wihtout a trace...

So, 25 years ago I first came to the United States. It was to attend the Country Music Fanfair event in Nashville, a place perversely romanticised in my head by Robert Altman’s film of the same name, Of course, it was nothing like that.
I was looking for Geraldine Chaplin, but only found a reporter from Time magazine who was staying at the Grand Ol’ Opry Hotel which had rivers running through it. I was billeted at an out of town Days Inn which still seemed impossibly romantic, and, well, frankly, American.
My tenuous purpose for being there free and gratis was chaperoning a bunch of listeners to Radio Forth’s Barrie Country on an annual pilgrimage to the source of all things C & W.
Nashville was their Lourdes, and the sub postmistress from Fife, registered epileptic boy in his early 20’s and at least 3 visually impaired punters sought salvation through the country nation.
They craved Conway Twitty City and I desperately sought Jason Ringenberger & His Scorchers, but made do with Rodney Crowell playing for free in the city’s pedestrianised central square.
A quarter of a century later and I am watching Trace Adkins and a mightily impressive band rip up Universal Studios using what looks and sounds like a full festival sound and lighting rig.
Adkins is the latest big name turn to light up the theme park’s entertainments schedule, with MC Hammer and Pat Benatar among the recent old school attractions to get the nostalgic nods from the cognoscenti. Actually nobody seemed to care too much for Hammer’s panto routine, but thought old Pat was holding up well, giving it her well known best shot.
Trace is of a similar vintage but far more current, enjoying crossover Top 20 hits in the Billboard singles chart as well as enormously successful albums, including 2 best of compilations.
Live the music sounds like rock-lite, designed for the masses swilling Bud, Miller or Coors low calorie excuses for beer. But hell, this is a man who has been sentenced to jail (for drink driving) but never had to do the time. A 48-year-old Lousiana man who was shot flush in the chest by his second wife and lived to tell the tale. Whose drinking has got him in to tight scrapes and less than jolly japes. Yet he still sets the ladies’ hearts aflutter, and whisper it, maybe some of the men’s too.
The speakers in Monster Square are like sniper’s rifles, picking off their targets from long range.
Marie Duipuise, a French Canadian single mom relocated to Florida with her 9-year-old son Daniel, is very keen and knows the words to every song.
Her companions, John and Juan, the latter being from Panama City, are equally enthusiastic. They are charming middle aged men who look like they have line danced in the past, and make La Cage Aux Folle look like a gritty prison drama.
Trace is moving on to films now, and last year made the final of American Celebrity Apprentice. He lost out to that great British export Piers Morgan. The US equivalent of Alan Sugar? Donald Trump.
Yup. Trace Adkins – he ain’t Steve Earle but he does not appear to be Randy Travis either.

share a little time

So, Jeff Davies is showing me pictures of his family.
Lovely wife, daughter aged 20, son coming up 17, and there may have been a dog. We have never met.
All snapped smiling on the front drive of their pretty house in Central Orlando.
It has lost half its value in the past 12 months, but Jeff is obliged to show me all of this.
Obliged because his manager at West Lake Resort has determined that family is a great sales tool, and as a front line salesman he is expected to exploit his own.
We have never met, but he is showing me these pictures and giving me the back story, what his children are studying and what they aspire to be.
And Jeff tells me that he used to be a chiropractor, but time-share apparently pays better and the hours are not so long.
We have never met, and will never meet again. We do not want to own a 2 or 3 bedroomed condominium in this lakeside development, for one week a year. Or indeed every other year. We do not want to own it, or pay just $300 extra to swap it for a similar property in any of the other major tourist resorts where West Lake’s partners have identical condo.
While paying spiralling maintenance charges to keep the lawns of all these time-share properties immaculately manicured, without a blade out of place.
We do not want this. We do want tickets for the Florida theme parks at a fraction of the cost if you were to buy from any one of the hundreds of kiosks hustling a deal.
That is the sole reason for being one of the few white families in a throng of Afro American folks contemplating this tiny slice of the American dream.
We do not want the peanut butter cookies fresh out of the oven in the ‘show condo’.
They are safe in the oven gloved hands of a lady from Honduras, and are the new ‘making bread’ or ‘brewing coffee’. They smell like home. Just not our home.
But Jeff can’t let us go just yet. We have to meet his manager, a charming lady from Peru. We swap memories of the great Teofilio Cubillas, who was the real slayer of Scottish dreams at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
We were told she came to the United States, and started out cleaning peoples’ homes.
Now she sells extra part time accommodation to those who feel such a thing is necessary.
After all, for those 51 weeks of the year you are not there, rest assured your cash is keeping the place in the style to which you are barely accustomed.
Her children are keen football fans, having gone to Germany in 2006 and booked up for South Arica next year. Sadly Peru have been as absent from the tournament for as long as the unfortunate Scots.
Equally unfortunately was the fact that we did not want anything else she was selling.
We left with what we wanted, passes for the parks, the ultimate time-share experience for those with a bellyful of reality.
Jeff joked our intransigence ensured that he could hit the golf course early. Where he could daydream about still being called doctor and making the nasty back pain go away. But clearly he didn’t want that, oh no.
Next, the wonderful world of fast lines and synthetic Mardi Gras, complete with an exotic man from Panama and his partner John.
Hasta la vista, as they say down that way.

