STL Post-Disptach online article

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loosestring
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Post by loosestring »

^ that was me ^

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Post by Guest »

That is too cool! I'll be up there in two weeks on July 4th weekend. My wife and I are having a 5th anniversary wedding (We aloped 5 years ago and didn't have a wedding, so I promised her on our 5th anniversary we'd do it. Kind of a renewal of vows.) in my parents backyard.
They will have a fireworks show at the riverfront on the 4th. Nothing compared to what you see in St.L, but it's still a fun time where most of the town gets together at the riverfront to watch big firecrackers explode. People like explosives for some reason... :?

Sandusky
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Post by Sandusky »

Hey, loose string-I clicked on the link & Louisiana sounds like a neat town. I love to stay at B&Bs, we might have to visit there sometime & stay. We've stayed at several in Ste. Genevieve & Augusta. We like to check out the Missouri & Southern Illinois wineries as well.
Last edited by Sandusky on Fri Jun 20, 2003 8:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

loosestring
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Post by loosestring »

Nope never been there. The closest I've been to CG is Poplar Bluff and I've only been there once. I grew up in Louisiana, MO. up north of St. Louis. My parents still live there and I hope to move my family back there. I'd love to go back there and do some recording of my own. It's a great little town. You can see a nice pic of it here that overlooks the Mighty Mississippi.

Sandusky
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Post by Sandusky »

Thanks for the article, SmokeBeatsWater. That's cool 8)

Hey loose string. I live in Cape Girardeau. Home of Freddy Friction. Ever been here? It's only about an hour and a half from STL. I'd really like to move back to STL someday...

SmokeBeatsWater

Post by SmokeBeatsWater »

Jay makes the cover of the Get Out section of the Post (has the article Fraggle posted above). The St Louis RFT chimes in on Farrar, too. And, not quite a shock, Jay was voted St. Louis' best singer/songwriter while the Bottle Rockets are the best Americana.

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The Terroirist
Jay Farrar calls Terroir Blues a "back to basics" album. It's not.
BY ROY KASTEN

By Jim Newberry

Jay Farrar, "a 'glass half full' kind of guy."

Jay Farrar
Details: Anders Parker of Varnaline opens.
Music Date: Monday, June 23
Where: Blueberry Hill's Duck Room

"We have half a beer to figure it out, I guess." Across from the rolling tape recorder, Jay Farrar sits, not exactly unsympathetic and nearly patient with what will never be figured out anyway. The Feasting Fox, a restaurant/tavern on the corner of Grand and Meramec in south St. Louis, is pretty much dead. The waitress checks in and breaks up the halting conversation. He's already made the music; he's not about to say something just to fill empty air.

Farrar calls his latest release, Terroir Blues, a "back to basics" album. It's not. For Farrar, the steely blues, hermetic slide, fluttering backward-tape loops, all the found-sound interludes he calls "Space Junk" and the gorgeous and irreducible melding of sound and lyric may feel like second nature. To any close listener, the album reveals quiet revolutions of heart and sound.

"With Sebastopol [Farrar's previous album] I was trying instrumentation I hadn't tried before, synth sounds and the like," he says. "But I hadn't used pedal-steel for a while, and so this was like going back to familiar instrumentation but trying out some different forms as well. The idea was to get across two contrasting elements: one, the live feel of the songs with vocals, juxtaposing that with the instrumental backwards segments and weave those together, and still provide an album with flow to it."

Terroir Blues ("terroir," pronounced tear-wahr, is French for "soil") is Farrar's second full-length solo album and the first on his fledgling label, Act/Resist Records, which he co-directs with manager Sharon Marsh. Although still distributed by the established indie Artemis, the new label is Farrar's preemptive strike at an industry that's gone south, often dragging artists down with it. "The idea was just to restructure the working relationship with Artemis," Farrar says. "I'm autonomous now to do what I want. If I want to record a reggae album of Oasis songs tomorrow, I could do it. It's mostly the freedom it affords. Artemis isn't restrictive in the classic sense, but it still is. They'd still be putting up the money and doing the promotion. After being in the music realm for so many years and seeing so many people getting pushed around and dropped by labels -- you know, I've experienced some of that myself -- I felt that the best way for there always to be an outlet for my music is to start a label."

But don't start submitting your demos to Farrar just yet. "I don't have any grandiose plans," he says. "I'll probably try to do some side projects that might come out on the label. As far as putting out other artists, that would be too much responsibility, to make sure you're doing the best job you can for them. I'm not willing to accept that role right now. I'm not used to being on the other side."

