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To download a pdf of this page, click here.

To download a pdf of this page, click here.

There’s no way I’m not going to watch the Grammy Awards, though I really don’t want to. My feelings on the awards show –– and most of the artists ‘The Academy’ has come to stand for –– is pretty much on par with flourescent lighting. It’s unavoidable and in your face, but all it really ever does after a while is give you a headache. I don’t care who wins most of these categories because, by and large, I believe that for every person represented inside that gold envelope, there are a dozen artists at home that no one in the Staples Center cares to hear. For an organization charged with representing and protecting music, they sure don’t care much about music. But I’ll watch, no doubt, because I love to bark at the moon and complain to no one in particular (and there’s guaranteed to be a few shots of Taylor Swift, right? She’s not bad to look at.). Instead of calling the whole show a wash, I’ve decided that there really are some worthwhile things to track at the 52nd Grammys. A handful of artists with ties to our area are up for a whole lot of awards. Whether or not you buy into the Grammy philosophy, these are some folks you’ve gotta get behind:

Zac Brown Band (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group, Best Country Album, Best New Artist)

My first memory of this band is working will call at the Georgia Theatre for a ZBB show in roughly 28 degree weather. Outside. But from that, and from interviewing them a couple of times since, there’s no doubt the members of the band do rank pretty high up there on the “helluva buncha good guys” list. They’ve done a lot for Athens, including a mega-benefit at the Fox Theatre for the Georgia Theatre this past fall.

Lady Antebellum (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group, Best Country Song)

While they claim Nashville as their home (and rightfully so), not many people realize that Charles Kelly and Dave Haywood (who, along with Hillary Scott, make up LA’s core), went to the University of Georgia. I root for just about everything else UGA, so why wouldn’t I pull for them?

Sugarland (nominated in Best Country Performance by a Duo/Group)

Jennifer Nettles is from Atlanta. Well, actually, from Douglas County. But Nettles has lived the songwriter’s lifestyle in Athens and Atlanta since long before Sugarland became huger-then-mega-huge in the country world. She’s still a supporter of the small-time arts (and cut her teeth just 60 miles away at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur). I can cheer for that.

Lance Ledbetter (nominated for Best Historical Album)

87% of you are scratching your heads right now and trying to find Lance’s nomination. You probably won’t, and you certainly won’t see it on TV. Lance, owner of Atlanta vinyl restoration company Dust-to-Digital, is nominated for Best Historical Album with Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950. His Athens connection? He’s been nominated twice (and won last year) for collaboration work with Athens legend Art Rosenbaum on collections of folk and field recordings.

Alec Wooden,

Executive Editor

By: Ned P. Rauch

Six or seven years ago my at-the-time girlfriend and I took ourselves to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville, Va. And what a home: the dome, the windows, the books and books and books, the doors strung with weights and pulleys that allowed pairs of them to open simultaneously. The land, the views, the headstone that, per his instruction, makes no mention of the fact that he’d been president—it’s quite a place the man made for himself.

I don’t remember a thing about our tour-guide, but I remember lots of things she said, including how uncomfortable she was talking about the whole business about our third president and the slave Sally Hemings, how their shagging spawned a parallel line of Jeffersons who history (and their cousins) would spend 200 years trying to ignore. Jefferson was a complicated, multi-faceted, multi-talented guy, our guide said, over and over again. She’d point to a device he invented that made an instant copy of whatever he was writing then wave her hand at the gardens he laid out and then explain that Jefferson died deeply in debt and spent wildly beyond his means.

She said he had a list of four goals that he felt everyone should achieve every waking day: 1) Learn something. 2) Exercise. 3) Drink wine. 4) Listen to music. Those four tasks, she explained, made up the core of what Jefferson considered a good, productive day. You figure it wasn’t very hard for Jefferson to make sure he learned something. The guy was an expert on so many topics, it’s hard to imagine he lived a single day without learning more than most college freshmen learn in a semester. Exercise was easy then, given that walking, riding a horse and boating were the only ways to get around then and all three of those activities are now Olympic events. He had a vineyard, so Rule No. 3 was a cinch.

Rule No. 4, though, got me thinking. Jefferson died 50 years before Edison came up with the phonograph, so any music he heard had to be performed live. It helped, of course, that he played the violin well. According to the foundation that maintains Monticello, Jefferson practiced for three hours a day when he was growing up. At some point, probably not while sawing away at scales as a kid, he said music “is the favorite passion of my soul, and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism.” He bought a pianoforte for his wife, a harpsichord for one daughter and a guitar for another, making the Jeffersons, not the Carters, Virginia’s first family of music.