long haul

So, the United States does have a favourable policy in respect of senior citizens, despite not giving John McCain a sniff of the Oval Office in the Presidential Election.
The cabin crew of the United flight to Washington from Heathrow must have had an average age of 58, and that was with a spritely thing in her mid 30’s on board.
Transferring through Washington Dulles, cardboard cut out Obama proclaimed there was hope, and just round the corner there were t-shirts on sale shouting “Don’t blame me, I voted for McCain and Palin”. Only in America. The reactionary regressing the intellectually repressed. Result.
En route to Florida from DC the trolley dollies were mature gay men, elegantly wafting tasteful cologne as they whizzed up and down the aisle with similarly ageless in flight delights.
Sat behind us was one Barry Pryor, who appeared to be giving a demonstration of the airline’s new policy of allowing cell phones to be used during the taxi process.
“Yeah man, you would not believe what happened when I walked into the rest rooms at the airport this morning,” roared Barry to his unknown acquantance. “I found this fucking titanium bracelet, man, with five freakin’ huge diamonds set in it,” he said with all the authority of the buyer at Tiffany’s.
Barry looked like Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy on a good day or Lenny from Strange Days on a bad one. He had a black and green ring through each ear lobe, and seemed a generous type.
“I could sell this thing and buy you a freakin’ car,” he enthused to his next caller. That this could have been a family heirloom or prized anniversary gift which happened on the floor of Minneapolis airport’s toilet did not trouble Barry. To be fair to him he was nice to children, or specifically my 6 year old youngest one who kept asking him why there were so many lakes in the Orlando area as he looked out over Central Florida on the approach to an interesting landing in 40mph cross winds.
Barry and his booty disappeared in the direction of the shuttle bus. I did not see his morals.
On to the Clarion Hotel on Universal Boulevard, marching to the beat of holidaying college bands from the northern states soaking up the sunshine for spring break.
For the past two years visitor numbers have been down, and there is a hint of desperation in the air over the theme parks.
Universal is making a major investment in a Harry Potter attraction, with cranes towering over the ramparts of Hogwart’s behind the ‘work in progress’ hoardings.
This year’s principal new arrival is the Simpsons Ride. If Americans don’t get irony, then the marvellously elaborate schtick putting this in the context of Krustyland, a theme park within a theme park will go over many heads this summer.
Due to open this spring but still clearly under construction is the other big investment, Hollywood Ripe Ride Rocket.
There are many offers for cheap packages to spend days at both Universal and Disney.
More tired than some of the park’s more senior attractions are taking a time-share tour, listening to a sales pitch for 3 hours in exchange for half price tickets.
If theme park crowds are falling, it is a safe bet that the queue to own a week every other year in one of these glorified holiday camps is not getting any longer either.
Tales from this bizarre JG Ballard scenario will continue on this channel….

Peerless Texas

So it was the first time I had seen Lyle Lovett since the splendour of his Large Band captivated 3000 fans and more at the Edinburgh Playhouse in the mid 1990’s
In the comparatively boutique surroundings of the Queen’s Hall fronting his four piece ‘Acoustic Band’, the long tall man from Texas is an even more commanding presence.
Sliver of suit, boots boasting the most immaculate chiselled toes, the 51-year-old with the grin that transcends lop-sided is the most tastefully tortured artist imaginable.
Anchored by the redoubtable Russ Kunkel, his drummer of long standing who also played with the cream of the Seventies Californian scene, and gets more power out of brushes than lesser mortals manage with sticks, this is a gentlemen’s ensemble of great talent.
Cellist John Hagen has been around Lyle for at least two decades, and it shows in the repartee between them. If timing is indeed the secret of comedy, then Lovett can stand up with the best of them.
He is more tall and droll than Chic Murray, a deadpan storyteller both spoken and sung. Hagen plays the knowing straight man almost as well as he bows that cello, which is very well indeed.
They reach back as far as If I Had A Boat, cherry picking from a 23 year career, injecting renewed vigour into tunes like My Baby Don’t Tolerate and Since The Last Time.
Showstopper of the night? In a set that wreaks casual emotional havoc throughout, the penultimate tune that opens the encore, North Dakota. Unrequited painful border brooding. Cue moist glass eyes etc.
In this former church, it was a religious experience.

