TED DROZDOWSKI

Ani DiFranco | Red Letter Year

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:12:29 GMT

Righteous Babe (2008)
This is DiFranco’s most sophisticated album, a musical convergence of her best qualities: warm singing, graceful writing, experimentation.

Mix nuts

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:49:42 GMT

An interview with breakout roots-music production stars the Tremolo Twins
Pop music has a history of great production teams.

ALTERNATE ROOTS: With their penchant for dialing in the right vibe for any type of roots music, Dinallo and Carlisle could call themselves the Rust Brothers.

Pop music has a history of great production teams. There’s R&B pioneers Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegün, Memphis rock ’n’ soul masters Chips Moman and Dan Penn, soundscapers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, Boston’s alt-rock wonder boys Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade, brother team Chris and Tom Lord-Alge, and sample-happy mindbenders the Dust Brothers.

Now Boston has a new duo vying for honors: Michael Dinallo and Ducky Carlisle. With their penchant for dialing in the right vibe for any type of roots music — blues, country, R&B, folk, primal rock — they could call themselves the Rust Brothers if they weren’t already known as the Tremolo Twins. And their moniker can be found on one of the year’s hottest R&B comebacks, Eddie Floyd’s new Eddie Loves You So on the revived Stax label. They’ve also just wrapped a reunion disc by Boston’s own Radio Kings. After a 10-year break, the Kings (with Dinallo on guitar) will play Harry’s in Hyannis on September 25, Toad in Porter Square on October 1, and Sally O’Brien’s in Union Square on October 24.

When Carlisle and Dinallo met a decade ago, they were Savages — members of vocal powerhouse Barrence Whitfield’s band. Ducky was the drummer and Michael played six-string. Carlisle was already a well-established engineer/producer and was in Robin Lane’s band and Kevin Connolly’s. He was also about to score a major breakthrough for his engineering work on Susan Tedeschi’s Grammy-nominated Just Won’t Burn (Tone-Cool). Dinallo was a fleet-fingered musician and songwriter who’d co-led the Radio Kings and backed harmonica ace Jerry Portnoy.

“Immediately it was like we were brothers,” says Carlisle. “We had similar tastes, a lot of the same musical reference points, and we thought the same things were funny.”

In 2004 their friendship become a partnership, and they began producing a series of albums at Carlisle’s Ice Station Zebra studio in his Medford home (which is where I talked to them). The first was Norwegian singer-songwriter William Hut’s Days To Remember (Corazong). Its follow-up, Night Fall, for Universal Records/Europe, went platinum in Scandinavia. They’ve also made albums for local artists: country songwriter Stan Martin and blues guitarist Bill McQuade, as well as Roomful of Blues frontman Dave Howard’s 2006 solo I Tried To Tell You (Gibraltar). And they’ve mixed tracks for bluesman Johnny Hoy. Recently Carlisle mixed several tunes on Buddy Guy’s just-released Skin Deep (Silvertone), the highest-charting album in the blues legend’s half-century career.

Interview: Dick Smothers

TED DROZDOWSKI — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:36:24 GMT

Mom always liked him best
The Smothers Brothers have spent 50 years in funny business.

The Smothers Brothers have spent 50 years in funny business. And sure, that’s a milestone, but the Lifetime Achievement Award they’ll receive at the Boston Comedy Festival on the event’s closing night, September 20, at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, is for something even more enduring: their contribution to America’s cultural identity.

From 1967 to 1969, Dick and Tom Smothers starred in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. At first the program was just another entry in the era’s line-up of variety shows, but it became a pipeline for ’60s youth culture, channeling ground-breaking musicians, anti–Vietnam War sentiment, and reefer-fueled cosmic consciousness into the nation’s living rooms every Sunday night. Artists from Jimi Hendrix to the Muppets got their big break on the Smothers Brothers’ show. Tom and Dick even pulled the great activist musician Pete Seeger off the blacklist, all while mixing silly songs about star-crossed love between crabs and lobsters with subtly barbed quips about foreign and domestic policy.