But for Jefferson, and everyone else kicking around at the time, listening to music was an active endeavor. There was no button to push that would fill the air for hours on end with music from all over the world; no way to capture it for later use. It must have been like when people first discovered fire, finding a lightning strike and dipping a branch into the blaze, carrying the branch back and feeding it so it wouldn’t go out and return them to the dark. The only music that reached a pair of ears in Jefferson’s time came from a pair of hands (or a mouth) from a few feet away (no amplification, either). That makes most music appreciation a remarkably elitist pastime—you had to have time and means to dig it—and puts Jefferson, one of the fathers of the world’s first great democracy, Mr. Power to the People himself, somewhat out of touch. I bet most people would have said of his fourth rule, “Buy me an instrument or a ticket to the symphony and I’ll listen any day you like. For now, I’ll concentrate on feeding my kids.”

As I type, I’m listening to a Blind Willie McTell album called Atlanta Twelve String. McTell was born in Georgia about 75 years after Jefferson died and 30-some years after the end of the Civil War (I’m being vague here because McTell’s date of birth is disputed). “I’m broke and I ain’t got a dime. Everybody getting hard luck sometime,” McTell sings. Jefferson knew of hard luck — his wife died young. He was also brilliant, driven, creative and imbued with the idea that all men are created equal … except, well, all those men (and women) he owned. These were people who would only start to be treated as human beings decades after Jefferson’s death. McTell was black and just a generation or two removed from them. Like Jefferson, he was brilliant, driven, creative and a musician. He learned Braille as a kid and wrote scores of songs that would help form the basis of the blues. And yet, had they somehow crossed paths, one wonders whether Jefferson, enlightened founding father and all that, would have invited McTell in as he made good on Rule No. 4 for the day, or sent him down to the fields. How many days of obeying Rule No. 1—of learning—would it have taken Jefferson to fully understand the wrongs of slavery (something about which he was admittedly conflicted)?

If a person’s looking for four daily rules to shape his or her day, Jefferson’s aren’t bad. Of the four, it’s really just the last that’s changed at all. I wonder if Jefferson would be pleased with how easy it’s become to listen to music on a daily basis. I wonder what he’d think of the role music played in the civil rights movement. Or of the fact that music helped a poor, blind kid from Georgia, a kid whose not-too-distant ancestors someone like Jefferson could have owned, achieve a kind of immortality, audible on a daily basis.

Ned P. Rauch lives in New York City and writes for www.tendollarradioshow.com and plays guitar in the band Frankenpine.

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I’m a fan of “best of” lists when done comprehensively and collectively — traits I believe the one you’ll find in these pages (page 42-43, if you’re keeping score) possesses. I asked our in-house and freelance staff to submit, ranked 1-20, their respective “Best of 2009” lists. Those lists were put into a simple reverse grading scale (# 1 record = 20 points, #2 record = 19 points…all the way down to #20 record = 1 point) and combined to make an aggregate top 20, melding dozens of individual voices into one.

The results were interesting — for example, multiple albums that didn’t make my own list found their way into the top 10 because so many others chose to include them. The same was true for nearly every list, as was that point’s opposite — some albums made the back end of many lists, but never gathered enough steam in the point total category to make it in the final list. Neko Case made nearly every list, but didn’t win. Three writers considered Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion to be the most overrated record of the year, yet it sits at #6. From all our differences, all our opinions, comes a list that represents no single person but somehow encapsulates us all.

In the interest of space (and the sanity of our readers), we didn’t print each person’s individual list in this issue, but they’re all available, along with survey questions and expanded results, on www.athensblur.com for the next few weeks.

Here’s the obvious question: why is our “artist of the year” not at the top of that list? Here’s the answer: the decisions were made independently, with the artist of the year settled on by immediate staff before the listing began. We weighed a good many options, searching for the artist who best captured the essence of 2009. Dan Deacon was that man — captivating audiences near and far with his live experience, releasing an exceptionally challenging yet universally accessible record and yet, somehow, remaining charmingly uncomfortable when asked to talk about himself.

Of course, the end of a year isn’t just about the best music made. It’s also a good chance to reflect on other trends we’ve watched, memorable moments and those we’ll never forget tragically taken from us far, far too soon.

It’s amazing how much can be forgotten within the span of 12 months. Events or album releases from January don’t seem like they fit with things that happened last week. At the very least, I hope these pages will be a nice refresher course and, as you start 2010, a reminder to you of what an extraordinary year 2009 really was.

Alec Wooden, Executive Editor

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Ned P. Rauch

Putting Party Faith in the Right Man’s Hands

By Ned Rauch

A few weeks ago I got the call of a lifetime. It was midday on a Saturday. Unending, cold, autumn rain dousing the concrete outside. Later that night, two great friends of mine would celebrate their birthdays in one big bash. It was one of those friends on the phone.