If Terroir Blues has more spartan production values than any of Farrar's previous albums -- at least since Uncle Tupelo's acoustic masterpiece March 16-20, 1992 -- the record somehow finds vast sonic and emotional resonance within its own limits. Even the studio where he recorded, a space adjacent to engineer Mike Martin's Broom Factory studio in St. Louis, was smaller than his previous warehouse like location in Millstadt, Illinois. "We didn't drill through the walls," Farrar says, "we just punched it out a bit and ran a snake to Mike's studio. We tracked in Mike's place, but the recording equipment was in my space. It was an amalgamated experiment. We know now that you can hook two studios together."

Though fond of analog tape -- "I just like the way it sounds, especially on acoustic instruments," Farrar explains --and arcane (at least by contemporary-rock standards) instruments such as the sitar, flute and bottle-neck guitar, Farrar continues to experiment through magical accidents. The album's second track, "Hard is the Fall," reverberates with what seems to be a delay pedal gone mad. The surging echoes are something else entirely. "It's four takes of the song layered together," Farrar explains. "We didn't plan it. Mike and I were playing the song back, and [Son Volt alum] Eric Heywood was listening to a separate mix, and he got all four takes coming back at him. He said, 'You guys gotta listen to this.' We all liked it. We never tried to line up the takes, and the odds that they did line up were pretty incredible. We had to go with it.

"It sort of fit the essence of what I was going after," he adds, in a rare moment of interpretation. "It's the gist of the song: Is this a dream, or is it real?"

As if by drawing an intense bead on what has always been most real and familiar to him, Farrar has made what he knows strange and beautiful again. His voice has never curled and swayed so expressively, his rhythm guitar playing has rarely sounded with such authority, and all the sliding cross-currents, steel bars and glass tubes on metal strings finally answer Farrar's call to "deliver us now, from this 21st-century blood." Heywood plays pedal steel, Rockhouse Rambler John Horton handles slide guitar, former Blood Oranges guitarist Mark Spencer attacks the lap steel and Bottle Rocket Brian Henneman explores the electric sitar. "Brian virtually created the slide sitar," Farrar says with a smile. "He'd never seen it before he showed up to play it. Though, as we speak, he has it at his loft. He's probably practicing it now."

In the months following the release of Sebastopol, Spencer had been accompanying Farrar on the road. Their collaboration over the course of the year flowed into the Terroir sessions. "The slide guitar wound up the sonic motif, if there has to be one," Farrar says. "It wasn't planned that way. The fact that Mark and I have done a lot of shows over the last few years allowed for us to find a common thread pretty easy. Especially with that instrumental 'Fish Fingers Norway.' We tried a similar concept to our live cover of George Harrison's 'Love You Too,' though he played the song on the slide guitar. I asked him if he could play it Indian style, and he said, 'Yep, no problem.' When Mark played regularly at a bar in New York, he'd buy tapes of Indian music from a street vendor. He's got it all stored up in there."

Farrar wrote most of the songs over the summer of 2002 and at least two of the songs are meditations on the loss of his father, Jim "Pops" Farrar, who died that August. Over a simple piano part and surrounded by pedal steel, Farrar offers the tenderest of elegies: "Beat bars and the Maritime/Post-war peace and paid your dues/ Now the burden is passed on/Find a way out of these blues/You're back in Dent County."

"The contributions he made to teaching me, as well as my brothers," Farrar says, "and virtually anyone in the neighborhood who wanted to learn to play, he'd do it. I guess you'd say his legacy lives on, in the people he taught to play."

Over the past year, Farrar faced his own legacy with the seminal Uncle Tupelo as he oversaw, with former bandmates Jeff Tweedy and Mike Heidorn, the remastering and reissuing of the band's catalog. "At times it was like, 'Who are these people?'" he says, laughing. "By the second listen through, they'd start to sound familiar again."

Neither intimidated nor haunted by the past, whether personal, professional or musical, Farrar has managed that remarkable feat: to remain connected to his sources while still imagining possibilities that go beyond them. "Remembrances of pride, guilt, laughter and luck" he sings on another song for his father. "Hard is the fall, but your heart is still brand new."

"When I think of the past, I'm not brooding," Farrar says. "I find it generally uplifting, the sense of history in this city and the potential it has. I guess I'm a 'glass is half full' rather than 'glass is half empty' kind of guy."

