Fader.com has a great interview with Dwight Yoakam covering his influences, music and performing in L.A. in the early 80’s hillbilly revival, his evolving career and his music, his taste for Nudie threads and nicely blocked Stetsons and his take on the young guns coing around in the music biz today.

I got an email today that Larry the Cable Guy is coming to the Radio City Music Hall. Larry the prick guy is both the Amos and the Andy of Southern comics and makes Southerners look like slope-browed hick idiots. As a resident of New York City and a Native son of the South I’d like to take a moment to send a big fuck you to this wanna-be piece of crap and his lame grandma fart jokes. Ron White has more talent in his whiskey sippin’ hand than Larry the idiot guy has in his entire fat body. Git “this” done, bitch!

Just a quick note from my family’s home in Dallas wishing all my readers a great thanksgiving (yeah it’s late, but what else is new?). Go celibrate by heading to your local bar, tavern or honky-tonk and supporting the working musicians that are still sweating it out and bringing you the best damn music that the major lables try and make you forget about. Hoist a pint or shot for the passion, beauty and heartache that music can bring and flip a bird to the machine that trys to put out the flame. 

Listen up hillbillys, it’s time for Uncle Jack Sparks to rant and review of the Coutry Music Awards. Always a heaping helping good time of meanness at the expense of Nashville’s conveyer belt country products and insight into acts that really should get the awards.

An excerpt: The only list you’re going to read grounded in twang reality. If you’re new to this exercise, and you think what you listen to on stations like K102, KEEY is country music, or even worse, you think it’s good, you should stop reading now. As always, this will end up being an indictment of the Nashville system of picking singers and music based on delivering a demographic for the advertisers who sponsor country radio and should not be taken as an insult to the extremely talented and hardworking studio musicians, the real artists of country music, who’ll never get recording contracts because they can’t get botox injections, braces for their teeth, or saline bags for their boobs.

Pitchfork has a fine review of Hag: The Best of Merle Haggard.

an excerpt:As an introduction to Haggard’s music– or even to  the Bakersfield sound that he helped popularize– Hag may be  unparalleled. Born in Bakersfield to transplanted Oklahomans,  Haggard was at heart a California artist, reared on 1940s and
50s country and influenced by Bob Wills, Tex Ritter, and Spade Cooley. You can hear their influence– especially Wills’– in songs like “Living with the Shades Pulled Down”, on which Haggard calls out his band members to solo, adopting a falsetto much like his hero’s. It’s an original tune, but it could very easily be a Wills cover.

Hag recently collaborated with another Country legend, George Jones, on the release ”
Kickin’ Out the Footlights…Again.”

From Pitchfork - Nick Cave and three members of his Bad Seeds– Warren Ellis (also of Dirty Three), Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos– will release their as-yet-untitled debut album as Grinderman on March 5 via Mute in the UK.

Grinderman’s music is “an instinctual yawlp that…resurrects the demons of each musician’s past: the trashcan proselytizing of Birthday Party-era Nick; Jim Sclavunos’ late 70s New York no-wave noise wisdom; Martyn Casey’s ominous Triffids bass reverb; plus Ellis’ avant-garde soundtrack work and his teenage love of Black Sabbath,” according to a press release.

“No Pussy Blues”– the song streaming from the band’s MySpace page– could be mistaken for a track from the Stooges’ reunion album, or at least what we hope that record will sound like. It’s noisy, funny, raw, and totally cathartic.

As previously reported, Dirty Three’s ATP in April will include sets from Grinderman and Nick Cave solo. Cave also has some European solo dates scheduled for the rest of November.

Finally, Cave has re-teamed with John Hillcoat, director of 2005’s Cave-written film The Proposition, for the next installment in Cave’s screenwriting career: Death of a Ladies’ Man. According to various reports, The Proposition’s Ray Winstone plays the film’s protagonist, a sex-addicted traveling salesman who takes his son on a road trip after his wife commits suicide. Cheery! Production began in September.

Nick Cave dates:

11-09 Nurnberg, Germany - Meister
11-10 Stuttgart, Germany - Liederhalle
11-11 Mainz, Germany - Phoenixhalle
11-13 Vienna, Austria - Konzerthaus
11-14 Bonn, Germany - Beethovenhalle
11-17 Zurich, Switzerland - Kongresshaus
11-19 Helsinki, Finland - Finlandia Hall
11-20 Riga, Latvia - Arena
11-22 Dresden, Germany - Kulturplast
Stream: Grinderman: No Pussy Blues [MySpace]

The fine folks at Pitchfork have posted a really nice review of the Legacy 2-CD 1-DVD release of Johnny Cash’s performance at California’s oldest state prison, San Quentin.

An excerpt: Cash’s decision to strum up a jail probably had as much to do with his own burgeoning mythology– the Man in Black, the cold-blooded killer, the anti-Nashville rebel– than any desire to remedy the U.S. prison system (although Cash did eventually actively advocate prison reform, meeting with President Richard Nixon in July 1972). All the ethical snafus inherent to the deed– it’s easy to argue that Cash exploited the convicts’ plight to buoy his own rep, or to sympathize with the families of the prisoners’ victims, who might not want to see their loved ones’ killer clapping his hands to “A Boy Named Sue”– are hard to dismiss, but At San Quentin is still a spectacular musical performance, one of the most mesmerizing live records in American history.