August Mixtape: Dog Days Edition
August Mixtape: Dog Days Edition
New stuff from Billy Strings, Joe Ely, Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, Jack White, Molly Tuttle, The Red Clay Strays, the final X, farewell to Aerosmith, and more.
The dog days of summer are here. I know many are ready for a little pumpkin spice in their lattes, but not this guy. Summer has always been my favorite season. Sure, the heat here in the South can be rough, but it’s the price you pay for beach trips, long days, warm nights, grilling out, baseball, and cool tunes.
Speaking of which, the latest Mixtape collects some of the best songs that have come across these ears over the last month or so. Take a listen and feel free to leave some of your recommendations below.
“Didn’t We Robbie” - Joe Ely
Thank God and Texas we have a new Joe Ely album to devour this week. Driven to Drive is classic Ely: Some late-night ponderin’, some honky-tonk bashin’, some all-out rock’n’roll - it’s all here, as is The Boss. Springsteen stops by to help out on the wizened swagger of “Odds of the Blues.” Springsteen and Ely have always complemented each other well (check out the Letters to Laredo version of “All Just to Get to You”), and here, Bruce indeed sounds much more at home than he does on his recent collaboration with Zack Bryan.
But it’s “Didn’t We Robbie” that really gets the fingernails clickin’. Boosted by a video that chronicles Ely’s friendship with Joe Strummer (he opened for the Clash during a pivotal moment in both their careers as the ‘70s turned to the ‘80s), “Didn’t We Robbie” reaches back to those honky-tonk hell raisin’ days with Ely’s energy and performance sounding like not a day has passed since.
“Play God and Destroy the World” - Amythyst Kiah feat. S.G. Goodman
Amythyst Kiah teaming up with S.G. Goodman is the power duo we need in 2024. The first single from Kiah’s upcoming album, Still + Bright, the swaying confidence in the performance reveals the anger underneath. “Surburban smiles are just a fraud” Kiah sings, while Goodman wants to “burn every cross you hide behind.” In the end, they warn we’re all going six feet under. Maybe that’s the only real common ground there is.
“Old Scratch Blues” - Jack White
Originally a nameless album released exclusively through his Third Man label (even the songs were untitled), Jack White gifted us No Name a couple of weeks later and did us a solid by naming the songs. “Old Scratch Blues” blows back your hair right out of the gate with the immediacy of the heavy blues that first inspired him, coupled with the fierce abandon of the White Stripes that caused us to believe that raw rock’n’roll could still be made.
“White Rabbit” - Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway
A highlight in their live set for a while now (the below video is over a year old), Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway - one of the best groups around these days in any genre - have included this Jefferson Airplane warhorse on their upcoming EP, Into the Wild, due September 30th. So surreal. So perfect. Go on, feed your head.
“Good Side, Bad Side, Side of Crazy Too” - Jerry Phillips
As soon as this damn song starts, and especially when Jerry opens his mouth, you know this is the real deal. (Sorry-not-sorry to all the stomp-clap-hey-yeah-whoah-oah-oah folks who have been clogging up the airwaves and streaming services over what seems like a decade or more now.) If Jerry’s last name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the youngest son of rock’n’roll royalty, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips. The 75-year-old’s debut album, For the Universe (recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis - as it should be), is set to be released on August 23rd. From where I stand, you better believe it’s already on the shortlist for Country Album of the Year.
“Big Black X” - X
I can’t tell you what a damn thrill it is to hear D. J. Bonebrake, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, and Billy Zoom rock again. Smoke & Fiction, the new album, is reported to be their last. They’re also on their final tour. If so, then good on them. This is the way to go out.
Oh, and punk rock, my ass. They’re a rock’n’roll band, and the best one LA ever produced.
“Drowning” - The Red Clay Strays
I’m a sucker for a nocturnal crawl; thick reverb on a guitar hitting a spare lick here and there, a vocal that can whisper through the pain on one line and shout it out the next, with a lot of space for the atmosphere to settle. You get all this and more with this new tune from Made By These Moments, the Dave Cobb-produced second album by Mobile, Alabama’s Red Clay Strays. I haven’t been paying much attention, I suppose, because these guys have apparently gone viral with a song from their first album, gotten signed to RCA, and have a song on the soundtrack to Twisters. Good for them. What counts, though, are the songs. And this one, along with a few others I’ve heard from their new album, delivers.