When in April of 1969 the show was cancelled by CBS, despite being at the top of the ratings, Tom and Dick were shocked. But nearly 40 years later, Dick, who spoke to me by phone from a hotel room on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, says that’s probably why he and his brother remain famous.

With anti-war figures like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez on the show, were you tempting the network’s wrath?
No, not at all. We were totally surprised. We didn’t think we did anything controversial. We were just doing what comedians do — making fun. In retrospect, the firing probably cemented our reputation. People don’t like having anything taken away from them before its time.

You had a show that failed before the Comedy Hour?
Yes, The Smothers Brothers Show, which was a sit-com where Tommy played an angel working to get his wings. The funny thing about that is that CBS wanted us because we were great at telling jokes and being spontaneous in front of an audience. We’d been on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar about 11 times and were selling out shows in New York clubs. So the first thing they did when they picked us up was take away the audience and give us a script.

Did you plan to be political when you got another shot with The Comedy Hour?
No, although Tommy has always been a radical left-winger and I’m a raging moderate. We came up as entertainers embracing the world of mainsteam show business. Steve Allen and George Burns and Milton Berle were some of our early reference points, although we never intended to have careers as performers. We were just brothers who argued and sang on stage, and people laughed, so we kept going.

B.B. King

TED DROZDOWSKI — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:42:25 GMT

One Kind Favor | Geffen
This is his best since his 2000 collaboration with Eric Clapton, Riding with the King .

Basic elements

TED DROZDOWSKI — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:37:36 GMT

The international and roots-music scene heats up
Boston was a world-music stronghold even before the “world music” genre existed.

SAHARAN SONGS: Vieux Farka Touré follows in his father’s footsteps at the Somerville Theatre September 27.

Boston was a world-music stronghold even before the “world music” genre existed. So there’s a rich offering of sounds from Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, India, and other locales coming this fall.

The most eagerly awaited return may be that of VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ. He’s continuing the legacy of his father, Malian music idol Ali Farka Touré, whose solo recordings and breakthrough work with American guitarist Ry Cooder put the art of his impoverished, landlocked African nation’s griots on the charts. Ali died in March 2006; Vieux made his recording debut in 2007 with an album bearing his name on the World Village USA label and a sequel, the remix disc UFOs over Bamako, that introduced him to the international dance circuit.

Like his father, Touré also has roots in blues and R&B, as we saw when he came to the Museum of Fine Arts August 20 as part of the “Still Black, Still Proud: An African Tribute to James Brown” project, whose members included Fred Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis from Brown’s JB’s band, and Senegal’s Cheikh Lô. But the guitarist, singer, and percussionist will deliver a more traditional performance at the Somerville Theatre September 27 at 8 pm: a set of Malian and Saharan tunes, backed by his quintet.

Many of this season’s world-music highlights will be on concert stages rather than in clubs. The Somerville, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Berklee Performance Center, and Harvard’s Sanders Theatre will all host outstanding artists. At the Somerville, the fall offerings begin on September 19 with KAL, a seven-piece group from Belgrade who modernize the romance of Gypsy music from Bosnia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Serbia. Then on October 3, it’s LO COR DE LA PLANA, an a cappella six-piece from Marseilles who sing in the Occitan language of Southern France, combining Mediterranean roots with African influences and plainchant.

The theater resonates with African music again on November 1, when the popular TOUMANI DIABATÉ returns. This time it’s a rare solo performance for the world’s leading kora player. And if you can’t get enough Tuvan throat music, HUUN-HUUR-TU on November 22 are your ticket. Sure, Siberia has the gulag, but it also has one of the most resonant and hypnotic vocal styles in the world.

Bill Burr

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:42:50 GMT

Why Do I Do This? | Comedy Central
The tirades he delivers here, always laced with self-depreciation, amount to a lovingly mean-spirited string of barbs aimed at racists, idiots, girlfriends, bikers, and well, just about everybody.

Blues juniors

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:25:08 GMT

Back Door Slam rejuvenate a British tradition
A guitar howls through the streets of downtown Chattanooga just as the sun begins to set, pealing out an elaborately improvised solo pasted onto the end of “Red House.”

