Geoffrey Himes, Journalist

Here is the opening of my Paste Magazine story on recent mainstream country albums by Christ Stapleton, Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan and Ashley McBryde. The complete story is linked below.

Like the film world’s Oscars, the Country Music Awards is an industry-sponsored event that’s not always a reliable guide to the year’s best work. But also like the Oscars, it’s not merely a confirmation of box-office champs. It’s an uneasy mix of quality and sales, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. Because that’s what we want: we want our best artists to find a large audience.

Take Chris Stapleton, for example. Like Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell, Stapleton is a gifted, rough-around-the-edges singer-songwriter who regularly plants his albums near the top of the Billboard country charts. Unlike Childers and Isbell, however, Stapleton plays the country radio game and has had enough hit singles to win 16 CMA trophies out of 34 nominations.

His latest award is for Best Male Vocalist, his seventh victory in nine years in that category. That makes sense, for his gruff baritone is one of the most distinctive voices in a genre full of soundalikes. Like the classic country voices of Willie Nelson, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Stapleton’s is immediately identifiable and unfailingly personal.

He’s not a great lyricist (the words to those great songs by his bluegrass band the Steeldrivers were written by bandmate Mike Henderson), but it doesn’t matter. The standard-issue romantic situations that dominate his new album Higher (released two days after the November 8 CMA Awards) come alive because that voice can bring out the depth of feeling that the words only hint at. Savvy Nashville super-producer Dave Cobb sets the stage for the singing to do what the words can’t.

His recent #1 single, “White Horse,” for example, warns a lover not to expect a fantasy cowboy hero, because he’s “not there yet.” In that “yet,” however, one can hear the struggle between want-to and not-able-to that gives the song its drama. Another track, “Think I’m in Love with You,” is the familiar confession of a guy who realizes too late that he’s in love with a woman. What redeems this version of the scenario is the sound of genuine surprise and panic in Stapleton’s voice, as if the epiphany has just occurred.

The Curmudgeon: The CMAs and the Tricky Job of Balancing Quality and Sales This year's CMA Awards walked a tightrope act between rewarding high-selling songs and artists whose music didn't make waves on the charts.

THE 61 BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2023:

(Much of my reading in 2023 was devoted to the three book clubs I founded long ago. One meets every month to discuss a book of poetry. One meets once a quarter to discuss books within a given theme—this year the theme was Shakespeare’ s plays. One meets twice a year to discuss a book in a foreign language and share a potluck dinner of that country’s cuisine. I read a bunch of books to prepare for my autumn trip to France and its World War II battlefields. I also listened to audio books when I was driving or walking and books related to my job as a music journalist. And sometimes I read a book just for the hell of it.)

