This weekend Nashville is hosting the 11th Americana Music Association shindig. It’s surprising that there aren’t more new releases scheduled around the event. The only one I’m aware of is the second disc from the Steeldrivers, Reckless, and it’s a good one.
Kind of an offshoot of the Dead Reckoners, it features mandolin/guitar player Mike Henderson and fiddler Tammy Rogers, and the quintet plays bluegrass with a hard twist. A combination of bluesy undercurrents and rock & roll attitude, Reckless ups the ante on their rightly praised first disc. Tunes like the frisky “Guitars, Whiskey, Guns and Knives” and the fast moving “The Reckless Side of Me” meet the solemn “Ghosts of Mississippi” and sober “Good Corn Liquor” for a satisfying alternative to today’s country and bluegrass.
If he was still alive, and who says he isn’t, Elvis Presley would have been 75 this year. To mark the occasion RCA is releasing a massive 30-disc box set, The Complete Elvis Presley Masters. When I received the announcement of an October 19 release, I thought about the two Peter Guralnick books on Elvis I bought when they came out in the mid- and late-1990s and never quite finished. Now, in the middle of Last Train to Memphis, the first volume, I’ve discovered what seems to be an incongruous soundtrack recorded in 2010 no less, John Mellencamp’s No Better Than This.
Produced by T Bone Burnett and recorded in three historic locations – Savannah’s First African Baptist Church, Sun Studio in Memphis, and Room 414 of San Antonio’s Gunter Hotel, where Robert Johnson recorded in 1936 – it was captured on a 55-year-old mono tape recorder using just one vintage microphone. Fans of his pop tunes might be left scratching their heads at this foray into folk, rockabilly, and country, but the concept works because Mellencamp channels the spirit of less complicated times. The laugh at the end of set closer “Clumsy Ol’ World” is just a hint that he was having the time of his life, making music that invigorated him and inviting the listener along for a ride that’s skillfully unfettered by modern inconveniences.
I remember seeing Dick Dale at Liberty Lunch not long after I first moved to Austin in the mid-1990s. The celebrated surf guitarist’s career was undergoing a resurgence at the time, due to the inclusion of “Miserlou” in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. What sticks with me from that evening came after he performed. Dale sat on stage and signed everything put in front of him for what seemed like hours. Some even drove home and brought back a guitar for him to autograph.
This came back to me with the arrival of Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale. Claiming to be the “first ever career-spanning collection” of his work, it’s a master class of guitar. Besides his classic sides, it also includes a magnificent take of Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” and an exuberant duet with Stevie Ray Vaughan on “Pipeline,” making it an introduction to the “King of Surf Guitar” that’s worth looking for.
This article appears in September 3 • 2010.