just like a ...

So it was 1982 and the legendary Rolling Stones were playing some “intimate” British shows, work their way back into the British public’s affections ahead of a European stadium tour.
That meant appearing at venues such as the Capitol Theatre in Aberdeen, legendary Glasgow Apollo and newly refurbished Playhouse in Edinburgh, the latter accommodating over 3,000 punters.
By default I had befriended the seasoned manager of the Edinburgh venue, a wily old operator called Ted Way, a professional brought in to ensure the place was properly run after years of less than diligent stewardship.
The Edinburgh cognoscenti viewed Ted with suspicion, a London connected guy pioneering the balding grey mullet look, with the air of somebody who knew what he was doing.
As a comparatively young independent radio buck, I was regularly invited to his office to enjoy the A list acts for whom the Playhouse was one of the first venues penned on any tour itinerary.
Ted was to be late accused of improper practices in the way he ran the theatre, but hand on heart I never witnessed anything to support those accusations. Although he was prone to ask what you wanted to drink, and if you said a Becks German lager, four bottles would be opened and lined up in front of you.
He was an indominatable character whose proudest possession was an oil painting of The Stranglers, with him in the frame as the fifth member of the band. The indestructible Shetland fiddler Aly Bain was a regular dinner guest chez Ted, and you needed to be indestructible to survive at his table.
Getting an interview with Mick Jagger had become Radio Forth’s top priority, and therefore mine.
Ted called me and suggested I come over and interview the promoter Harvey Goldsmith, with a nod and a wink on arriving at his office. Nothing said, just a wave through to the back office where the man who would mastermind Live Aid sat casually at a desk.
Harvey was accommodating and friendly, but I was uncertain how this fitted into the “get Jagger” plan, or how I would explain it back at base. It was the means to an end, a concept alien then, but much clearer with hindsight.
On the day of the show I was drinking IPA in the magnificent Café Royal, drowning my embarrassment at the Jagger failure, and hoping that seeing the Stones in such an “intimate” setting would be some recompense.
Suddenly a breathless Tom Bell, then Radio Forth’s Head Of Music, burst through the swing doors in West Register Street. He was clutching tape machine and said that if I went that minute Mick would grant an audience backstage at the Playhouse.
There was no time to think about it. A whirl and there I was in a dressing room deserted but for the Stone’s singer and some blonde woman.
“Jerry, go and get us a couple of beers darling,” drawled the sexiest man alive.
Only later did I realise that Mick had just asked Jerry Hall to go and get this 24-year-old a Budweiser, which was not as common as piss back then. Still tasted like it though.
He was loquacious, warm and friendly, I was overawed, nervous and full of 5 pints of the Café Royal’s finest.
All appeared to go well. As it turns out, the most significant thing on the tape was the distant sound of Edinburgh’s TV21 playing their final gig, having landed the opening slot through their record company Decca. They of course released all the really good early Rolling Stones material. And turned down the Beatles.
Mick had in the words of David Byrne been talking a lot but not saying anything. Possibly I was mesmerised by those legendary lips and imagining where they had or hadn’t been, but there was nothing of substance in those 15 minutes, Then again the buzz phrase in commercial radio at the time was ‘it’s all about the sizzle not the sausage’.
This was all facilitated by Matt Donald, the Eighties EMI radio plugger and one of the funniest human beings to grace the planet.
I learned that getting the big name interview was not everything after all. Unless you are prepared to ask the tough questions and listen to the answers.