YOUNG GUNS: Back Door Slam have been at it since they were 16, and Davy Knowles confesses that they’ve even covered “Free Bird.”

The (other) British invasion: Five great bands from UK blues' back pages. By Ted Drozdowski.

A guitar howls through the streets of downtown Chattanooga just as the sun begins to set, pealing out an elaborately improvised solo pasted onto the end of “Red House.” The six-stringer, Back Door Slam’s Davy Knowles, has his wah-wah pedal pushed way down to make his Strat sing at the slightest flick of his pick.

Although plenty of bands have covered this Hendrix staple, Back Door Slam — who will open for Kid Rock and Lynyrd Skynyrd Saturday at the Comcast Center — are investing it with rare power and authority. Besides, the tune’s a perfect closer for the “Bike Night” street fair they’re playing, and Knowles’s notes bounce off nearly as many parked Harleys, BMWs, Indians, and other bikes as they do bricks.

“Red House” and “It’ll All Come Around” have become the favored epic closers for the hundreds of sets the rocking blues-inspired trio have played across America since the release of their debut, Roll Away (Blix Street), in June 2007. The disc rambles as much as the band and their cramped van have, criss-crossing from heavy electric blowouts like the Cream-y “Outside Woman Blues” to the acoustic title track to the shimmering romantic ballad “Too Good for Me” to the bonus cut “Real Man,” which blends the kind of pick-and-strum chitlin-circuit licks that Hendrix perfected with the melodicism of Robert Cray.

Roll Away — which was recently followed by the release of several live covers on iTunes including “Red House” and the Cray tune that gave the band their name — sounds like the work of musicians from the Deep South, guys who grew up drinking the same muddy water as the Allman Brothers and the Skynyrd boys. But Back Door Slam are actually the latest scions of a British lineage that goes back to the ’60s, when John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and a clutch of other groups squeezed the pulp of their American blues idols to produce a distinctive musical juice.

“It’s not like we consider ourselves saviors or anything,” says Knowles, who is modest for a 21-year-old guitar monster with the voice and looks for pop stardom. “But if somebody hears us and then goes out and buys a Muddy Waters record, well, that’s fantastic.”

For olde times’ sake

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:54:01 GMT

The return of the Squirrel Nut Zippers
Squirrel Nut Zippers aren’t just a cult band — they’re practically a cult.

VIDEO: Squirrel Nut Zippers, "Hell"

Squirrel Nut Zippers aren’t just a cult band — they’re practically a cult. The sextet’s flair for 1920s formal wear and their musical skeleton of the same era’s jazz and orchestral pop — fleshed out by blues, country, rock, and even klezmer — make them stand out as much as any group of alien worshippers. And it’s been that way since they crawled out of Chapel Hill’s club scene and carved their own path through the grunge- and alternative-rock-dominated ’90s.

Now, after a six-year absence, they’re back, regrouped since 2007, and heading toward making a new album, with a stop along the way at the Paradise this Friday.

“I can’t believe we haven’t been back to Boston yet,” says drummer Chris Phillips. “WFNX was the station that introduced Squirrel Nut Zippers to commercial radio.”

That was back in 1996, when the Zippers had just released their second album, Hot (Mammoth), which included a saucy little swing tune called “Hell.” Its horns, banjos, and Cab Calloway–style vocal delivery stood out boldly alongside R.E.M. and Nirvana. Plus, the group’s name comes from a chewy candy that Necco began manufacturing in Cambridge in the mid 1920s.

After Squirrel Nut Zippers got big in Boston, “Hell” broke out everywhere, including MTV, where the video became a camp classic. It was followed by two more singles and another brilliant video worth eyeballing on YouTube: the early-’30s-style black-and-white cartoon for 2000’s “Ghost of Stephen Foster.”

Humor has always been an essential part of the Zippers’ world view, along with an omnivorous musical diet, right from the days when Phillips and frontman Jimbo Mathus met while working in an Italian restaurant in 1993. “We had both just discovered turn-of-the-century New Orleans jazz and found we had a lot of the same tastes and had both come up playing in punk-rock bands,” explains Phillips.