1. William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra (drama, 1607)
2. William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (drama, 1595)
3. William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (drama, 1601)
4. William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing (drama, 1598)
5. Salman Rushdie: Victory City (fiction, 2023)
6. William Shakespeare: The Tempest (drama, 1611)
7. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera (fiction, 1988)
8. Barbara Kingsolver: Demon Copperhead (fiction, 2023)
9. Sharon Olds: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (poetry, 2002)
10. Marguerite Duras: The Lover (fiction, 1984)
11. Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (fiction, 1968)
12. Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See (fiction, 2014)
13. Zadie Smith: The Fraud (fiction, 2023)
14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother (fiction, 1972)
15. William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (drama, 1599)
16. Vladimir Mayakovsky: Selected Poems (poetry, 1920)
17. Ian McEwan: Lessons (fiction, 2023)
18. William Shakespeare: As You Like It (drama, 1599)
19. Salman Rushdie: Quichotte (fiction, 2019)
20. Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations (poetry, 1874)
21. Marguerite Duras: The North China Lover (fiction, 1984)
22. Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly (fiction, 1978)
23. Anna Akhmatova: Poems of Anna Akhmatova (poetry, 1960)
24. Galway Kinnell: The Avenue Carrying the Initial of Christ into the New World (poetry, 1964)
25. Kate Atkinson: The Shrines of Gaiety (fiction 2022)
26. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (fiction, 1940)
27. Yusef Komunyakaa: Magic City (poetry, 1992)
28. Damon Galut: The Promise (fiction, 2021)
29. Philip K. Dick: The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories (fiction, 1963)
30. Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle (fiction, 2021)
31. Czeslaw Milosz:: Daylight (poetry, 1953)
32. Marguerite Duras: War: A Memoir (memoir, 1985)
33. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Big Mama’s Funeral (fiction, 1962)
34. William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale (drama, 1611)
35. Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (fiction, 1767)
36. Donald L. Miller with Henry Steel Commager: The Story of World War II (history, 2001)
37. Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train Mind (fiction, 1950)
38. Milan Kundera: Identity (fiction 1997)
39. Benjamin Labatut: When We Cease To Understand (science, 2020)
40. Grace Cavalieri: Grace Art: Poems and Paintings (poetry, 2021)
41. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Eyes of a Blue Dog (fiction, 1955)
42. Abdulrazak Gurnah: Afterlives (fiction, 2020)
43. John Banville: The Sea (fiction, 2006)
44. Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (fiction, 1990)
45. Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth (fiction, 2012)
46. Paul Verlaine: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (poetry, 1884)
47. Yves Bonnefoy: The Curved Planks: A Bilingual Edition (poetry, 2001)
48. Benjamin Black (aka John Banville): Death in the Summer (fiction, 2011)
49. Hailey Leithauser: Saint Worm (poetry, 2019)
50. Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (poetry, 1915)
51. Alan Furst: Night Soldiers (fiction, 1988)
52. Stephen E. Ambrose: D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (history, 1994)
53. Ruth Stone: Ordinary Words (poetry, 1999)
54. Peter Carey: The Big Bazoohley (fiction 1995)
55. Lucinda Williams: Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (memoir, 2023)
56. Philip K. Dick: Ubik (fiction, 1969)
57. Richard Powers: Overstory (fiction, 2018)
58. Jennifer Egan: The Invisible Circus (fiction 1995)
59. Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterach: Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson (memoir, 2020)
60. Sandra Lim: The Curious Thing (poetry, 2021)
61. Patrick Modiano: La Place de L-Etoile (fiction, 1968)

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine profile of Gregory Porter. The complete story is linked below. I hope you enjoy it.

“I’m reluctant to do things in a conventional way,” confesses singer Gregory Porter; “that may be why I gravitated to jazz in the first place.”

Porter is able to sell out performing-arts centers on the strength of his rich baritone, his storytelling lyrics and his updating of the ’70s gospel-soul tradition. But he describes himself as a jazz vocalist—and rightly so, for the unpredictability of his songwriting and his live performances prevent listeners from ever taking for granted what might come next.

“Sometime when I’m writing,” he continues, “there will be an obvious rhyme, a perfect rhyme, but I’ll tell myself, ‘Let me mess with perfection.’ Sometimes when I’m performing, when the audience is expecting the melody line to resolve to a certain note, but I’ll choose a different note.” He demonstrates over the phone from a Manhattan hotel room by singing a line that ends on the one chord, then singing it again so it ends on the five. “I may have a perfect groove, but I’ll mess with that too, letting my voice land on different beats.

“I do it to make the audience feel an angst in their bodies. I do it to make myself feel that same angst. It puts a fingerprint on the music that says, ‘Okay, this is who I am.’ I like that. It’s okay to be one perfect flavor of vanilla, but if you mess with that, you come across as just yourself—and the music comes across more as art.”

Porter is even willing to mess with something as seemingly predictable as a Christmas album. For his new release, Christmas Wish, he wrote three new songs for the record and chose several others that dig into the eternal dilemma: How do you enjoy this happiest of holidays when you know there are so many people hungry and hurting in the world? How do you balance the awareness of that truth with the much needed joy and optimism of the day?

“It could have been just a side project,” he admits, “but I decided to use it as a continuation of my work. If I’m going to be writing about Christmas, the songs will be in my voice, songs that speak about charity as well as nostalgia. When I sat down to write, the first words that came up were ‘I wish that I was blind.’ I thought, ‘Is that okay to say? Am I being politically incorrect?’ But the next lines made it okay.”