“I have a favor to ask,” he said. “Would you put together the music for tonight?”

I have yet to be asked to be a godfather — friends who have say it’s one of life’s big moments. I’ve met a handful of Pulitzer winners, but I’ve never asked them about the call. Also probably a big deal. But this? If a party’s a book, your songs are the paper. Nautically speaking, they are the hearty wind when conversation hits the doldrums. They get people moving, dancing and trading e-mails and numbers. They’ve got to perform the way I imagine an experienced butler would attend to the guests: always there to help, to serve, but never in the way. The wrong songs (too grating, too weird, too predictable, too aggressive, too weak) and, well, party’s over. Think pushy butler.

“I’m honored,” I said. “But I have to go. There’s not much time.” Just eight hours to build an entire night, song by song. Remember John Cusack’s guiding words in “High Fidelity?” “Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art,” he said. “Many do’s and dont’s. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.” Truer words never spoken. Here’s what I came up with.

Number 1: “Angels in Harlem,” by Doctor Clayton. An old blues tune from way, way back. Great lines about how all the pretty girls live in Harlem and “plain women live out in the country, ’cause folks just don’t want them around. When you find a ugly woman living in Harlem, she’s either rich or from some other town.” I’ve seen pretty women in Harlem and the country, but who’s to argue with a guy named Doctor Clayton? Anyway, it was a palate-cleanser of an opening song. I figured no one arriving at the party would have just been listening to a scratchy recording of a piano-based blues number. It worked. Got everyone on the same page.

Next came “Loralee,” by The Whitsundays. I don’t remember where I found these guys, but I dig them, and it’s impossible to hear this song and not bob your head. This song would introduce motion to a roomful of people who just took off their coats.  Plus, there’s something James Bond-ish about the sound of it.

The Budos Band, a neo-funk band that records in Brooklyn, were third with “Chicago Falcon.” Philadelphia horns, Meters guitars, keys, a heavy — but nimble — rhythm section and no vocals. Slick playing and plenty of “oomph” (my Little League coaches always told me to put more “oomph” into my swings. Made sense then…).

Batting cleanup was Art Neville singing “Bo Diddley (Part One).” I love Bo Diddley and any song by him or about him (of which there are lots). We’re still uptempo here, important for the small-talk portion of the bash. If you were to air drum to any of these songs, your hands would be very, very busy.

Black Joe Louis covering the old James Brown song, “I Don’t Mind” followed. This guy kills me. He’s loose, wound up, crass and smooth all at once. Slower, but still plenty of funky stops. And horns and back-up singers, which do wonders for a party.

Now, a strange move: back to the Budos Band. I think I got taken in by the song title: “King Cobra.” I couldn’t not play it. Another slow-burning, instrumental funk tune. Somehow, it worked. No other bands got repeated plays. Go Budos.

I chose Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” next. It’s one of those blues songs that swagger through pain. “Wine and women is all I crave. A big-legged woman gonna carry me to my grave.” If that doesn’t spark a conversation, nothing will.

It’s late, I know, but we’re finally getting to the first female singer of the night: Betty Davis, with “Anti Love Song.” Slinky. Sexy. Tense. If this doesn’t get your wheels turning about the guy or girl standing by the bowls of almonds (one bowl with salt, one without) nothing will.

A while ago I co-hosted a radio show. During that time I connected with a guy at Bloodshot Records in Chicago who gave me a lot of cool stuff, including a record by Andre Williams. Williams is old (70-something), loud and dirty. His “Rosalie,” which I played here, is really dirty. Talks about things going on “up under the porch.” Great tune, though I saw someone give a double take at the porch line. Borderline pushy butler moment.

Number 10: Ace Frehley, with “New York Groove.” I’ve spent most of my life loathing KISS. Somehow, these last few years, I’ve started to fall under its spell. This song, which is from Ace’s solo record (in 1978 all the KISS members released solo records at the same time; they all tanked), should be a theme song. Not sure to what.

Following Ace (no easy task): Band of Bees, with “Who Cares What the Question Is?” It’s an ersatz Ringo Starr tune, but what the hell? Catchy ditty with a great slide guitar part and nice bounce between the one and three and two and four beats.

That’s 11. I’ve got 143 more to go but no room to do it. A few highlights: In the 18 slot, Clancy Eccles and “Don’t Brag, Don’t Boast.” No. 22: The Coup with “My Favorite Mutiny.” Buddy Holly’s “Down the Line” at 30. Patsy Cline and “Walkin’ After Midnight” at 51. No. 108? Fabienne Delsol with “Mr. Mystery.” And finishing it off, Bo Diddley, with “Diddley Daddy.”