So he, Mathus, and Mathus’s then-wife, Katherine Whalen, dove in. “A lot of the music from that era was poorly recorded, and we were listening to most of it on tapes, so it was hard to decipher,” he goes on. “But Jimbo is a really deep musician. He started learning all the chords, and there was a lot of whisky drinking, chicken frying, and playing music until all hours of the night.”

By the time of the Zippers’ 1995 debut, The Inevitable (Mammoth), the group had become “a black box,” according to Phillips. “You stick your hand in and you could pull anything out.”

Poli-sci

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:46:22 GMT

Jimmy Tingle runs again
Comedian Jimmy Tingle is on the stump.

“Why can’t we build submarines for addicts, and while they get clean under water, they can patrol our coasts?”

Comedian Jimmy Tingle is on the stump. “A lot of candidates say they want to stop crime, but none of them wants to communicate with criminals,” he says. “If elected president, I will not only have ex-convicts in the Cabinet, but I will recruit them from previous administrations.”

He’s also got a handle on the energy crisis. “What about tapping the human energy in America — the bicycles in health clubs? Why can’t we hook those up to generators?”

Tingle brings his newly revamped one-man show Jimmy Tingle for President to the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown for a run beginning next Thursday, July 24. He’s the latest to hit the road to the Oval Office in a line of humorists that starts with Will Rogers and continues on through Pat Paulsen and Stephen Colbert. And why not? Tingle has been a man of ideas since the late 1980s, when he broadened his approach to comedy, abandoning traditional stand-up for political and social satire. That move made him the toast of England and a commentator on 60 Minutes II and MSNBC here in the States. It even netted him an HBO special.

Until last October, the Cambridge born-and-raised comic was also the proprietor of Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway theater in Somerville. “We did a lot of great shows and had a lot of fun,” he explains in a vowel-tugging Boston twang when we speak by phone, “but I was becoming more of a businessman and less of a performer and writer. To go to another level, I had to let it go. Jimmy Tingle for President is a way for me to be engaged in all the day’s issues. It compels me to think about solutions and to be funny and insightful.”

So I question the faux campaigner.

Are you a Paulsen or a Rogers candidate?
I’m more of a Rogers candidate, because he was a better comedian and writer.

What experience do you have?
In 2000, I did Jimmy Tingle for President for a week at the Comedy Connection and a week in Wellfleet.

Why run again?
This is an interesting time for a humorist like me. Politics is so mainstream now. When I started doing political humor in the ’80s, very few people were. There was no cable, no Daily Show. Now we’re inundated with the topics of the campaign, and people are overwhelmed by the seriousness of it.

New Guitar Summit: Jay Geils, Duke Robillard, Gerry Beaudoin

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:17:23 GMT

Shivers | Stony Plain
This cool, sleek soundtrack for a night of cocktails, sophisticated banter, and, hell, maybe even nookie brings the elegance of ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s jazz blues crisply into the present.

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog

TED DROZDOWSKI — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:54:51 GMT

Party Intellectuals | Pi
Humor, melody, and weirdness rule in this NYC avant guitarist’s sonic universe.

Preacher Jack gets it from on high

TED DROZDOWSKI — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:55:52 GMT

Boston rock legend and 66-year-old piano wrangler keeps hammering the keys
“I get my energy directly from Jesus,” says Preacher Jack Coughlin.

HAVE MERCY! “When God gives his energy to me, I become like a five-year-old boy on stage.”

“I get my energy directly from Jesus,” says Preacher Jack Coughlin. Which implies that besides being a living Boston rock-and-roll legend, the 66-year-old piano wrangler is also the spiritual equivalent of the Energizer Bunny. At least, that’s how it seems on those nights when Preacher Jack hammers the keys for hours, switching among tunes by Hank Williams, Mahalia Jackson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Clara Ward, and Albert Ammons — a who’s who of musical sin and salvation — and launching into spontaneous, tommy-gun-paced sermons about various goods and evils. At times, it’s like watching a man breathe fire, and the source of the flame is definitely within.

