Americana pioneer and country legend Jim Lauderdale is coming to town to play songs from his catalogue and his new album Hope. Our correspondent Kathleen Williamson is here to greet him with a wide-ranging interview in partnership with KXCI-FM and Zócalo. Enjoy—and get to the show, which, to judge by past performances, promises to be one of the best of the year.
Jim Lauderdale. Photo by Scott Simontacchi.
Jim Lauderdale and His Band will play at the Hotel Congress Plaza (311 E. Congress) on Saturday, May 14, at 7:30pm. Tickets $28 in advance at www.hotelcongress.com.
This piece is supposed to be about the upcoming appearance by legendary 70’s progressive rock act Wishbone Ash and their 50 year anniversary/celebration of their epic LP, Argus. As such, there will be thoughts on their signature twin lead guitar sound; what is it that defines progressive rock; and what it was like to be immersed in that very British primordial ooze that spawned bands of similar sensibilities, like early Genesis with Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, etc.
But mostly, after two phone conversations while he was driving between gigs (he assured me he was on Bluetooth), I find myself fascinated with Andy Powell, guitarist, singer, composer and keeper of the flame (and the brand) for Wishbone Ash since its inception in 1969.
At first, I thought his quiet, thoughtful demeanor to be in such contrast to the sound and power that can drive the music. And then I thought more about the music. And while it’s been a long time since I’ve had me some Wishbone Ash on the turntable, when I did get around to serving up Argus, I was moved by its artistry and the melding of quiet and soft with those brilliant guitar driven melodies. Having heard parts of it twice in two days, I still cannot get “Time Was” out of my head. But I digress . . .
These are but some of the things we touched upon.
Wishbone Ash—the current lineup.
Progressive Rock. When I asked Andy to define the term, he said with a wry chuckle, “It was really just bands playing with more than three chords. We were trying to flex our creative muscles, and really, just trying to be clever.” This led into his thoughts and reflections on the evolution of British music from the mid-1960s on citing bands like Small Faces and the Move and how the British fascination with American blues somehow fused with the psychedelia music of that time.
Argus. “It’s a vintage sound if you listen to the late ’60s 16-track analog. And while you always love every project you’re involved with, yes, we did know this one was special.”
50 Years of Wishbone Ash. In our first conversation I asked him if there was ever a time when he wasn’t doing Wishbone Ash, wasn’t playing or recording under that name. I know it’s not unusual for a classic rock band to reconstitute 15–30 years after its heyday. Or perhaps there was an extended hiatus or two—also not unusual for the genre. When I asked him about this again, he alluded to 1991–94, when he went off the grid, so to speak, working at what’s known as a teaching farm. Buteven then, he was still doing business and playing the occasional gig. Wishbone Ash sports a discography that includes at least 27 albums spanning more than 50 years, including 2020’s Coat of Arms.
Down on the Farm.In 1991, Andy joined his wife, who was a teacher, in a new job she had where she would be teaching kids on a farm. During this time, Powell deeply reflected on his life and his music career. “I decided I had had it with agents and managers and I’m only going to work with good people.” And so his time and energy would be split between doing chores on the farm and working on rebuilding the name and the brand of Wishbone Ash. “I needed to get real with it; strip it down to the basics and then rebuild. And I loved getting me hands in the dirt and seeing exactly what you’re made of. It doesn’t get any worse than pig shit!” he laughed. This time marked a significant turning point in his life and career. And Wishbone Ash? It was then and there Powell understood how much he needed to reach out and connect to the community of fans that was still out there.
Ahead of Its Time. Powell believes the funding for Illuminations, released in 1996 and paid for by asking the band’s extremely supportive fan base for money, was perhaps the first recording project to be funded in this way. While now quite commonplace, in the mid-1990s, crowdsourcing (Go fund Me, Indie Go-Go, etc.) was virtually unheard of. “I believe we were ahead of the curve when it came to finding new ways in reaching out to our fans. We also had one of the first websites up.” Since the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s, Powell has made excellent use of the social media tools available. In another example of being ahead of its time, Powell says it was the early 2000s that Wishbone Ash, teaming up with the band Yes, headlined a musical cruise, again quite commonplace now, but 20 years ago, not so much.
Favorite Albums in the Post-Argus Era. Post Argus simply means anything after 1980. “I’m very proud of Illuminations. I feel we were very successful in making a slick, American style rock album.” He also cites Elegant Stealth (2011), Blue Horizon (2014), and the most recent Coat of Arms. I would love to have heard him expand on his takes on what made each project so memorable.
