New release roundup The B-52's Cowboy Junkies Calexico Komeda Patty Griffin Alvin Youngblood Hart A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Sam Shepard: Playwright, actor, stud on PBS The son also rises By Dawn Eden After a lifetime of disappointments, Julian Lennon is finally doing it his way Y E S T E R D A Y Home Movies By Charles Taylor Summery, sensuous fun: "High Season" and "Rough Magic" (07/07/98) R E C E N T_. M U S I C Dig his mood By John Milward Putting the "roll" back into rock 'n' roll: An interview with Nick Lowe (07/03/98) Sharps & Flats By Bill C. Malone Everything old is young again: A look at new music from the veterans of Old Country (07/02/98) Road warrior By David Bowman The path to Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels" was paved with good intentions (07/01/98) American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Fishers of men: Two offbeat TV talk shows reinvent the celebrity interview (06/29/98) The A-Team By Jonathan Curiel A tour of Africa's biggest pop stars becomes the biggest musical bargain in America (6/24/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The B-52's TIME CAPSULE: SONGS FOR A FUTURE GENERATION | REPRISE RECORDS HEAR IT | BY ANDREW HAMLIN | I remember the B-52's first "Saturday Night Live" appearance as a definitive announcement from the world that it was weirder than I was. (One of my best friends, six years older, recalls that they carefully cut both songs roughly in half to fit the air time.) The band cut a wide swath through youth culture (from my pre-pubescence to my friend's bloom-of-pubescence and beyond) with the same resonance as this best-of's silver-shocked cover photo of the NYC World's Fair globe. They were emissaries from a future that never came, a fantasy universe of coolness cobbled from Question Mark & the Mysterians 45s and "Star Trek" reruns (the late great Ricky Wilson looks uncannily like a Federation cadet in that cover shot), which couldn't materialize in any area larger than a dorm room. The B-52's pole-vaulted with Pez dispensers into the national consciousness, expanding that fantasy till it fit inside a club, a warehouse, a veal-calf fattening pen or a hand-held FM radio you could set on "10" to enfritter local Klingons. Two solid new tracks show them still studying physics ("Debbie") and astronomy ("Hallucinating Pluto"), still searching for a planet, or a dimension, cool enough to host the real party out of bounds. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Cowboy Junkies MILES FROM OUR HOME | GEFFEN BY DAVID BOWMAN | Margo Timmins and her brother Michael have been making the same Cowboy Junkies record for 20 years, each containing the same tension. How many songs will successfully walk the line between codeine beauty and narcolepsy? There's always a point when you nod out playing a Junkies record: When Timmins is quietly singing background music, and the rain is falling. Or maybe it's snow. And there's nothing in the house to down but a dozen bottles of Nyquil. But there are those other moments -- usually a half-dozen of them -- where the simple beauty of electric guitars and Timmins' lonely voice become so chilly and terrifying it's like falling asleep in the back seat of a car in Iowa and waking up in Utah. The highs on the Junkies' last album "Lay It Down" were higher than the ones on "Miles From Our Home," but there are fewer lows on the new album. And Timmins has written another glorious song with the late great Townes Van Zandt called "Blue Guitar." (What's the story behind that association?) The Junkies continue to have the quality of old movie stars one mistakenly assumes are dead. "They're still around?" Yup, they are. They're an important band -- no one else charts the autumnal territories that they do. They're what grunge sounds like after it achieves ambiance. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Calexico THE BLACK LIGHT | QUARTERSTICK BY MEREDITH OCHS | "Tuscon's weird, man," declared Jodie Foster in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore." She was right, but it's the kind of weird you want to be around; only a surreal landscape like the Old Pueblo's could have produced the sublime music of Calexico. As a rhythm section, band principals Joey Burns (bass) and John Convertino (drums) have played with some of rock's most iconoclastic names: Giant Sand, Richard Buckner, Barbara Manning, Victoria Williams and Lisa Germano. As Calexico, the two realized their own musical vision of low-key, improvisational Americana on their 1996 debut, "Spoke." On the follow-up, "The Black Light," Calexico look south of the border for inspiration, adding mariachi horns, Latin rhythms and Tex-Mex accordion to their desert musings. Other instrumentation -- pedal steel, vibes, organ, cello and percussion -- make the album an atmospheric wonder, allowing Calexico to take the noir themes of their spaghetti westerns and desert films to outer space. It's clear that Burns and Convertino are more confident in their "solo" project this time around; while they've always been accomplished and creative musicians, the textures and subtle orchestration they've created for these songs give "The Black Light" shape, without abandoning the spontaneous feel of "Spoke." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Komeda WHAT MAKES IT GO? | MINTY FRESH HEAR IT | BY PAUL FESTA | "What Makes It Go?", the name of Komeda's latest disc, is a question one might puzzle over in regard to the band itself. What is it that makes these songs from the Swedish sub-Arctic so intriguing and irresistible? Named for the Polish film composer who scored "Rosemary's Baby" and other Polanski flicks, Komeda are nothing if not nostalgic; they riff off every 1960's pop phenomenon from the late Beatles to early electronica. But this Nordic foursome serves up retro in an unmistakable style of its own, a kind of moody, boppy minimalism that has as much to do with sunless winters as with the midnight sun. Komeda seem incapable of presenting any mood less complicated than schizophrenia. If the song is in a sunny major key, the lyrics are sure to bring cloudbursts. If it's in a gloomy minor key, you may find yourself grinning like an idiot. Whatever moods Komeda are mixing, the results are pleasingly simple on the surface, and endlessly interesting underneath. "What Makes It Go?" isn't quite as good as Komeda's remarkably lyrical English-language debut, "The Genius of Komeda." A memorable collection on its own, that first disc now takes on added significance by answering the question posed by the second. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Patty Griffin FLAMING RED | A&M RECORDS BY ANDREW HAMLIN | Patty Griffin perforated my consciousness like buckshot via 1996's "Living With Ghosts"; it featured mostly just Patty's guitar, which built little two-story cottages through the air, and Patty's voice, which hollered from the kitchen like a poltergeist with a passion for Aretha Franklin's pipes and Janis Joplin's anguish, but backed off into a resigned and seductive whisper. From "Flaming Red's" leadoff track I had to examine my stereo, then my room and finally the world outside my front door to make sure I was still in the "Living with Ghosts" universe. On the new album, drums thump hip-hoppily, distorted guitars flare grungily and electronica keyboards beep. Whether Patty or A&M mandated this smorgasbord of Contemporary Production Values is anybody's guess, but her voice holds its own against a plethora of elements, while her songs exploit and/or subvert whatever producer Jay Joyce slathers on them. While the string section saws on "Peter Pan," Patty reduces herself to a raw-throated wreck and tells the story of Wendy walking out on Peter. She's ready for radio success, but willing to reward the long-distance listener. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Alvin Youngblood Hart TERRITORY | HANNIBAL HEAR IT | BY MARK ATHITAKIS | The territory that Alvin Youngblood Hart writes songs about is an American landscape that isn't there anymore: It exists only in the pages of weather-beaten WPA guides, songbooks that only cultists read, Folkways compilations that only cultists listen to. So while cultists will be pleased to note that his "John Henry" isn't very different from the Carter Family's, everyone else will be pleased that Hart is usually building on his own skewed perspective on the past, not a received one. With a virtuosic guitar style and a voice that shifts from a dulcet croon to a piercing holler, Hart's second album unapologetically immerses itself in the deepest country and blues traditions: Muddy Waters' Mississippi, Leadbelly's Louisiana, folk traditions that have spider webbed from Manhattan to Los Angeles. But what's so appealing about "Territory" is that Hart has almost magically recovered the music's immediacy and made it modern: "Countrycide," the album's seven-minute centerpiece, is a haunting, swirling ballad of light feedback and folk-history storytelling that collides genres instead of merely imitating them. He finds a punkish, cartoonish beauty in Captain Beefheart's off-kilter "Ice Rose" and offers an urbane take on ska on "Just About to Go." Traditions are only useful if you can build on them, he figures, but he also understands why the hoary old country-blues themes are useful too. Death, loss, misery, heartbreak: how very '90s. SALON | July 8, 1998