I had put together eight hours and 26 minutes of music. A bit overkill. Still, it was a good party until some jerk with a watch almost as big as his ego hijacked the stereo and put on his own music. Disaster. One guy passed out standing up. The hostess got too drunk, pissed off her sister and berated her guests. See? Very subtle art. Like butlery. Which may, or may not, be a word.

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Twenty-seven years ago Bruce Springsteen released the most daring, revolutionary and rock ’n’ roll record of his career and, perhaps, of the era. He did it without drums, bass, saxophone or pretty back-up singers and recorded it in his bedroom on a four-track tape machine. Then he went and named it Nebraska.

It’s simple, it’s spare, it’s honest and it’s haunting, and to hand it into the record company, at a time when synths and New Wave ruled, took more balls than his peers would have even dared to muster. You think Jackson Browne could have pulled that off? In today’s scene, Jack White has made a career out of zigging when people thought he’d zag. Nebraska out-zigs White by a mile, and it’s no novelty act. It’s painfully real.

In 1982, Springsteen was at the cusp of international superstardom. Born in the USA was two years away, but Springsteen had already established himself as the greatest American rock performer. The River, which came out in 1980, produced his first top-ten hit, “Hungry Heart.” He’d toured the country’s arenas, but hadn’t yet graduated to stadiums, and supernova status was anything but certain.

In the decade that had passed since the release of his first record, he’d consistently moved toward his rock side and away from his folk side, filling his songs with sharp, chiming electric guitars, pianos and organ riffs, explosive drums and sax. Whereas acoustic guitars defined the sound of 1973’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ, they appeared on subsequent records only to color a song or two.

Meanwhile, the ’80s were becoming, well, the ’80s. War between Iran and Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan, Central America a violent mess. Reagan was elected on a promise of a new morning in America that, to Springsteen’s ears, sounded like a con.

And so he retreats to a rented Jersey farmhouse with an acoustic guitar, a tape recorder and a bunch of Flannery O’Connor stories. Out comes a record about serial killers, organized crime, envy, social stratification, a cop-killer, brotherly love, corruption, Vietnam, desperation, duty, emasculation, pride, cars, love, family and — all in one song — a dead dog, a dead man, a baptism and a runaway bride.

Over the course of Nebraska’s 40 minutes are 14 deaths, including a death-row execution (another character, sentenced to life in prison, asks the judge, instead, to “put me on that execution line,”), four run-ins of one kind or another with the police, two courtroom scenes, a fist fight and a fatal explosion.

Much of Nebraska is about life’s unforgiving side and the authority patrolling it — and whether you face it or run away from it. The word “sir” appears nine times; “road” appears seven times; “car” and “highway” both appear six times. This is not a record about romance. The word “love” shows up just three times on the whole record. The first time, the narrator admits that his “love may be cold.” The other two times come at the end of the record, in the same line. “Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true.” Past tense. That love’s on ice, too.

One cut, sort of, qualifies as a love song: “Open All Night.” But it’s less an ode to Wanda, the narrator’s girlfriend, whom he met at Bob’s Big Boy, than it is to his car. Springsteen sings the lyrics to this one five times faster than anything else on the record, and it’s the one tune on which we hear an electric guitar. It, too, is running fast. There’s a frantic, fleeting freedom here. It’s the feeling you get when you know where you’re going and why. You’re in control, and control is a rare thing for the characters on this record.

And yet Springsteen is in total control of it. He played and sang every note on it, adding bits of harmonica, mandolin, glockenspiel and organ here and there, fleshing out these skeletal songs just enough to give them life. He tried the tunes with the rest of the band, but heard none of the angst and pain in the new arrangements.

Springsteen, like the people on the record, would be alone on this one and, in some ways, barely there. The reverb on his voice creates a sense of distance and detachment. While his face appeared on the cover of his last four records, Nebraska’s cover shot is just a road cutting through the prairie beneath a heavy sky. The record came out, went gold, but Springsteen didn’t tour behind it. He OK’d a video for “Atlantic City” but isn’t in it — just black-and-white shots of a beat-up gambling town.

Somehow, in the midst of all that darkness, Springsteen shines a little light. It’s dim, but it’s there in the refrain of “Atlantic City” (“Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.”) and in the title of the last cut, “Reason to Believe.” The song doesn’t offer any reasons at all, but it finds Springsteen marveling at the ability of people who’ve lost it all to endure. “At the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe,” he sings.

And that’s what makes Nebraska not just gutsy but strong: it finds hope in the hardest of times.

Ned P. Rauch lives in New York City and writes for www.tendollarradioshow.com and plays guitar in the band Frankenpine.