I finally asked Andy if anyone had ever approached him about writing a book as his stories so well blended the precision of detail with the richness of the times. “Oh yeah, I’ve done that! My autobiography is called Eyes Wide Open.”
Not one who is generally a fan of older, iconic bands with multiple personnel changes, I am excited for this show.
Wishbone Ash plays the Rialto Theatre, Tuesday, May 10 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets range from $30 to 42.
Legendary folk singer/songwriter Janis Ian, a recording artist since the mid-1960s, is now on her farewell tour, with an early stop in Tucson. Tucson musician Kathleen Williamson enjoyed this illuminating conversation with her shortly before Ms. Ian arrived in town.
Janis Ian performs solo at the Rialto Theatre (311 E. Congress) at 8:00pm on March 3, 2022. See here for tickets and conditions.
Rick Wakeman is a little grumpy, a touch out of sorts. He’s between houses, moving from one to another, not sure where anything is. “It’s a nightmare,” he tells Zócalo. “But once I get settled I’m going to treat myself with a nice new turntable to play all these albums I’m packing and unpacking.” With that happy thought, Wakeman goes from momentarily annoyed to funny and gracious.
The shift puts a pleasant lie to the name of his forthcoming “Even Grumpier Grumpy Old Rock Star Tour,” which will bring him to Tucson on March 1. It’s not his first visit: Wakeman first came to Tucson with the band Yes 50 years ago, in 1972, supporting their album Fragile and its rollicking opening tune “Roundabout,” a showcase for Wakeman’s renowned keyboard skills. “That was a great tour, a lot of fun,” he recalls, “and Tucson was a pleasure.”
He’s been back several times, sometimes behind the wheel of a fast car, for Wakeman is also a longtime auto enthusiast, having owned more than 200 cars by his count—many, such as a prized Cadillac convertible, “donated,” as he quips, in divorce settlements. One of his favorites was a 1986 Dodge Ram van that he bought on a stateside tour, tired of missing planes because of perpetually late (and now, sadly, truly late) Yes bassist Chris Squire. “I’ve still got the van,” he says. “It’s here, and one day I’ll restore it.”
Wakeman, now 72, came of age when the British Invasion was just building up to land on America’s shores. “When I was 12 or so,” he says, “there were just two channels on television, and they were on for just five hours a day. The radio was dreadful. There was nothing to distract us, so we made our own entertainment. My life was spent playing soccer and playing every kind of music I could. I woke up thinking about music, went to school and spent the day talking about music with my friends. Music was everything, and it was all I ever wanted to do.”
That all proved to be ideal training for someone who would be performing before audiences just a couple of years later, and whose skills advanced so quickly that he was an in-demand session player at only 18. In that role, Wakeman has played with some of the biggest names in rock and pop music over the years: David Bowie, Elton John, T.Rex, The Strawbs, Cat Stevens, even Black Sabbath. By his reckoning, he’s appeared on more than 2,000 recordings.
Asked whether there’s anyone he didn’t play with whom he wish he had, Wakeman is quick to respond: “Yes, my favorite band when I was a kid was The Who. I always wanted to play with them. John Entwistle was a dear friend, but nothing developed. And while I knew all The Beatles and spent time with them, I never recorded with them. Still, I didn’t do too bad…”
He joined Yes in 1971, contributing to such iconic projects as Close to the Edge before leaving to make the solo albums The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He returned to Yes for several runs and was inducted with the band into the Rock in Roll Hall of Fame in 2017.
It all adds up to a storied résumé, and Wakeman is preparing for his tour by selecting music across more than half a century, gathering deep cuts from his musical heroes and colleagues and his own arsenal. It takes time and attention. “I listen to whole albums,” he says. “There are one or two cuts that you think, ‘That’s brilliant!’ Then there are one or two cuts that you think, ‘Oh, that’s awful.’ And then you realize you’re listening to your own album!”
Is there anything he’s particularly grumpy about? Says Wakeman, “Gosh, where do I start? It’s been a tough couple of years for everyone, but for the entertainment industry it’s been nothing short of disastrous. I’m a people person, and I’ve hated not being able to give concerts and go out. I don’t think anything is ever going to be quite the same, but it’s good to feel that we’re slowly coming back.”
For all that angst, Rick Wakeman is a jovial fellow. Expect plenty of jokes—he’s a master of the off-color tale—along with reminiscences and, of course, a full slate of classic tunes at the show.