Again he started singing over the phone. “Strange thing to wish for, but I just can’t unsee all this misery.” Switching back to his speaking voice, he concluded, “I think I can be forgiven for not wanting to see, to not hear the things that are happening in the world, because it can be painful. But I know I have to look, have to hear. The hope comes through, though, in the lines,” and he starts singing, “Everything is not lost, ‘cause Christmas and New Year is coming on strong.”

Gregory Porter: "Let Me Mess with Perfection" “I’m reluctant to do things in a conventional way,” confesses singer Gregory Porter; “that may be why I gravitated to jazz in the first place.”

My lists of the best jazz and best non-jazz albums of 2023 have been posted on the Jazz Journalists Website:
https://jja.wildapricot.org/2021MembersBestJazz/13292088

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine story on new albums by the Pretenders, Graham Parker, the Ba*****ed Ladies and Martin Zellar. The complete story is linked below.

The first song on the Pretenders’ new Relentless album is “Losing My Sense of Taste.” The title comes from the Covid symptom, but the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde flips its meaning from one’s taste for food to one’s taste in music and art. “I don’t even care about rock ‘n’ roll,” she sings in a panic, or “Beardsley, Rothko.”

Any music fan who’s crossed the boundary of 40 has felt a similar anxiety. The heroes of one’s youth have either disappeared or have released one mediocre album after another. One confronts the terrible choice of abandoning those old favorites or succumbing to nostalgia.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Pretenders, who released their terrific eponymous debut album in 1979, and their best album, Learning To Crawl, in 1984, are still making impressive new music. Relentless may not be a pinnacle project, but it’s ambitiously risk-taking and solidly executed.

Though that lead-off track has the grinding guitars to justify the album’s title, the rest of the album is surprisingly varied—from the acoustic-guitar folk-rock of “Look Away” to the Stonesy rocker “Vainglorious,” from the psychedelia of “Let the Sun Come In” to the sumptuous balladry of “I Think About You Daily,” featuring a lovely string arrangement by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.

All 11 songs were co-written by Hynde and guitarist James Walbourne, and Hynde’s lyrics are usually the best thing about these new numbers. Most of them wrestle with the dilemma of continually craving romance even in the face of a long history of failures. On “A Love,” she’s terrified of what a new infatuation may be getting her into. On “Domestic Silence,” she wonders why she’s still in a relationship where they’ve stopped talking.

On “The Copa,” an idyllic seaside affair is ended by her need to get back to work. “I Think About You Daily” is a sad apology to a lover discarded when her career was hottest. These situations have no easy answers, and Hynde doesn’t offer any, but she gets to the heart of the matter as few songwriters do.

Graham Parker had his own terrific debut with Howlin’ Wind in 1976 and his best album, Squeezing Out Sparks in 1979. Yet he too has released a solid new album this year. Last Chance To Learn the Twist reunites the singer from London’s Hackney neighborhood with his longtime guitarist, the Rumour’s Martin Belmont. The sound is vintage pub-rock, which in the late-‘70s mixed hard, fast punk-rock with reggae, soul and pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll.

New Albums from Aging Rockers: The Curmudgeon on The Pretenders, Graham Parker and Ba*****ed Ladies Paste Magazine is your source for the best music, movies, TV, comedy, videogames, books, comics, craft beer, politics and more. Discover your favorite albums and films.

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine profile of Low Cut Connie’s Adam Weiner. The complete story is linked below.

Art Dealers is the title of both the recently released Low Cut Connie studio album and the forthcoming documentary movie about the band. Though some songs are in both, those in the former are all studio versions, while those in the latter are all live versions.

The first thing you see in the movie is the band’s front man Adam Weiner, sitting in a diner, wearing a black fleece jacket with his signature dark curls drooping over his forehead. “I’m shy,” he tells filmmaker Ray Power, “very shy. I’m very square, a very boring person.”

Before long, though, the movie captures him in a crowded, sweaty New York City nightclub, his denim jacket open over a torn-apart undershirt, one boot on the piano bench, one boot stretched out behind him like a weathervane, as he pounds rock ‘n’ roll triplets on the keyboard and hollers, “Mama, Mama, Mama, tell me I’m a good-for-nothing; tell me I’m a real big boy.”