“Leadfoot” - Billy Strings
You’ve just got to have a song named Leadfoot in your arsenal if you’re Billy Strings. You should also have a Chevelle in your video and on your album cover (Highway Prayers, coming September 27) to drive the point home. But when you’ve also included a bunch of trippy imagery, goofy masks, and surreal animations in the process, count me in. I can feel Doc noddin’ along from the ether, degnabbit.
“Chemical Sunset” - Orville Peck & Allison Russell
Old-school soul/blues/jazz stomp from two of the most adventurously fantastic artists working in roots music these days. From Peck’s new star-and-rhinestone-studded album Stampede, he and Allison Russell need to make an entire album of this kind of material…now.
“Orangefield” - Van Morrison
Van Morrison is at his best when he’s either searching or reflecting. Live at Orangefield is Van in full reflection mode. It makes sense, as the album chronicles a 2014 set of shows recorded at the secondary school where he held his first performance in 1959 when he was 14 years old (with a skiffle group that performed “Midnight Special”). The songs here aren’t the Moving on Skiffle type, however. This is the enlightened-astral-Avalon-all-into-the-mystical-garden Van that we know and love. Some chord structures shift and songs are rearranged, but he’s fully engaged and the changes add to the fun as he takes you way back to Hyndford Street.
“Trouble” - Meshell Ndegeocello
From her new Blue Note album, No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, celebrating the centennial of the activist/author’s birth, “Trouble” finds Ndegeocello joined on vocals by Justin Hicks, Kenita Miller, and Paul Thompson on spoken word. As it moves along in its meditative groove, the might is in the message. “Everyone’s down for the struggle,” they sing, “until it begins.”
“Pure Heavenly Joy” - Elizabeth King
As you might have noticed, this world has lost its damn mind. Sometimes, though, the light breaks through the darkness with what can only be described as pure heavenly joy. Soul Provider, the new album from powerful Memphis gospel belter Elizabeth King, gives us just that for a little over half an hour. King didn’t release her debut album, Living in the Last Days, until she turned 77 in 2021. Now with Soul Provider, released in her 80th year, she finds a way to reach new heights, and in the process, gives us just enough hope to get through another day.
BONUS TRACK: “Let the Music Do the Talking” - Aerosmith
With the announcement last week of Aerosmith calling it quits due to Steven Tyler’s vocal issues, I thought I’d leave with a few thoughts on the Bad Boys from Boston.
My first exposure to Aerosmith was Rocks, and to me, it’s still their best moment. After riding in on the coattails of the “bad boy” image the Stones had already perfected (and were still cultivating), Aerosmith drew equally from the Glimmer Twins at their sleaziest and Zeppelin’s bluesy riffs at their grungiest, carrying the hard rock torch through a run of classic Columbia sides in the seventies.
By the end of the decade, however, the substances became more important than the music, and it showed. After cleaning up their act, they switched to Geffen and experienced one of the most successful second winds in rock history. Unfortunately, that didn’t start with their Geffen debut, Done With Mirrors, which is still their best front-to-back offering that isn’t named Rocks and deserves much more love than it gets. (Probably because initially the entire album jacket and label were printed backward - Mirrors! Get it? - nobody knew what the hell it was. Truly a Spinal Tap moment.)
Tyler and Perry redeemed themselves with a historic collaboration with Run-DMC organized by Rick Rubin in 1986. Finally, Permanent Vacation, released the following year, became the big success they’d been shooting for.
With the help of Desmond Child’s co-writes and a group of high-profile videos on MTV, the boys were back and bigger than ever. They ruled the roost as the elder statesmen of sleaze at the exact right moment when the focus had turned to hard rock with the help of fellow Geffen artists such as Whitesnake and Aero-acolytes Guns N’ Roses, whose Appetite for Destruction rocked harder than anything Aerosmith themselves had offered since Rocks.
Aerosmith spent the rest of the ‘80s and into the ‘90s crafting a slick, mainstream version of hard rock. Still, there’s something about that grainy footage from “Let the Music Do the Talking” (a reworked - or “Tyler’ed-up” version that first appeared as the title track from the Joe Perry Project debut) that acts as the perfect continuation of where they left off at the end of the ‘70s (the “Draw the Line” reference in the solo isn’t accidental).
That’s how I want to remember them: gritty, dirty, dangerous, just punks in the street. Back before Desmond and MTV, when they let the music do the talkin’.
As always, thanks for reading and listening!