Rick Wakeman will appear at the Rialto Theatre (318 E. Congress St., 520.740.1000) on March 1, 2022. Doors open at 7pm, show at 8pm. Tickets $38–$62. Visit www.rialtotheater.com for more information.
Friday, February 11, 2022, at Hotel Congress. The sidewalk outside of the venue was lined with all types of characters, but most had the vibe of ’70s hippies with a much more sophisticated sense of fashion. The small bar in the lobby of the venue was slightly less crowded than on a typical Friday night at the Hotel Congress, but the front room was packed, with around 200 people in attendance. Opening band Divino Nino, from Chicago, played a wide range of styles throughout their set, starting with a psychedelic slow jam and ending with a funky number that had the room hopping.
Inner Wave. Front left: guitarist Elijah Trujillo; back left: keyboardist José Cruz; center: lead vocalist and guitarist Pablo Sotelo; rear: drummer Luis Portillo; right: bassist and vocalist Jean Pierre Narvaez. Photo by Jake Ward.
Inner Wave, a band from Los Angeles, took the stage, highlighting songs from their new album Apoptosis, recorded during the quarantine in 2020 and recently released. The energy level in the room turned up a notch as the band started its set strong. The guitars, synth, and drums flowed together in perfect symphony, while the vocals carried over them seamlessly. The band sounded the same performing live as they do on record, which is an impressive feat in a world of auto-tune. The crowd was enjoying every moment of it, and the band was, too, playing as if for old friends when in fact it was its first ever appearance in Tucson. The sounds had couples and groups dancing until the very end of the show—which, we hope, won’t be their last performance here.
See here for a documentary of the making of Inner Wave’s newest.
“Pandemic blues again, life in lockdown / Don’t let your hope, your driving force / Drag on the ground.” So writes Jay Farrar in “These Are the Times,” two years into a worldwide plague that, he adds, has us “walking backwards.” One of many highlights on the new Son Volt album Electro Melodier, the song speaks to Farrar’s guarded optimism that, as he puts it elsewhere on the album, “the worst will soon be over.”
Electro Melodier began as a classic Covid album, assembled, as so many are these days, with musicians recording in different studios, one Son Volt member from as far away as New York, most of the others closer to Farrar’s home base of St. Louis. But something was missing in the distance, he says, and as time went on and the album inched along, “we all masked up and played together.” There’s an agreeably live feel to the album, one that hits the ground running with the upbeat, aptly titled “Reverie,” which encourages its listeners not to “stop dreaming on a distant star.” The album continues in a similar spirit, though with a couple of more pensive moments, one of them the song “War on Misery,” which, Farrar says, “I wanted to sound something like Lightnin’ Hopkins, with a low-tuned guitar and some quiet spaces.”
In a sense, Farrar tells Zócalo, the pandemic was a boon, if in just one regard: by taking the band off the road and constant live performing, it gave him and his bandmates the time to work hard on crafting an album that holds together as a piece. Even so, he allows, he’s glad to be going out on tour again after nearly two years away, a tour that will see the band’s return to Tucson after several years on top of the pandemic-born hiatus.
Electro Melodier, says Farrar, came together well overall, though one song, he says good-naturedly, was a little like pulling teeth. A slow march with pensive lyrics about the big lies in the face of the “truth we all know,” it “started to veer off in a direction that was sort of like the band Rush. We had to dial it back a bit to keep it from going off into prog-rock territory.” It’s now safely back in the Americana pocket that Farrar helped pioneer, another standout in an album that never falters.
Son Volt at 191 Toole, Wednesday, January 19, at 8pm. $25 via Ticketmaster or at the door. Proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test within the previous 48 hours is required for admission, and masks must be worn.
It’s almost impossible to write about Lisa Morales and her upcoming show on the Hotel Congress patio without writing/talking about her sister and lifelong singing partner, Roberta, who succumbed to a three-year battle with cancer a scant three months ago. “It’s still hard,” she said in a recent phone interview as she prepares for her first tour since the advent of Covid.
“I was with her in the hospital every day for three months, after the initial diagnosis,” she said. Following chemo and radiation, “she fought, and she won, for a while. We were hoping she might sing on the [new] album. Obviously, it’s still pretty raw.”
