I’m here watching my defending champ Spurs open the first round of playoffs againt the Pheonix Suns (spurs won in double overtime, YOW!) and the Tim McGraw and Def Leppard video for their co-written song “Nine Lives” comes on before the commercial.

First off, I’m floored that the NBA continues to display their utter disregard to, or ignorance of, their demographic by placing artists to perform songs in the playoffs that are more at home in the NFL demo (Tom Petty) or viewers of the daytime squawk-fest The View (Rob Thomas.)

Sure the song is crap, it’s fluff, it’s clown music and ridiculous to the ears to anyone that knows either country or rock music, but the thing that amazed me was how well it fits into the soft-rock MuzikMafia sound that is being cloned in Nashville these days. It was a like the fundamental elements that are usually fused into mediocre product were separated on stage into their separate elements of soft-pop-rock and soft-pop country.

Now I get why “artists” like Bon Jovi are heading over the the country side of the fence, the building blocks are not all that different. All instruments on 11, calculated hooks, trite imagery of god, country and family or idiotic lyrics that only drunken crackers can love (my personal favorite song when I’m a drunk cracker is Sweet Home Alabama.)

It’s all formula folks, like making Big Macs. Apply to any passable singer with a carefully tailored and sanctioned image, feed it to corporate radio, music television and complicit web sites , cross pollinate to the corporations other media holdings and off you go.

Want fries with that?

- Chet Flippo at CMT’s Nashville Skyline features thoughts on the new Wilie Nelson bio “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life” by Joe Nick Patoski. From the post:

Patsoki has ascribed his fascination with Nelson to his own decades-long quest to discover a way to write the real Texas book, the one that finally captures the giant sprawling state and its larger-than-life characters. He says he finally realized the answer lay right before him in the form of a Texas superstar he had already interviewed many times before. Willie Nelson was Texas.

- Ryan Adams has written on his blog that the Ryman Auditorium is a “shit hole in Nashville”and that he hates, HATES country music. And always has. And he “references” it when he makes music that sounds like that, the way a director would use water as a backdrop for a svcene (sic) with a shark in it.

And here I thought that sobriety would make Ryan less of a sniveling self-absorbed prick.

- Plans were announced today for this year’s 25th Annual International Country Music Conference.

“The International Country Music Conference is the premier academic event for those studying and writing about country music,” stated conference co-chair Don Cusic. “It is appropriate that ICMC is held at Nashville’s Belmont University.”

This year the conference is set for May 22 to 24, 2008.

Roots rocker Chris Gaffney of the Arizona-based Hacienda Brothers succumbed to liver cancer today, friends say. Our thoughts are with his family.

Peter Larson at the Orange County Register penned a fine and fitting obituary.

Hank III posted some photos from his recent “Me and My Friends” video shoot. Looks like it was a lot of muddy fun!

More here

As part of the all month celebration that is Willie Nelson’s 75th birthday I got my hands on an extra copy of the just released biography on the Texas Yoda “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life” by by Joe Nick Patoski. The book will go to the first peron to correctly answer the following:

We got a winner. Congratulations Patricia! Way to know your Willie!

Can you match Willie’s duet partner with the songs below (in order)?

1. Seven Spanish Angels
2. Beer for My Horses
3. Touch Me
4. I Gotta Get Drunk
5. To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before
6. Old Friends
7. Boxcar’s My Home
8. Pancho and Lefty
9. You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago
10. Bob Wills Is Still the King

Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, a concert can really floor you. Just surprise you in ways you had no idea you still could be. I’m glade to say this last Saturday I attended a sold out show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom that did just that.

Omaha Nebraska’s McCarthy Trenching opened the show at about 8:15 belting out self-described songs of drinking, killing and horse songs drinking, killing and horse songs with workmanlike diligence and little room for flourish.
26-year-old singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle then hit the stage sporting a throwback look - sequin-trimmed suit and Brylcreemed hair - to match his gloriously throwback sound. Accompanied by mandolin-banjo-harmonica player and stamp-collection enthusiast Cory Younts, Earle served up with his blend of old school honkey-tonk
(Hard Livin, Ain’t Glad I’m Leavin’) and Tennessee backwoods country (Who Am I To Say, The Ghost Of Virginia) and straight up corn-pone fun (Chitlin Cookin Time In Cheetham County, Your Biscuit’s Big Enough For Me.) All the country music history sketches that make up his new release ‘The Good Life” were on show in full force. Earle showed confidence as he stalked the stage, stomped his boots to cue chorus to bridge breaks and hoisted his acoustic guitar rifle-like Johnny Cash-style. The New York crowd whooped and hollered and the girls near the stage stood transfixed with by his rugged Southern charm. Earle left the stage with a song for his Grandpa (Absolute Angels Blues) after almost an hour and left the crowd wanting more but primed the crowd for what was to come.