“When God gives His energy to me,” Preacher Jack continues, “I become like a five-year-old boy on stage. I don’t care about my sunglasses or white shoes. All I want to do is pour my soul into the music and touch people with it. That’s my goal.”

The recent Pictures from Life’s Other Side (Cow Island) and the spate of shows he’s been playing lately (this Friday he’s at Church in the Fenway) make it seem that Jack’s just kept rolling along at the same relentless pace in pursuit of that goal since the late 1950s, when he played legendary Beantown DJ Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg’s sock hops billed as “Boston’s Jerry Lee Lewis.” That’s at the same pace, maybe, as the locomotive rhythm of his speech, which turns conversations into fascinating, eccentric monologues that range from smoking to music history to Cecil B. DeMille.

But for most of the past half-decade, Preacher Jack’s pursuit of his goal stalled, and he was flummoxed in his effort to “bring the love of God to people so they won’t be killing themselves or shooting each other or bringing about horror.” It wasn’t because of booze. He cleared that hurdle years ago, along with a few psychological foibles. Besides, Jack relates, “I’ve always felt very close to God and always loved Jesus, even when I was drinking my Budweisers.” It was simply that his manager had left Boston, and until long-time fan Peter Levine stepped up to Jack’s pulpit last year . . . well, the Preacher’s never been adept at organizing his affairs. That meant nobody was on the phone jabbering at club owners for bookings, and also that Jack was sitting at home. Even if a gig came in, he couldn’t take it unless it was within walking distance of his Salem digs.

Dr. John

TED DROZDOWSKI — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:20:49 GMT

City That Care Forgot | 429
Strident as it is, this CD was meant as a tonic for the people of the Crescent City.

Al Green

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:00:21 GMT

Lay It Down | Blue Note
The Reverend Green gets his sexy groove back after the three uneven releases that followed his 2003 secular comeback.

Soul men

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:59:08 GMT

Hucknall, Hunter, and Burke
Classic soul music’s timelessness has come again.

ALL HAIL: It’s the songs — and his singing — on Like a Fire that maintain Burke’s rep as the King of Soul.

Classic soul music’s timelessness has come again. The style’s durable humanity — a sweet blend of gospel-rooted singing and sex-beat grooves tattoo’d to hornball lyrics — is back in vogue thanks to a series of recent albums designed to take this old-school music to a new audience.

The latest entries are ex–Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall’s Tribute to Bobby (Rhino), Solomon Burke’s Like a Fire (Shout! Factory), and James Hunter’s The Hard Way (Hear Music). They’re part of a run that started with Burke’s 2002 Grammy-winning Don’t Give Up on Me, which teamed the legendary vocalist with a bare-bones team of hipster musicians led by producer Joe Henry and has continued with further fresh-slanted discs from Burke, ’60s survivor Bettye LaVette (supported by the Drive-By Truckers on last year’s Scene of the Crime (Anti-)), and others including Amy Winehouse, whose Back to Black (Republic) is this new-take-on-an-old-sound movement’s current high mark.

Of these three new discs, Hucknall’s Tribute to Bobby is the most promising and the most disappointing. It’s an unexpected homage to the 78-year-old chitlin-circuit veteran Bobby “Blue” Bland, original essayist of such soul-blues classics as “I Pity the Fool” and “Two Steps from the Blues.” What’s cool is the way Hucknall plays with Bland’s arrangements. Bland himself is known for using unexpected key shifts and modulations to achieve high drama. Hucknall’s changes include brisker tempos and sampled beats. The drag is that, graceful as Hucknall sounds singing Simply Red’s pop, his androgynous voice is a silly substitute for Bland’s musky baritone, which could turn the phone book into an erotic masterpiece. It’s as wrong as James Brown sung by a castrato.

Hunter refuses to slouch toward the contemporary at all on The Hard Way, but he still sounds fresh thanks to the ska he ingested as a British youth and to the healthy veins of calypso and Latin music that pulse through the grooves of “Carina” and “Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” Throughout, he sings like Jackie Wilson recording for Jamaica’s Studio One, and he fortifies his arching vocals with terse guitar licks that echo the great soul factories of Memphis, Muscle Shoals, and New Orleans. The Crescent City gets a little extra representation thanks to piano master Allen Toussaint’s contributions to three songs.