-----

Best Singer/Songwriter
Jay Farrar
For the second year in a row, RFT Music Award voters selected Jay Farrar as St. Louis' best singer/songwriter. Though some may grumble that Farrar, like Nelly, is not so much a local artist as an artist who happens to live here, it's highly unlikely that anyone could argue that he doesn't deserve it based on his astonishing body of work. As a founding member and principal songwriter of the seminal country-punk trio Uncle Tupelo, the 36-year-old Belleville native has had an influence that far exceeds his sales. (That might change, though: The band's four albums were just remastered and rereleased with bonus tracks, along with a new compilation called 89/93: An Anthology.) After the dissolution of UT, Farrar went on to form Son Volt, an underappreciated experimental-roots-rock outfit that made three albums before going on a hiatus of indefinite length. Just over the past two years, Farrar's released two full-length solo CDs, Sebastapol and the soon-to-be-released Terroir Blues, along with the EP ThirdShiftGrottoSlack. He's also written and performed the instrumental score for the independent film The Slaughter Rule and recently founded his own label, Act/Resist, which is manufactured through his previous label, Artemis. No doubt about it: Farrar isn't the type to rest on his laurels.

Even if Farrar's place in the local-music pantheon is debatable, he's clearly inspired and influenced by St. Louis -- its rich musical history, its elegant ruination, its deep and nourishing confluences. Terroir Blues makes this connection clearer than ever before. On "Cahokian," he links the doomed civilization with the one that's building shopping malls over the Native Americans' ancient earthen mounds: "...New Mississippians/ Under a smog-choked sun/Waiting to be undone." The mood throughout is elegiac -- Farrar has said in interviews that the songs were inspired by the death of his father, local troubadour and eccentric Jim "Pops" Farrar -- but it's never truly depressing. On one of the CD's most beautiful cuts, Farrar sings, "Hard is the fall, but your heart is still brand new." Here's to new hearts, and to new beginnings. -- René Spencer Saller

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Best Roots/Americana
Bottle Rockets
"Roots/Americana" may be the least well-defined category in this reader's poll, but it's obvious the Bottle Rockets fit the term at least as well as anybody in town. The generally accepted meaning of "roots" as a term applied to music is that such music draws better than 50 percent of its inspiration from at least one form of Americana-based music, especially country or blues. The Bottle Rockets are more than a little familiar with both.

When singer/guitarist Brian Henneman and drummer Mark Ortmann were building their reputation in the late '80s with the band Chicken Truck, most of their fans described them as a cross between John Prine and Neil Young. Of course, Prine is country to a tee, but he's mostly a complex, playful wordsmith, and that's what Henneman took from him when he started writing songs. Young is a rocker who loves country music, which makes him a perfect role model for country musicians who love rock. Somewhere in there, along with dozens of other excellent stylists, these guys absorbed some ZZ Top, too, which brought some Texas blues and boogie to the mix.

Chicken Truck imploded before the end of the decade, but after Henneman achieved a solo recording deal, three-quarters of the band reformed as the Bottle Rockets. Rave reviews from the likes of Village Voice critic Robert Christgau weren't quite enough to bring the Bottle Rockets commercial success. The band has released five full-length albums on four different labels in the last ten years. If the members ever get the rights to assemble all this music under one roof, their eventual greatest-hits compilation could turn out to be one of the best listening experiences in the history of the alt-country field they helped to create.

The last year has been eventful for the Bottle Rockets. They issued a stellar tribute to the late Doug Sahm, digging deep into his catalog to bring attention to some of his lesser-known trips through American roots music. Almost immediately, bassist Robert Kearns left the band, and soon enough, so did long-time rhythm guitarist Tom Parr. Augmented by members of the Rockhouse Ramblers (also nominated this year), Henneman and Ortmann began gigging around St. Louis in a '70s-influenced country band called Diesel Island while they prepped for the future of the Bottle Rockets as original artists. With the addition of Rockhouse Rambler mainstay John Horton as second guitarist, the band is preparing to tour in the fall, in support of its new album -- insider rumblings suggest it's going to be fantastic.

The Bottle Rockets have been a great band for a long time -- more than 20 years if you go back to Henneman and Ortmann's earliest gigs together. Odds are they'll continue to delight Americana fans for years to come. -- Steve Pick

loosestring
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Post by loosestring »

Where in Mo. do you live Sandusky :?:

Sandusky
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funny criminals

Post by Sandusky »

criminals wrote: i was the one with "route" cranked, jay. :P
Hee hee, criminals, that's funny! :lol:

I feel your pain, Loose String. I used to live in St. Louis too & I really miss it. :cry: At least I'm not that far away.

criminals
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Post by criminals »

i didn't know jay moved jajouka from millstadt to dogtown.

he might have passed me (or vice versa) on one of my commutes to st. louis one morning. i was the one with "route" cranked, jay. :P

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Post by smoke »

Thanks for the article. I have the disc and I think it will blow people away when they hear it. Sonofthesoil summed it up pretty well. It is a beautiful, dark record.

loosestring
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Post by loosestring »

Cool article. I used to live in South St. Louis... ~sigh~
I miss it :cry:

fraggle

STL Post-Disptach online article

Post by fraggle »

Jay Farrar gets familiar
By Daniel Durcholz

Special to the Post-Dispatch
06/19/2003

Musicians and morning rush-hour traffic do not go well together.