The most accurate and hilarious description I’ve come across for the Felice Brothers (actually three brothers and friends) is by way of Andrew Leahey over at All Music Guide - “they’re a pack of earth-stained country boys from the wilds of the Catskill Mountains, not Ivy Leaguers who thought ransacking their parents ’60s records would a better career move than grad school.” Dead on description and doubly so live. Cards on the table, I came to the show for Justin Townes Earle and decided to hang for a few songs by these Yankee roots rockers just to see what all the fuss was about. I’m glade I did.

It appeared that many under 30-year-olds from the Felice Brothers hometown of the Hudson River Valley and the New York City area, where the Felice boys honed their craft in the subway stations, turned out to welcome them back home. Young girls in cotton dresses shouted the band members names like they had them in home room and their drunk boyfriends sang to every song at the top of their lungs like they could do it in their sleep.

The Felice Brothers are often compared to a more punked-out Band, and it’s a pretty fair comparison. Like The Band The Felice Brothers take country and roots music and turn it in on it’s history to exposes the Celtic, blues and gospel innards. Gothic Americana landscapes drenched with sepia, whiskey (on stage and in verse) and blood.

Sometimes it seemed that the band was using their instruments as weapons and songs would veer just out of control just to right itself at the last minute. Tales of broken dreams and dreamers flat broke and staring down narrowing odds (the harrowing Hey Hey Revolver), sin, redemption and Dixieland salvation (Saved (Lieber-Stolle), Mercy) and salacious limo drivers (Cincinnati Queen) and straight up murder ballads that would make Nick Cave take notice (Ruby Mae.) Sometimes the whole affair seemed like a Ken Burns soundtrack mashed up with the Pogues on a particularly heavy bender.

Guitarist and lead gravel-throated vocalist Ian, drummer and vocalist Simone and accordionist and bear of a man James Felice along with a guy named Christmas (bass) and Farley (fiddle and washboard) played music dank with tradition and yet crackling with passion and fire. I’ve always said that if you can fake authenticity you can do anything, but if there is any faking until they make it with this band then my well tuned bullshit detector was unable to pick up the trace.

There have been some leveling of derision at the Felice Brothers for supposedly cribbing their sound to the Dyan/Band basement tapes. These jibes are usually from critics that see no problem giving a pass to the likes of the Zeppelin/Pixies plagiarism that is the White Stripes. I agree with Picasso that bad artists copy and great artists steal. The Felice Bros. are casing the joint and armed to the teeth.

The Felice Brothers Bowery Ballroom 4-12-2008 - I’m Saved

By way of Twangville

If you find yourself in Nashville this week head over to the Mercy Lounge where the Americana Music Association, Grimeys Records and the Nashville Scene salute Great American Record Store Day with a series of events.

Thad Cockrell (Thursday April 17th), Drive By Trucker’s font man Patterson Hood (Friday April, 18th) and Kathleen Edwards (Friday April 19th) all perform in support of the Great American Record Store Day.

Want to know the best part of last night’s CMT awards show? when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss accepted the Wide Open Country video of the year honor for “Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On),” a song previously recorded by the Everly Brothers. That was it, period.

The spectacle was embarrassing. It’s like when Elvis came back from the from his stint in Friedberg, Germany with the 3rd Armored Division. Elvis began his career as a rugged hillbilly channeling country, blues and gospel of his upbringing in Tupelo, Mississippi and after his time in the Army and losing his mother he slowly devolved into a drug-riddled, spangled-jumpsuit-wearing freak. Today’s mainstream pop-country music is the Vegas Elvis. A bejeweled, bloated shell of past greatness.

You can point the finger at lots of places, Nashville elite’s initial embarrassment of the Opry and country music industry and the dirty hillbillies crowding their streets. Blame Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley and Bob Ferguson for the syrupy sounds of Countrypolitan to increase market share and entice middle America. Blame the smooth 70’s sounds of Alabama and Kenny Rogers…whatever.

Bottom line, you see talentless hacks like Rascal Flatts, John Rich and Taylor Swift and artists that should know better, Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, and real talent like Ashton Shepherd pushed off to a side stage and trying to get a song in before the breakand you see the shadow of something great just off in the wings. Something beautiful, passionate, timeless and real…not some idiotic (and not funny) song about maintenance men and snotty women. And there is the insidious incursion of the American Idol pod people which works into the music industry’s business plan of offsetting risk and increasing predictable financial success. Like McDonalds you know what you’re going to get. But what’s good for burgers sucks for music.

So hats off the Plant and Snoop Dogg, who donned all all black in honor of “my main homeboy” Johnny Cash. These men and breaking stereotypes in new and courageous ways and doing something that’s actually worth paying for.

As someone who grew up with and still loves country music, and has family in the business, what I saw last night was an insult to tradition and a depressing look at the genre’s future.

The #1 Willie Nelson fan site stillisstillmoving.com gives us a sneak peak of of Texas Monthly’s special tribute cover commemorating Willie’s upcoming 75th birthday. It will also be the first time TM HAS ever done a cover without a word on it in 35 years (well, for the 270,000 or so subscribers) the rest of the newsstand buyers will get a version with just one cover line, featuring Mike Hall’s 12,000-word oral history of soon-to-be-75-year-old Willie’s life.

This is surely one to pick up!