T Bone Burnett

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:45:18 GMT

Tooth of Crime (Second Dance) | Nonesuch
The follow-up to Burnett’s 2006 masterpiece The True False Identity (Sony) is a dark, cynical, vaguely futuristic song cycle triggered by a Sam Shepard play.

Emergency music

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:50:55 GMT

Clinic offer urgent care with Do It!
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s last words were, “Let’s do it!” The next sound was gunfire.

SCRUBS: Clinic’s newest, Do It!, is an 11-song case of the jitters.

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore’s last words were, “Let’s do it!” The next sound was gunfire.

Liverpool quartet Clinic’s new album is called Do It! (Domino), but this disc has its own disturbing sonic agenda: throbbing fuzz guitars, odd-interval organ lines, chattering percussion, wheezing melodica, churning reeds, and club-footed beats blend into a riveting 11-song case of the jitters.

Clinic have been in the business of pleasing with uneasiness since their beginning 10 years ago, when the group first gathered around their musical hookah and toked deeply of German art-rock stalwarts Can, early Pink Floyd, composer John Barry, and cognitive nihilist philosopher and musician Henry Flynt, then exhaled their self-released debut, IPC Subeditors Dictate Our Youth. Next, they put on the scrubs and surgical masks they’ll wear when they play the Paradise this Friday and began chasing their muse across the world’s stages.

What’s as surprising as the odd juxtaposition of broke-dick acoustic Delta blues and Sgt. Pepper Technicolor they bring to a number like Do It!’s “Tomorrow” is how consistent they’ve been over the years. The same mesmeric off-kilter rhythms that made IPC Subeditors and their 2002 masterpiece, Walking with Thee (Domino), twitch also keep Do It! lurching to a different drummer. That would be Carl Turney, who specializes in the kind of lug-booted waltzes that have listeners breathing uncomfortably as they’re hypnotized.

In fact, all of Clinic is one big rhythm machine that eschews traditional solos, singing, and lead lines for a weave of metronomic parts that mesh into a fresh harmonic and melodic language — with a purposeful stutter. “The urgency that our rhythms give has been a key part of our music from the beginning,” explains Ade Blackburn, the group’s keyboardist and primary singer, via e-mail. “I see that as punk- or rock-and-roll-based. There seems a lot of music now that is either sluggish or pays no attention to rhythm. We want to make music that is exciting and has a direct impact on audiences.”

Fair enough, but there’s a cinematic element to Clinic as well — a sense of space and mood within their music. In Do It!’s “Corpus Christi,” for example, they conjure the claustrophobic bustle of an Arabic market with ringing castanets and microtonal guitar. Blackburn points to John Barry, the scorer of the “James Bond Theme” and Midnight Cowboy, as an inspiration for the band’s painting detailed pictures with simple melodies. But there’s also the flavor of classic rock-and-roll minimalism in their blend of spare lines and big volumes. “Early Pink Floyd, Can and Henry Flynt have influenced our approach,” Blackburn confirms. “The songs are usually based around one chord or a riff. The intensity from that is something those bands proved can work — often better than something more fussy and complex.”

Oddballs and noisemakers

TED DROZDOWSKI — Wed, 07 May 2008 20:21:43 GMT

Looking back 20 years to the Pixies' Surfer Rosa and the beginning of the Best Music Poll
Twenty years ago, the American Top 40 was nothing like Boston’s live music scene.

RENEGADES: Like other bands of the time, the Pixies had a passion for surf music, punk rock, and marking their own territory.

View results and more from this year's Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll at BestMusicPoll.com.

Twenty years ago, the American Top 40 was nothing like Boston’s live music scene. Sure, Guns N’ Roses, George Harrison, and Cheap Trick put songs on the chart, but otherwise acts like Whitney Houston, Chicago, Poison, INXS, Rick Astley, Tiffany, and Billy Ocean ruled the nation’s soft-pop, dance music, and hair-metal-fixated tastes.