Was he lying about being shy? Was he joking? Not at all. He’s just the latest example of that show-business staple: the performer who’s quiet and withdrawn offstage but who transforms into a boisterous attention-getter, a charismatic magnet whenever he or she steps into the halo of the spotlight and the bubble of the crowd’s roar. In the dressing room, Weiner is one way. When he grabs the mic, he’s another.

“It feels very natural,” Weiner says over the phone from his South Philly home. “It’s a switch that flips on. There are a lot of performers like me who are rather introverted. Prince was shy; Elvis was shy—David Bowie, Patti Smith. They’re shy, but you see them perform, it’s like a thousand firecrackers going off at once. It’s like we conserve energy offstage, so we have more energy when we’re onstage. Some of my fans are disappointed when they discover how boring I am in real life. They expect me to be that outgoing, over-the-top guy all the time.”

He’s nervous when the stakes are low, calm when they’re high. In October, for example, he was invited to perform at Monmouth University. Bruce Springsteen was being interviewed there, and once the interview ended, they wanted Weiner to sing Springsteen’s “Incident on 57th Street.” “It’s a long, complicated song,” he recalls, “and he’s there on stage watching me. It should have nerve-wracking, but it felt easy. The moments that most people would find the most difficult, I find the easiest. I’m at ease on stage as I am nowhere else.”

What makes this possible? Well, it’s an entirely different dynamic when the lights are on you and the listeners are in the dark, when you’ve got a microphone that makes you louder than everyone else, when you’ve got an audience that’s willing, even eager to be entertained. That’s not like most interactions when you’re face-to-face with someone who can interrupt or rebut you. On stage, the singer has the license to drown out and overwhelm every heckler and naysayer.

“I’m a person with certain kinds of anxieties and nervousness that are amplified offstage and turned down onstage,” Weiner confesses. “Some people who are very gregarious and outgoing clam up when you put a mic in front of them. I’m the complete opposite. Art has been a great vehicle for bringing out this part of me.”

Low Cut Connie's Adam Weiner: Flipping the Switch Low Cut Connie has a new album and a new documentary, both called 'Art Dealers.' Front man Adam Weiner discusses both.

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine story on recent albums featuring the jazz drummers Elvin Jones, Allison Miller, Brian Blade Jonathan Blake and Rudy Royston. The complete story is linked below.

The most exciting jazz reissue of the year has been Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, a tape rescued from the forgotten bowels of the New York Public Library. It captures these jazz giants performing at a Greenwich Village basement club during their all-too-brief, six-month collaboration.

Much of the attention lavished on the two-CD reissue has gone—and deservedly so—to the two reed players who were finding new ways to remake compositions through freewheeling improvisation. But the discs also capture drummer Elvin Jones at his peak, refashioning the possibilities of rhythm as thoroughly as Coltrane and Dolphy were reinventing harmony.

It’s a welcome reminder that drummers can do a lot more than just keep time. Just as horn players can leave the original melody implied as they improvise variations, so can drummers leave the underlying pulse implied as they play alternate patterns against the unstated groove. And it’s that distance between the implicit and the explicit that allows percussionists to bring their creativity and personality to the music.

There are a lot more opportunities to explore these possibilities in jazz than in pop music. It’s no surprise that one of the most impressive bandleaders in jazz today is a drummer: Allison Miller. Her latest album, River in Our Veins, finds her leading a sextet with five of her frequent collaborators: pianist Carmen Staaf, violinist Jenny Scheinman, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, bassist Todd Sickafoose and trumpeter Jason Palmer.

Miller’s dozen compositions are built from the bottom up, with a strong pulse that governs the music even when it’s left unstated. The rhythm section of Miller, Staaf and Sickafoose plays around the edges of that groove, revealing the many ways it can be syncopated, multiplied and punctuated. And it’s out of those ever-shifting rhythms that the horn and fiddle lines take shape.

The album includes a tune named “Potomac,” the river near Miller’s childhood home in Maryland, and another called “Hudson,” the river near her current home in New York. There’s also the powerful influence of the Mississippi as it flows through New Orleans and the push-and-pull carnival dancing in that city’s streets. An echo of that city’s birthing of jazz can be heard in the clarinet/trumpet give-and-take—and even more so when the five guest tap-dancers are added to the sextet. The clickety-clack of their metal-studded soles reinforces the difference between machine beats and human-body beats—less perfect perhaps but more compelling

Give the Jazz Drummers Their Due The best jazz drummers can leave the underlying pulse implied as they play alternate patterns against the unstated groove.

