Blue Plate Special

Senor McQuire

Pass the Hot Sauce: Prairie Oyster likes their music traditional and country-style.

Prairie Oyster serves up some tasty C&W licks

By Greg Cahill

There is a haunting moment on “She Won’t be Lonely Long,” the plaintive opening track on Prairie Oyster’s new Blue Plate Special (Vel Vel) disc, in which singer and bassist Russell deCarle evokes a high, lonesome wail that for just a second sounds for all the world like the late, great Graham Parsons–the ex-Byrd and tragic godfather of country rock–risen from the ashes of his Joshua Tree funeral pyre.

“He wasn’t that much of an influence actually,” says deCarle, during a phone interview from his 140-acre ranch outside of Toronto, Canada, “though I did listen to the Byrds a little bit. I mean, we were playing when those guys were still around. And I was influenced by many of the same traditional singers as Parsons: Merle Haggard and the like.”

OK, so deCarle isn’t channeling the dearly departed–he’s still got a serious lock on the spirit of traditional country music.

Prairie Oyster–whose new CD shifts easily from honky-tonk shuffles to Tex-Mex reveries to Orbisonesque ballads–is hardly a household name in the lower 48 states. But this hard-working Canadian sextet has garnered six coveted Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies) since 1986, and is generating quite a buzz stateside. Of late, music critics are lumping in Prairie Oyster with such sizzling New Country revivalists as BR5-49–country bands marked more by their love of twangy guitars and the joy of a crying pedal steel.

These are prime cuts.

In the mid-’80s, such neo-traditional country artists as Dwight Yoakum and Steve Earle infused new blood into a pop-country genre bloated by slick crossover acts like Barbara Mandrell and Kenny Rogers. By 1992, Nashville had settled into the bland pop pretensions of Garth “I’ve got an MBA and I’m gonna use it” Brooks, Billy Ray “I really wish I was a Chippendale dancer” Cyrus, and other country posers.

“You mean, that Barry Manilow in a cowboy hat thing?” deCarle asks, sizing up the competition. “I’ve always listened to country music, though I also listened to tons of rock and pop and R&B. But there’s just something about it. I hear a Ray Price shuffle and–who knows what it is?–it tweaks a mysterious thing in your brain and turns you on.

“But it’s all soul music to me. I mean, I love the Stanley Brothers just as much as I love Aretha Franklin.”

It hasn’t been easy finding the limelight. DeCarle co-founded the original Prairie Oyster band in 1974, a short-lived regional hit. “That was more of a western swing, honky-tonk sort of a thing,” he explains. In 1982, the band reunited for a few gigs and has been at it ever since. In a surprise move, Prairie Oyster became the first band signed to ex-CBS bigwig Walter Yetnikoff’s new label, which most assumed would revolve around rock and pop acts. “We’re real excited,” says deCarle, adding that Vel Vel has marketed the band in an aggressive manner rarely seen in the country side of the business. “For whatever reason, they get what we are all about. In most cases, you record an album, and if the single doesn’t do that good–bang!–you’re stuck with an album that you feel very good about but that is just sitting there.

“We really didn’t want to end up spinning our wheels again.”

Instead, Prairie Oyster is bringing pure country to the table and sweetening fans who’d gone sour on the country music industry. “I think it’s always there,” deCarle says of the traditional influences. “People who love country music are always playing it. They may not be heard on the radio and they may be hidden out there, but they’re always out there doing it. I think that no matter what happened, we’d all be playing some form of this music in some incarnation.”

So is the world finally catching up to Prairie Oyster? “Hopefully,” he laughs. “I mean, one thing we have in common with the Dwight Yoakums or the Ricky Skaggses is that we hold that tradition in very high regard.”

Prairie Oyster opens for country singer Kathy Mattea on Friday, May 2, at 8 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $24.50­$32.50. Call 546-3600.

From the April 24-30, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Raza Rock

Rock as Salvation: Punk singer Roco of the Mexican band Maldita Vecindad.

Photo by Maria Madrigal

New CD showcases Latin rock explosion

By Greg Cahill

I THINK THAT ROCK CAN SERVE as a tool for social change,” says guerrilla artist and rock documentarian Ruben Guevara, who once collaborated with Frank Zappa on the doo-wop parody group Ruben and the Jets. “I mean, I’ve been a rocker all my life. Aesthetically, rock is to me a form to communicate confrontation and challenge the status quo.

“I’ve held to that credo all my life.”

For Guevara, that perspective provided the driving force behind his latest project, Reconquista! The Latin Rock Invasion (Zyanya/Rhino), a vibrant compilation of defiant Spanish-language anthems designed to ignite, shake, and rattle the psychic core of society.

“Many of the songs in this collection are simply blues in a different and broader context,” explains Guevara, during a phone interview from his East L.A. home. “Rock and the blues have evolved in Latin America as a way of purging the horrors of history.

“Latin rock has become a raw sensory channel, airing wounds of terror, anger, and sorrow. Rock as exorcism. Rock as salvation. Rock as grace.”