Boston was, and pretty much remains, a guitar town, even if today more of those guitars are held by singer-songwriters than blood ’n’ guts rockers. But within that six-string driven sensibility, there’s always been a little room for the quirky. Especially in ’88, when the scent of the punk revolution was still fresh and the shockwaves from creative firecrackers like the city’s own Mission of Burma and frequent visitors Hüsker Dü bristled through the local music community.

The scene wasn’t just tolerant. It encouraged oddness. One of the big winners in the Phoenix/WFNX Best Music Poll’s first year, 1989 — which reflected 1988’s action — was Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, a folky outfit that included a portly man named Neno Perotta playing a shaker made from a coffee can. Sometimes Perotta performed shirtless. He always sweated copiously on stage. Despite this, the band took the Best Local Folk category and placed for Best New Artist.

Another group featuring a portly guy who sweated a lot under the lights — the Pixies, led by a singer who called himself Black Francis — fared less well in the initial Best Music Poll. Like Ed’s, the Pixies placed in the Best New Artist category, which was won by the now woefully obscure Lemmings. And the Pixie’s second disc, Surfer Rosa (4AD), was a runner-up in the Best Local Record/Tape/CD category to a winning demo called Bang-a-lang by Mike Viola and Snap.

Well, the “snap” was on the Best Music Poll and its voters, because Surfer Rosa became one of the most influential albums of the ’80s. Today it’s widely considered the foundation of the post-punk scene’s more artistically and commercially ambitious offshoot, alternative rock.

When it arrived, Surfer Rosa was riveting and ramshackle, full of evocative imagery and noisy outbursts. Many budding artists, including Polly Jean Harvey, Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, and the members of Radiohead and Catherine Wheel, heard its siren’s call and followed.

Backwoods Barbie

TED DROZDOWSKI — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:33:46 GMT

Dolly Parton rolls out the big guns
Dolly Parton should run for president.

GLORY OR BUST: Those major labels who counted Dolly as a has-been are the ones in a bind.

Dolly Parton should run for president.

She’s qualified. For 22 years, Parton has led a vast community based on family values and cultural traditions. It’s called Dollywood, and it has far better thrill rides than most American cities. Plus, the country-music icon already has her own campaign bus, and it’ll pull into Boston on Tuesday, when Parton and her big band play the Opera House behind her new Backwoods Barbie (Dolly Records).

And Parton is an inspirational speaker. “I’ll never stop doing and I’ll never stop dreaming,” she says when we connect by phone as her bus rolls through the desert outside Las Vegas. “And I believe in putting shoes on my dreams, so if they can’t fly, they can walk.”

Dolly also knows business. In 1974, she refused to sign half the rights to her song “I Will Always Love You” over to Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker — a requirement for any tune to be cut by the King. According to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the megahit has generated more than $250 million.

“I knew it was one of my best songs,” she says, “but it wouldn’t have mattered what song Parker wanted the publishing on. That’s money I’m earning for my family. I couldn’t give it up. It was already a hit for me, but then after Whitney Houston recorded it and I did it two more times, once with Vince Gill, well . . . I’ve made gobs of money off it.”

Vast riches aside, there are many reasons why Dolly should shoot for the Oval Office. She proved she was in touch with the working class with the 1980 movie and #1 smash 9 to 5. And though she might not look presidential in her mini-skirted Pocahontas get-up or the leopard-print V-scoop one-piece she wears on the cover of her new disc, the media and the public both love an underdog.

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born that way, the fourth of 12 children in a family homesteading a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee. She moved to Nashville in 1964 to seek her fortune, and she found it. Then, two decades ago, when country-radio programmers and label chiefs decided it was time for a new rock-fangled brand of the music, she and a host of other classic artists — including Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and George Jones — were dismissed from the industry. It’s not exactly a rag-to-riches-to-rags story, but in the pop superstar realm, she became an underdog again.

Jackie Greene

TED DROZDOWSKI — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:01:20 GMT

Giving Up the Ghost | 429
This ex-blues prodigy’s latest has the verve and emotional depth of Clapton’s best singer-songwriter outings.