Here’s the opening of my Texas Music Magazine story on Buddy & Julie Miller. The complete story is linked below.

Like any newly arrived musician from out of town, the 25-year-old Buddy Miller spent most of his first year in Austin scouting the scene and looking for work. Everything he had heard in New Jersey about the Texas capital’s mid-’70s scene and its uncanny blend of traditional country and progressive folk-rock proved true. The town was brimming with hot pickers, smart songwriters and spellbinding singers, but the person who impressed him the most was a 20-year-old beauty named Julie Griffin, a soprano who sang as if there were no filter between her heart and her mouth.

On Sept. 22, 2023, Buddy and Julie Miller released their fifth duo album, In the Throes, but the married couple have collaborated on nearly every album either one has made over the past 47 years. Though the married couple has lived in Nashville since 1993, all the music they’ve made contains an echo of their first encounter in Texas.

Julie was a Texas native, born and raised in the small town of Waxahachie until age 9, when the family moved to Austin. She spent much of her adolescence sitting on the cement floor at the Armadillo World Headquarters observing the budding and blossoming of “Cosmic Cowboy” music, and soon she wanted to do it herself. Someone heard her singing Gram Parsons’ “Grievous Angel” and hired her for what she calls “the worst band that ever lived.” But the band’s guitarist Ben Cocke was forming a new group with singer-songwriter Patterson Barrett, and they asked Julie to join.

The band was called Partners in Crime, and Julie and Patterson were soon a couple. Buddy, playing with rockabilly legend Ray Campi and honky-tonkers Doug Seegers and Darrell McCall, would see the Partners whenever he could. When Cocke left, Buddy grabbed not only the guitar slot but also the spare bedroom in Patterson and Julie’s tiny bungalow (next door to Butch Hancock).

It was a tense situation: Patterson and Julie were drifting apart, Buddy was infatuated with Julie, Patterson was falling in love with his future wife, Julie was swinging between up and down moods, and everything was in limbo. Buddy played on one track for the band’s first album and on all of the band’s second, unreleased album.

“I had a sense of harmony,” Julie explains, “and it was so much fun to do it with Patterson and Buddy in front of people. I know Patterson like the back of my hand; we went through a lot together. Then Buddy joined the band, and he was so incredible.”

“On stage, it was the Patterson and Julie Show,” Patterson says now, “and Buddy was the guitar player who occasionally sang. Even then, he was a great singer. Neither one of them was writing, which is ironic because that’s what they’re known for now. Julie was very sexy and charismatic on stage, and she was encouraged to emphasize that. That, on top of a rough childhood, gave her every reason to be screwed up. If she hadn’t been reborn with all that Christian stuff, she’d probably have died a long time ago.”

“I heard Partners in Crime,” Buddy recalls, “and they were great. I thought they could go places, and I wanted to play with them. I liked Pat’s songs, and I loved Julie’s singing. She had a lot of heart in her voice. But when I got a gig at the Lone Star Cafe in 1979 opening for Delbert McClinton, I saw a country-music scene was developing there. They weren’t making records in Austin, but they were in New York. So Julie and I moved up on Jan. 1, 1980.”

40 Years On, Buddy and Julie Miller Offer Spiritual Uplift Amid Rootsy Harmonies - Texas Music Magazine 'In the Throes' celebrates the marriage of Buddy's rustic, raspy tenor and Julie's eternally youthful alto

My poem, "The Swamp Swallows Everything," is included in the new book from Penguin/Random House, "Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry," edited by K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla.

Here’s the opening of my Texas Music Magazine profile of Jon Dee Graham. The complete story is linked below.

Several friends told Jon Dee Graham, “Don’t make a death album.” It’s just too hard, they said, to write songs about the subject without being clumsy or depressing or both. His answer? “How can I not?” After all, he’d had three close brushes with death between 2008 and 2022: a car wreck, a stroke and a heart attack. During the last, Graham’s heart stopped beating for at least five minutes.