Native Tucsonans and members of the extended Ronstadt clan, Lisa says, “we knew we had something special since we were little girls when our father used to take us to sing at La Fuente [on Oracle Road] with the mariachis.” In time, as their individual musical personas developed, Roberta eventually joined Lisa’s already established band, and their new group, Sisters Morales, was born. Relocating to San Antonio, where they set up shop, they recorded six albums and toured the world. Their unique blend of homegrown Arizona/Tex-Mex, fueled by their original compositions and stellar harmonies, melded roots steeped in traditional Mexican music with a contemporary flair for Americana and blues. This original brand of Southwest gumbo, so hard to define but so easy to love, made them a must-see act on the road and festival circuit throughout the country and abroad.
While their visits to Tucson were too few and far between, they did play a memorable show the El Casino Ballroom in the early 2000s while also headlining the Tucson Folk Festival in 2005. Following the death of their mother in 2011, the sisters decided it was time to part ways musically, although, “of course, we were still very close.”
Since then, Lisa has produced two solo albums and is on the cusp of releasing a third, She Ought to be King, due out next spring. In its first single, “Freedom,” Morales sings about the power of loving each other as a mother does and speaking up when we see injustices. “It’s a very simple message,” she says. “Love one another, be kind, do the right thing, be honorable and help one another.”
Musically, “Freedom” retains a percussive Latin feel, although it’s not like anything one would associate with the sisters. Clearly her growth as an artist continues to be reflected in her solo work. It’s a ride that has allowed her to rub elbows with everyone from Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys to Rodney Crowell. “Freedom” also boasts the services of original Santana and Journey alum Gregg Rolie on keyboards and backing vocals.
When she takes the stage at Hotel Congress, it will be the second show of a tour that follows a hiatus dating back to early 2020 and a welcome reprieve from a series of Zoom and other online offerings. In dedicating this show to Roberta, Lisa will be fronting a four- or five-piece band in a homecoming that no doubt will be as comforting as it may be bittersweet.
The Lisa Morales Band plays the Hotel Congress outdoor patio on Saturday, November 13, at 8:00 pm. Doors open at 7:30. Tickets are $20 general admission, $25 reserved.
“You can’t be young and do that.” So writes James McMurtry, closing in on 60, in the first song on his new album The Horses and the Hounds. You can’t be young only because it takes decades to live up to the vision of that song, “Canola Fields,” which takes in dozens of years and thousands of miles, speaking of love, fear, mortality, and wandering, among other things, and that has a stoic feel to it, as if to say, sometimes things work out, and sometimes they don’t.
McMurtry’s expansive vision comes naturally: he’s a Texan who looks out on a big horizon, after all, and his father was the noted novelist and part-time Tucsonan Larry McMurtry. Many of the younger McMurtry’s songs have a 30,000-foot view of things, whether he’s writing of the country folk who wind up going off to fight America’s secret wars—we don’t know about them, he notes, because they’re not on TV—or of a border rider who shoots his best friend for reasons we can only guess at. The songs are evocative of dusty, windy places, sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic, always memorable.
The Horses and the Hounds, McMurtry says, isn’t exactly a COVID album. Most of the tracks were laid down a couple of years ago. COVID, of course, got in the way of everything all the same. “I couldn’t go out and play for more than a year,” he says, “so I worked on the recording some more.” The result is a richly layered work that often sounds like—well, a horse trying to kick down the gate and head for the field, impatient and onrushing. Listen to “What’s the Matter,” a song that answers its own question, and its blaze of guitars and stomping drums, and you’ll get a sense of his impatience to get the show rolling again. (“Oh, yeah,” McMurtry adds, “and I had five different keyboard players, all of ’em on B-3!”)
James McMurtry will perform songs from his new album on September 5 at the Hotel Congress Plaza (311 E. Congress). For the vaxxed and masked—others need not apply, and proof of vaccination is required—McMurtry’s solo show will begin at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20 in advance or at the door.
This December all live theater and dance events are canceled in Tucson, but you can still take in the Nutcracker at El Toro Flicks drive-in theater (198 S. Granada Ave., 520 449 4468).
On December 21, Danswest Dance Company presents a new, original staging of the classic ballet. Written and directed by Danswest owner and professional tap dancer Megan Maltos, Not Your Ordinary Nut features dancers aged 7–18, plus a few courageous dance dads. NYON is entirely choreographed by Tucson artists, three of whom grew up dancing at Danswest.
The show incorporates elements of all of Danswest’s styles—ballet, yes, but also acrobatics, tap dancing, jazz, even hip hop, and plenty of heart. The dancers had six weeks to learn the choreography before it was filmed in October. Danswest will offer two screenings at 6:00 pm and 9:30 pm. Tickets are $40 a carload. For more information, contact Megan.maltos@gmail.com, (520) 240–2476.
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