting into certain molds: coffeehouse types who smoke American Spirits and scribble words on legal pads. Music Row scribes who bang out three chords and the truth over coffee by daily appointment. Gypsy troubadours in search of the muse who fancy themselves modern-day Kerouacs.

Too often we think of songwriting as an art form that must be written down, in the form of chords and lyrics. But the term “songwriting” can be applied to any form of musical composition – whether it be lyric, melody, rhythm, groove, jam, etc. Bob Dylan is credited as the sole writer of “Like A Rolling Stone,” but would that song be the classic it is without Al Kooper’s opening blast of B3 organ? (Kudos to the bands out there that split songwriting credits.)



In this issue, we honor the life and legacy of Levon Helm, the scrawny Arkansas drummer who helped create some of the most enduring songs in the rock canon as a member of The Band.

Helm was not a “songwriter” in the Music Row sense of the term. But he certainly thought himself a songwriter of one kind, as evidenced by his long-running dispute with guitarist Robbie Robertson over authorship of the Band’s wholesale catalog. In spite of their long-running differences, Robertson visited Levon on his deathbed and had kind words to say about his former mate in our cover story. Whatever personal differences came between them along the way, one cannot deny their musical brotherhood.

Though Helm is not credited as a writer on any of The Band’s tracks, it’s well assumed that his deep knowledge of blues, soul and country formed the bedrock of the Band sound. Helm soaked up his musical influences while growing up in Helena, Arkansas (also the home of Conway Twitty). It was in Helena that he was introduced to Walcott’s Rabbits Foot Minstrels and other traveling minstrel shows. Helm was the only Southerner – or American, for that matter – in a group whose sound drew heavily on a cross-section of Dixie roots music. The Band now stands as the unofficial godfathers of a “genre” of music that has become known as Americana. And it was Helm who held the keys to the devil’s music, so prevalent in his neck of the woods, where the roots of those sounds seemed to spring from the land itself.

In addition to his vast musical legacy, Levon’s legacy as a man will endure as well. Shortly after Levon’s death in April, Bob Dylan released a statement calling the drummer “one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation.”

Levon’s spirit truly was palpable: it translated through his music, and whatever footage was captured on camera. You can see that glint in his eye when he’s talking about the roots of rock and roll in The Last Waltz(a film that Helm openly disparaged for much of his life.) For Levon, the music came honestly. As Bruce Springsteen has said: “We’re so used to seeing versions of the thing, Levon is the thing!”

Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys, who was Helm’s roommate in Los Angeles in the ‘60s, once told me that Levon’s good guy image was wholly genuine, saying, “He was just the salt of the earth.” It was Levon who turned Keys on to a bevy of blues harmonica players, and recommended that Keys incorporate their styles in what he was doing on the sax. “It turned out to be good advice,” Keys said.

Levon Helm taught musicians of his generation the importance of reaching back into America’s musical past. It certainly worked for The Band: the musical stew they cooked up at Big Pink, in the mid-‘60s, was unlike anything else at the time.

In our Role Models interview, Don McLean suggests that much of today’s “computer music” doesn’t help anyone. Even decades later, the music of Levon and The Band still helps people.

It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

Songwriter country teems with lonely hearts. We know. We read your words of agony and loss month after month when judging the lyric contest. We hear tales of unrequited love, adultery, bad grades, and emotional wounds that have lasted ages. We hear elegiac songs about dead pets named Wiggles, and listen to murder threats delivered in rhyme. It takes a toll on our judges. One poor soul recently cracked up and had to self-medicate with bath salts after an all-night judging bout.

We love sad songs – don’t get us wrong. Our record library is lined with the complete discographies of Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt and Morrissey – sad-sack songwriters whose music should come with a warning label and SSRI prescription. But we also appreciate tunes that crack with real humor from time to time. And we get these, too, for our lyric contest. We’ll never forget “I’ve Got A Crush On Sarah Palin, I’m Gonna Rock Her Like Van Halen.”And the lyrics for “Grab Your Balls, We’re Going Bowling!” (which may or may not fall in the unintentional comedy department) still hang on the wall of our Intern lair. “Deeper Shade Of Red,” a song submitted recently by one Jim McKay, explores the varying degrees of redneck-hood. “All my friends are between jobs/I just don’t go to work … That makes a deeper shade of red.” Indeed.


In this special “comedy” issue, we raise a glass to the performers who make us laugh in rhyme. Our cover subject, Late Night host Jimmy Fallon, has left millions of Americans in stitches with his parodies of famous rock stars – and seen his own star power catapult as a result. The Tebowie meme, a combination of Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie and quarterback Tim Tebow, was one of late night television’s brightest moments last year. And Fallon’s impression of Neil Young performing the theme song to “The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air” turned a lot of heads, including that of Neil himself, who discussed Fallon’s impression when we interviewed him for our 2011 cover story.“I’d like to see him do [the current version of] me now,” Young said. When told this by AS, Fallon says the challenge is on.

The comic’s new album, Blow Your Pants Off, features parody songs from his show, and a few new ones he wrote with a high school friend. Fallon wrote “Cougar Huntin’”with country singer John Rich, who tells AS that Fallon has the chops to write professionally on Music Row.

Also featured in this issue is Tenacious D, who discuss their influences in the realm of comedic rock, citing Spinal Tap as the first example of “aggressively stupid” writers. Several songwriters take part in our comedic roundtable, including Dan Bern, whose songs offer incisive social commentary with a shot of laugh-out-loud humor.

Of course, some songwriters can write tunes that live on the razor’s edge between humor and sadness – and still throw in an emotional truth or two. The more skilled among us (John Prine, Warren Zevon, David Berman) can even do it within the same line.


“Humor may be one of the best delivery mechanisms for the truth,” Kinky Friedman tells us. “It really is about sailing as close to the truth as you can without sinking the ship.”