“These are things people are afraid to talk about,” Graham explains. “That’s part of my gift. I’m not afraid to spell out what’s going on in my head. And frequently, it’s stuff people think they don’t want to hear. But the audience goes, ‘Oh, he’s talking about the thing we’ve been thinking about for months and months, but he’s not dodging it. He experienced it, and he came out the other side.’ Part of my job as a service to these people is to confirm that. As a musician, I want to be useful. With this new record, I’m as useful as I’ve ever been.”

That new album, the first in seven years, is titled Only Dead for a Little While. The lyrics imply that death is such an essential partner to life that we can’t live to our fullest until we acknowledge the endgame. And the music itself is proof of that message. Graham’s signature electric guitar attack and baritone growl are in full force, conjuring up both the existential threat and the undeniable thrill of facing mortality head-on rather than hiding from it.

“I was dead,” Graham insists. “And having died, I found it’s just not that big a deal. It’s nothing to be afraid of; it’s more like a long, deep nap. Everyone’s afraid of death. Most people think, ‘Yeah, death, that’s not me.’ But, come on, every single human being on earth has the same ending. I thought it would be painful and difficult and fearsome, and it was none of those things. It was actually fairly gentle and peaceful. Believe me, I’m super happy that I came back, but the experience relieved some of my deeply ingrained fears about death.”

This is not a peaceful record. Graham does not, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night.” The album begins with a garage-rock guitar riff, marching through the jungle like a guerilla army that can’t be stopped. The opener asks: What was the pivot point “Where It All Went Wrong?” When did it all turn south? When did human beings become haunted by death and loss? And Graham answers in the very first line: “When the first monkey fell out of the chattering tree.” In other words, it’s been like this as long as there’s been homo sapiens, and it always will be like this. Don’t kid yourself.

If anything, the album-closing track, “Lost in the Flood,” is even bleaker. This time the riff is sadder, wearier, as Graham catalogues all the things doomed to oblivion: “Medical Plaza and the Fortune Bond, the Money Store and the Payday Pawn, all gone, lost in the flood.” It’s all temporary, everyone and everything we know.

“‘Lost in the Flood’ imagines, ‘What if days and weeks and years were water, just washing us away,’” Graham explains. “All the things we take for granted; it’s all going to be gone, lost in the flood. But that’s OK. Change is the language of the universe. And guess what? You’re also going to be gone; you’re going to be lost in the flood. All of us.”

Death Ain't Got No Mercy - Texas Music Magazine On 'Only Dead for a Little While,' the man who's dodged death three times in the last 15 years confronts the Big Questions. "I'm as useful as I've ever been," Jon Dee Graham insists.

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine story on East Side Digital Records, featuring Eric Ambel, the Bottle Rockets, the Blood Oranges, Go To Blazes, Jimmy Silva, Steve Daly, Jerry Joseph and Tom Heyman. The complete story is linked below.

Two of my favorite albums this fall have been Jerry Joseph’s Baby, You’re the Man Who Would Be Kingand Tom Heyman’s 24th Street Blues. As I kept listening, it dawned on me they were linked. Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, who produced Joseph’s pugnacious, pub-rock anthems, had long ago produced three records for Heyman’s original band, Go To Blazes. Those latter discs were released by East Side Digital Records, a largely forgotten label that rostered much of the best roots-rock of the early ’90s.

It deserves to be remembered. ESD released one of the greatest albums of the decade—the Bottle Rockets’ The Brooklyn Side—as well as terrific records by Ambel, Scott McCaughey (later a fixture in R.E.M.’s tours), the Skeletons (later Dave Alvin’s band), Bill Lloyd (half of Foster & Lloyd) and Chris Stamey (of dBs fame). ESD was also home to the Blood Oranges, Terry Anderson, Barrence Whitfield and Jimmy Silva, four acts whose brilliant recordings never found the audience they deserved.

“I’d always been very excited about power-pop and ’60s psychedelia but with a rootsy influence,” says Steve Daly, who ran the label as a subsidiary for Rykodisc. “Top of the heap for me were The Byrds and The Beatles. When you listen to The Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born To Follow,’ it goes from country to folk to rock to psychedelia and back to country all in one song. How cool is that? I wanted to put out records like that.”