It’s a real eye-opener for gringos. After all, you can count on one hand the number of Latin musicians who have broken through to the mainstream: Richie Valens, Julio Iglesias, Los Lobos, Gloria Estefan. Indeed, the death of Tejano singing star Selena–the subject of a new major motion picture–stunned the mass media, in part,because few knew about the enormous extent of her popularity within the Latin community.

“That’s a real good commentary on U.S. society in general,” Guevara reflects. “It just shows how departmentalized we are and how afraid we are to listen to stuff that’s in our own backyard. We’re just not very open to other cultures.

“I think it’s time to be a little more adventurous, a little more courageous.”

Visceral and passionate, the 17-track Reconquista! is a good place to start. Stylistically diverse, the criteria for inclusion required, not hits, but bands that are “saying something and saying it with power and passion,” Guevara says, specifically Latin rock bands that focus on social and political commentary.

“One of the first bands that I heard that totally knocked me out was Mano Negra, who were originally from Spain before getting kicked out of the country and moving to Paris,” he adds. “The first song I heard them perform was ‘Viva Zapata,’ an homage to the Zapatista rebels fighting Mexican government forces in the Chiapis region. I was blown away that they were politically aware and well informed and that they were actually doing a piece dedicated to that struggle.

“That set the tone for the compilation.”

One of the most chilling songs on the compilation is “El Matador,” in which Los Fabulosos Cadillacs of Argentina memorialize a Chilean poet–nicknamed El Matador–who had his hands amputated by police before thousands of horrified onlookers at a packed soccer stadium. His crime: writing seditious poetry.

“It was a brutal act and one that should be remembered,” Guevara says. “I mean, here was a man who did nothing more than tell the truth and he had his hands amputated in modern times!”

THE SPANISH BAND Seguridad Social deliver a bold condemnation of the conquest of Central and South America by Spanish conquistadors in the 15th and 16th centuries. “I think it offers incredible unity for Latins because even the Chicanos hold animosity toward Spain for the colonization and the repression,” Guevara says.

“We are the result of that–after all, our parents and grandparents moved up here because of economic oppression directly connected to the colonization and the conquest.

“History lives and bad memories are hard to put aside.”

On “JFK,” Nagu Gorriak–from the Basque region of Spain–debunk the Camelot myth that paints President John Kennedy as the superfriend of the world, even contending that Kennedy once conspired with dictator Gen. Francisco Franco to back an invasion of the countryside with American B-52s and U.S. Marines.

“In my estimation, not even the Clash are as strong as them,” Guevara says. “They can switch from punk-metal to salsa so fast that you can’t even imagine that they’re the same band.”

“Un Gran Circo” by Maldita Vecindad y Los Hijos del 5 Patio (The Children of the Fifth Caste of the Damned Neighborhood) is an eclectic mix of ska, rai, and carnaval drumming that centers around the main square in Mexico City, the original site of the Aztec temples long since demolished and replaced by a Catholic cathedral. Today, the square hosts a circuslike parade of beggars, protesters, and firebreathers.

The band, one of the top rock acts in Mexico, is now being courted by major labels in the United States.

“I hope that it sparks some interest in the non-Latin community as well,” Guevara says of the compilation. “Musically speaking, I think that it’s very interesting and fresh.

“I’d like it to connect with the world-beat audience.”

Unfortunately, Rhino Records has decided to issue the liner notes only in Spanish, though an English translation is available by mail or on the label’s Website.

IN MANY WAYS, Reconquista!–the first in a series of compilations focusing on domestic and worldwide Latin music–is the culmination of more than 30 years’ work. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Guevara recorded in the early ’60s with the Apollo Brothers doo-wop group. In 1971, he met Frank Zappa. “Our interests in music were similar, from doo wop to Bartok. And I was interested in rock theater,” Guevara explains.

Zappa, who three years earlier had created the doo-wop parody band Ruben and the Jets for a recording, suggested that Guevara put together a stage version of the band. “At the time, it seemed like a good opportunity, but I was burned out on rock: the flaky musicians and the low-paying gigs,” he recalls.

“I told Frank, ‘It sounds good, but there are just too many detours in rock.’

“He told me, ‘You know, man, you’ve got to build your own roads.’

“So I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ “

GUEVARA RECORDED two albums with the band on the Mercury label, the first produced by Zappa. “That lasted three or four years,” he says. “We split up and I started writing material that focused on more social and political issues.

A few years later, Guevara became one of the first artists on Rhino when label president Richard Foos in 1976 asked him to record a doo-wop version of the “Star Spangled Banner.” In 1983, Guevara returned to compile the two-volume Los Angelenos: The East Side Renaissance, featuring his band Con Safos and chronicling the then-emerging East L.A. roots rock scene (Los Lobos bowed out because of contractual problems), and a third album spotlighting the best of the Midnighters, the pioneering Latin rock band.