Evidently John Cooper Clarke's Bus Pass

So John Cooper Clarke has just turned 60. The barely bantam-weight Salford bard middle-aged spread appears to have affected only his remarkable hair, still coloured dark as raven’s wings with approximately the same span.On Saturday night a very respectable crowd partial to iambic pentameters in a Mancunian punk rock style crammed into Edinburgh’s Cabaret Voltaire – surely the most appropriately named venue for such a literate performer.And the local literati were littered throughout the crowd, including the redoubtable Paul Reekie, another man of words who seems to improbably improve with age. The long greying hair giving him the look of a craggy Celtic Iggy Pop, but most definitely not that of an insurance salesman.(For the unfamiliar, check his early piece Lovers on the impressive compilation of Scottish post punk Messthetics No 5.)Johnny was due on stage at 8.30 but didn’t make it until 9.00pm, his taxi driver apparently unsure where the Cab Vol was situated in the heart of the historic Olde Towne. Next to the Blair Street Sauna, from where many a promoter of shows source the dressing room towels for the appearing stars. Freshly laundered, obviously.And to think JCC could have hopped on a bus for free, if he remembered to bring the pass. Sporting a heavy red tint rather than the old black wraparound shades of old, he drinks whisky with a bottle of water chaser. Class. His are one of the few shows where the cry of “Twat!” is a request not a heckle, although the occasional Czech lager fuelled hollers from the more drunk and confused are deftly despatched out of the park. There are more yarns and gags than poems, but no complaints on that score.The highlight is Beasley Street being restyled as Beasley Boulevard, with all the accoutrements of 21st century living. Back in 1982 or so I committed the broadcasting faux pas par excellence of deciding to play his single at the time, I Married A Monster From Outer Space.It was during a show called Forth Street at tea time, on curiously enough, Radio Forth.In my defence Forth Street was the station’s actual address.Being disorganised as usual, only the album was to hand, and not thinking about the single edits so popular back in the day, slammed on the LP version.“I mean it’s bad enough with someone from another race,” says Johnny, “But fuck me a monster from outer space.”Cut things short before the next refrain but fell short of an apology. How many of the sizeable drive time audience rang in to complain? Not a single one.Admittedly, I only played a record, but it will come as no surprise that profanity failed to be quite the boosty woosty to my career as it did for those of Ross and Russell all these years later.

Hicks

So I was going to interview Bill Hicks at Radio Forth. He was appearing in a tent on the Meadows as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in a circus tent. Regular Music were taking a chance on the new enfant terrible of American stand up comedy. Because William Melvin Hicks was ferociously anti anti-smoking folks were confusing him with the better publicised “No Cure For Cancer” comedian Dennis Leary. The two having had a war of words not dissimilar to the early Eighties contretemps between Jerry Sadowitz and the Bing Hitler character devised by Craig Ferguson.
In fact Hicks was entirely magnanimous with regard to Leary. I watched the latter perform his impressive routine while UK producer Lisa Meyer (co writer of the Young Ones and then beau of Rik Mayall) ran a stop watch on his performance. Afterwards we adjourned to the Beau Brummel boozer on Edinburgh’s Hanover Street, where Dennis proved to be one of the most genuine and affable performers you could encounter on the Edinburgh Fringe. “I have kids, and just want to secure them a decent future” he said over a couple of beers.
Hicks was incredible. I had concocted a transparent Desert Island Discs rip off called Getting Personal, where guests would select their favourite tunes to play during an hour (commercial or course) or conversation.
He agreed to participate, and insisted that all his selections were by either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, because, he said, everything else was shit. Including presumably his own band The Marbleheaded Johnsons. It was of course provocative.
Bill was captivating. Others participating in the pre-recordings often wanted the music to be cut in after the recording to save time. Not him. He leapt around the studio during every tune, playing air guitar as if his life depended on it. He was the courteous Texan gentlemen throughout, while expressing some of the most trenchant views to leave the lips of any stand up of his generation. He also refused to be drawn into any discussion or debate regarding Dennis’s act, other than arching his impressive eyebrows and smiling sweetly.
Up to that point all I had heard was a cassette of his live performance ‘Relentless’, and been captivated. Seeing him perform in that tent on the Meadows, incorporating the lurid carving on the poles that supported it into his act was unforgettable.
He launched into his splay thighed porno routine and the collective expulsion of breath from the audience could have launched the world’s first Jumbo glider.
They were seasoned ‘alternative’ comedy observers but nothing prepared them for such an uncompromising onslaught.
Two years later I was on a train from Edinburgh to London and read that Bill was dead. He had quit smoking but cancer sought him out through the pancreas.
That was 15 years ago yesterday. Few have been so missed and horribly misunderstood.