And he did. There were scenes all over the U.S. with bands making that music, but the big labels were caught up in post-punk, grunge, techno and hair-metal and weren’t interested. Daly scooped them up and often turned them over to producer Ambel to crystallize their potential.

“Steve was one of the best music guys I’ve ever worked with on any label,” Ambel says over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. “It’s almost criminal that he left music and got a day job. He knew where I was coming from. For people our age, rock ‘n’ roll is our classical music, and when you see how it grew out of country and the blues, you’re really opening up the box to an embarrassment of riches.”

ESD is the missing link between the roots-rock peaks of the ’80s (L.A.’s Los Lobos, Blasters, X and Dwight Yoakam) and the Aughts (Drive-By Truckers, North Mississippi Allstars, Dropkick Murphys and Lucero). Not only did the label keep the lantern burning, but it also issued music well worth checking out today.

The Forgotten Triumph of East Side Digital Records ESD released one of the greatest albums of the 1990s—the Bottle Rockets’ 'The Brooklyn Side'—as well as terrific records by Eric Ambel, Scott McCaughey, the Skeletons, Bill Lloyd, Chris Stamey and the Blood Oranges.

Here’s the opening of my Paste Magazine story about Tony Brown, Marty Stuart and the Mavericks. The complete story is linked below.

Among the highlights from this year’s Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion were the Friday night set by The Mavericks and the Sunday afternoon set by Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives. Both acts have developed live shows more impressive than those during their hitmaking days in the last century. It’s those hits the fans still want to hear, however, and both groups obliged, but they transformed the old material with arrangements more muscular and virtuosic than those on the records. The singing was undiminished and the playing much improved.

The notion that such adventurous acts had country radio hits in the late ’80s and early ’90s may seem implausible in this era of narrowly constricted radio playlists, but that was the brief window of the “Great Credibility Scare,” as Steve Earle called it. It was a time when a Cuban-American band from Miami (The Mavericks), a bluegrass mandolinist from Mississippi (Stuart), a self-described “borderline Marxist” from San Antonio (Earle), a bluegrass singer from Kentucky (Patty Loveless), a country-jazz singer from Texas (Lyle Lovett) and a folkie poet from Austin (Nanci Griffith) could get signed to a major label in Nashville and each have at least two Top 40 country singles.

All six of those acts were signed to MCA Records by Tony Brown, who was the company president—and also the producer on many of the albums. Along with such likeminded outsider acts as Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, Rodney Crowell, Dwight Yoakam and Ricky Skaggs at other labels in town, these artists triggered a creative flowering that Nashville hasn’t matched since.

“I was trying to forge a new thing here in Nashville,” Brown told me in 1996. “Rosanne and Rodney were the pioneers, then Steve. Steve brought Nanci’s name up, so I went to see her and she was incredible. Her folk music sounded like great country music to me. Guy Clark gave me a tape of Lyle. Everyone thought I was a genius, but it was more being around Steve, Guy and Rodney.

“They opened my eyes to the notion that there was more to country music than just the Nashville formula, this vanilla, generic thing, more mediocrity than you could stomach. In the mid ’80s, when all those guys emerged, people were hungering for something different. I was hungering for something different. Music Row didn’t invite them in but took a lot of their ideas and turned it into a new formula thing.”

Before his set in Bristol, Stuart sat on his tour bus, parked in downtown Bristol, Tennessee, between the Piedmont Stage and the Blackbird Bakery, and tried to explain how it evolved. Even now he shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it actually happened.

“Tony had that gift that Sam Phillips had,” Stuart suggested, referring to Brown and the Sun Records founder who discovered Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. “He could predict stardom. Like Sam, he could see the potential in artists that they couldn’t see in themselves. And he was in a position to do something about it. He had a big corporation behind him—and a powerful radio promotion department. When he picked up the phone, people would answer. Getting Reba and George Strait on the radio was easy. Getting Steve and Lyle on the radio was the real triumph.”

Marty Stuart, The Mavericks and "The Great Credibility Scare" The notion that acts like Marty Stuart or The Mavericks had country radio hits in the late '80s and early '90s may seem implausible, but that was the brief window of the “Great Credibility Scare,” as Steve Earle called it.