“Those proved informative to the rock press, which at that point didn’t really know about the body of work we had contributed as a community,” Guevara says. “But they didn’t do well commercially.”

He later worked as a performance artist, but in 1990 approached Foos about reactivating the label’s Latin music subsidiary.

“The vision then was to cover the whole U.S. Latin music scene, from the 1940s to the present.”

Foos agreed. In 1993, Guevara started planning a Raza music series, spanning 50 years of Latin rock. When he realized that there were no compilations focusing on the broad global Latin rock scene, Guevara went back to Foos and suggested that they start there and work their way backwards.

The result is Reconquista!

“My whole thing as an artist has been to confront the status quo and to make people look at our humanity with a new perspective and then to celebrate it,” he says.

“We all need to be revitalized by rock ‘n’ roll. The material on Reconquista! is meant to make us reflect and dance at the same time.

“With that combination, how can you lose?”

From the April 17-23, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Island Style

In Tune: Ledward Kaapana appears with other masters of the style on April 23.

Photo by Paul Schraub

Three Hawaiian slack-key guitar greats play at LBC

By Traci Hukill

HAWAIIAN CHEESE is legendary. Screaming aloha shirts and matching muumuus, tins of macadamia nuts sold for their weight in gold, the same syrupy-sweet strains of steel guitar dripping from the Muzak system in every airport, restaurant, and store–all bespeak the tourist industry’s unswerving devotion to schlock.

But they’re not fooling the Hawaiians. From Ka’u in the south of the Big Island to Haena in the north of Kauai, folks still come home from work, plop down on the couch with their guitars, tune them ki ho’alu style–Hawaiian for “slack the key”–and settle in for an evening of playing music and talking story. A lilting, relaxing style that fuses elements from folk, country, ukulele, and good ol’ campfire music, slack key has been around for 150 years and just keeps gaining popularity.

Slack key–which can now be heard stateside, thanks to an ambitious series on pianist George Winston’s eclectic Dancing Cat label–owes its existence to a few quirky circumstances. In 1832, King Kamehameha III hired Spanish and Mexican cowboys to control a cattle population run amok on the Big Island. The paniolos, as the Hawaiians called them (from español), brought guitars and played them around campfires at night. After they’d taught the Hawaiians the best of their cowboyish arts in the way of cattle damage control, they returned home, some generous souls leaving their guitars behind with the Hawaiians.

The official word is that the islanders adapted the tunings to their own music. In the un-PC and more entertaining version, however, no one remembered to show the Hawaiians how to tune their new instruments, and so sprang up a number of creative region-specific tunings that eventually assumed such whimsical names as “Wahine,” “Taro Patch,” and “Mauna Loa.”

Until the ’70s ushered in a resurgence in cultural pride and encouraged slack-key masters like Gabby Pahinui and Atta Isaacs to go public with their considerable knowledge, slack key was steeped in secrecy. Families so jealously guarded tunings and techniques that performers used to turn their backs to tune their guitars. Today, the tunings for each song are listed in the CD jewel case jacket, and would-be slack-key players can take university classes or learn from how-to videos and books.

Keola Beamer, Ledward Kaapana (with Bob Brozman), and George Kahumoku Jr. will perform the sounds of Hawaii next week at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa.

They are nurturing a style steeped in rich tradition. George Kuo–who has been playing slack key since the ’70s, the height of the so-called Hawaiian Renaissance–picked up tips from buddies and later from masters like Ray Kane and Pahinui. Kuo developed a silvery, precise, almost cerebral style of playing that nods to the old school of the ’30s and ’40s even as it flirts with jazz and improv, especially when he’s playing with his part-time band, the Sons of Hawaii.

“But we don’t go overboard,” insists the soft-spoken Kuo. “We try to keep it the old style.”

The Rev. Dennis Kamakahi–who really is an ordained Episcopalian minister, although he presides only “when they need the help”–enjoys the distinction of being one of Hawaii’s most popular songwriters. His song “Wahine ‘Ilikea” splashed across the islands when the now-defunct Hawaiian Style Band recorded a pop version of the song in the early ’90s. Like Kuo, Kamakahi started young, practicing his first chops on a ukulele as a tyke of 3 and moving on to slack key in high school. Kamakahi’s style of playing is warm and vibrant, each song a soulful consideration.

Indeed, most slack-key guitarists take their art to heart. “In my family, music was taken very seriously,” says Beamer, who wrote “Honolulu City Lights,” one of the most popular Hawaiian songs of all time. His most recent album, Mos’uhone Kika: Tales from the Dream Guitar, appeared on Billboard’s chart of top world music. “Music was an integral part of our lives, almost like religion,” he adds. “But Hawaiians are up against a shallow stereotype, often demeaning to our native culture.”

Keola Beamer, Ledward Kaapana (with Bob Brozman), and George Kahumoku Jr. perform Wednesday, April 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $17.50 for adults; $15 for juniors and seniors. Call 546-3600 for details.

From the April 17-23, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.