About a year ago, Jay Farrar, late of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt and now a solo artist, decided to move his recording studio, Jajouka, from its former location in Millstadt to Dogtown, in part to avoid clashes with conventional commuters.

"When I was recording 'Sebastopol' (his 2001 album), the hours I was keeping were pretty rough," says Farrar, who lives in south St. Louis. "I started at like 10 p.m. and got out anywhere from 3 to 5 a.m. I don't know if you've ever been up all night and encountered rush-hour traffic, but it's something I don't want to experience ever again when I'm fatigued."

Farrar may be a little extra tired these days from having a new baby in the house, his second child. Still, he says, being a dad doesn't really affect his ability to make music.

"It makes you kind of restructure things," he says. "A lot of times when I was writing songs for this new record, I was getting up at 5 in the morning, before the kids got up, just so I'd have some time. You just learn how to make it work."

Apparently, he has. On Tuesday, Farrar will release "Terroir Blues," his second solo album and first on his own Act/Resist label. The night before, Farrar will preview some of the songs from the disc in a special show at Blueberry Hill's Duck Room. A tour with a full band will kick off later this summer.

"Terroir" is not a misspelling of "terror" but rather a term that Farrar ran across while reading an article on wine in The Atlantic Monthly. It's a French word that refers to the soil, climate, culture - everything that gives a distinct personality to the grapes being grown on a certain plot of land.

"It just struck me as an interesting word, plus the fact that there was no direct English word it translated into," Farrar says. "I thought it would work as a title."

Indeed it does, because Farrar's work also has its own terroir, dealing more and more with people, places and events of this region. As far back as Uncle Tupelo, he was writing about his hometown of Belleville and its environs. In more recent times, he's colored his work with references to Ste. Genevieve, Times Beach and other familiar locales.

On "Terroir Blues," that trend continues with "Dent County," a touching tribute to his late father, "Pops" Farrar, who was a familiar character on the local scene and a musician in his own right. There's also "Cahokian," a thoughtful meditation on the area's ancient earthen burial mounds - remarkable structures that speak to our self-destructing society, though we're more inclined to simply take them for granted.

"There used to be a Grandpa's store right there, right in the middle of all those mounds when I was a kid," Farrar says. "I'd go there to look at Harmony guitars and stuff they'd have for sale, and you'd look out, and there are the mounds. There was this odd juxtaposition of the parking lot, the mounds and people's backyards. It seemed strange to me then, and it still does now."

"Terroir Blues" is rather sparsely produced, in part as a reaction against the more textured, fleshed-out sound of "Sebastopol." That album featured more keyboards and overdubbed instruments, whereas the new one - which includes performances by a core band of Mark Spencer (ex-Blood Oranges), Jon Wurster (Superchunk) and John Horton (Rockhouse Ramblers, Mike Ireland & Holler) - goes for a live-in-the-studio feel.

Fans may get whiplash as Farrar jumps from one style of recording to another, but he finds trying different methods is the best way to keep a fresh perspective on his work.

"You sort of learn from the people you're influenced by," he says. "Like Neil Young and Bob Dylan. One of their strengths is that they're always changing things up."

In that regard, the new album offers a handful of brief instrumentals - backwards noise loops, really - that Farrar dubbed "Space Junk." Those tracks are not mere filler, but rather a subtle tribute to his dad.

"I was writing songs during the last few months of his life, so it was kind of an emotional roller coaster," he says. "I turned to working with some of the backwards sounds as a way to escape the weight of what was going on."

Beyond that, four of the songs - "No Rolling Back," "Hard Is the Fall," "Hanging on to You" and "Heart on the Ground" - are presented in two separate versions, one acoustic and the other electric.

"For the last couple of records, I've been trying different instrumentation on a song," he says. "This time I decided to throw a couple of the extra tracks on there. I was listening to a Flaming Lips record that I liked where it threw in some alternate mixes. It's the kind of situation where those versions would likely wind up on a B-side or get put on the Web site. But it's not always easy for people to track those things down."

Not when they have to deal with their kids and fight the morning commute, anyway. Jay Farrar has been there, folks, and he's felt your pain.


Jay Farrar
When: 9 p.m. Monday
Where: Blueberry Hill's Duck Room, 6504 Delmar Boulevard
How much: $20 (available night of show only)
More info: 314-727-0880 or www.blueberryhill.com

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