GIRL TO COUNTRY: A MEMOIR by Amy Rigby

(Southern Domestic, UK, 2026; 280 pages)

She emerged from bohemian New York with a maiden solo album, 1996’s Diary Of A Mod Housewife which shifted what was considered by a struggling music industry to be a “disappointing” 20,000 copies, despite glowing coverage. Her output since has included records with husband Wreckless Eric, the wildest card in Stiff’s pack—who encouraged her to “just get on with” Girl To City, an enthralling no-holds-barred account that left me with hope there’d be a second volume taking a life less ordinary nearer to the present.

Well, here it is: an account of a 35-year-old shaking off the fetters of a deteriorated first marriage, and uprooting to Nashville, the storm centre of what was once regarded as the squarest and, arguably, most lowbrow genre in pop. Yet it began to “celebrate rather than feel ashamed of its homespun history,” comments Amy. Certainly, by the mid-1970s, the Tennessean capital had embraced more generalized output, albeit of a kind not uninfluenced by country & western’s lyrical preoccupations and the kinda tunes folk like a-tappin’ their boot leather to.

As a result, there came to be—as Buck Owens sang in a 1973 B-side—“a songwriter under every rock,” and much of Amy’s domicile in “Music City USA”  (or, to Native Americans, “The Land of the Ill Wind”) was spent gravitating back to the Big Apple (most conspicuously to create 2005’s Little Fugitive long-player); on chiefly well-received tours overseas in venues where “the familiar smell of disinfectant mingled with the odour or beer was comforting and anxiety-inducing”—and, most germane to this discussion, camaraderie  with such as Skeeter Davis an effervescent regular on the Grand Ole Opry—which is to the C&W entertainer the same as Everest to a mountaineer—and hovering round publishing offices, most of them in close collusion with disc companies and studios on or within hailing distance of Music Row, the Tin Pan Alley of Nashville with its curt brush-offs, unreturned messages and hoity-toity receptionists.

She wasn’t entirely unacquainted with what to expect, having embraced qualified success with the Last Round Up (part of “this crazy new country punk phenomenon”), who’d chanced their arms in the metropolis during the mid-1980s. Therefore, armed with a guitar, demos and an intriguing curriculum vitae, she was poised to supplicate anyone who expressed the vaguest interest or even allowed her past the switchboard.

Up against entrenched inhibitions; “uncomfortably close to being over the hill,” and an “ethos where you only acknowledged success—never failure, fear or uncertainty,” the cardinal sin was to betray visible desperation: too nasty a reminder of the impermanence of stardom and wealth. Nevertheless, when the industry’s fish weren’t biting and left-over copies of her releases were to be destroyed (“the smasher would reduce the music I’d poured my sweat, tears and probably blood into, to useless shards and finally, powdered crystals”), she was obliged to buttress earnings as a performer with “proper” employment, albeit temporary, in a “frozen office park,” grounded by a daughter in tow, whose purpose was not “to take pride is watching your parent work at fulfilling their creative desires”—and her own father’s resumed pleas for her to “face reality and GET A REAL JOB.”

Periodically, it was a tempting prospect for one whose upbringing in “close-knit, provincial Pittsburgh” was blighted by low self-esteem and an associated degree of social anxiety disorder (not helped by persistent teenage acne). “For all my artistic ideals and aspirations,” she sighs, “maybe I just wanted to live a middle-class life, with easy parking and a cute shower curtain.” She was pushed ineffectively in this direction by a rich boyfriend who felt suspicious of every man I came in contact with between the ages of nineteen and ninety,” and of a type close to those outlined in “Needy Men” on Little Fugitive, which earned a justly rave review in The Nashville Scene, a weekly magazine that reflected the cohesion and depth of the region’s popular culture.

After the new century shifted out of neutral too, all signposts began to point towards the link-up with the fellow who “felt like English pop music royalty to me”; moving with Eric to a village in Aquitaine (“thinking how cool it would be to have Richard Coeur de Lion as your neighbour”)—and this inspired, sometimes mildly shocking—and, crucially, always entertaining—study concerned with “trying to find myself outside of the place that defined me.” (Alan Clayson)

Donovan’s Sunshine Superman at 60

By Harvey Kubernik

Sunshine Superman is the third studio LP by singer-songwriter Donovan. On August 26, 1966, it was released in the United States on Epic Records.

Donovan and his record producer Mickie Most began the album at the EMI studios at Abbey Road with arranger John Cameron, guitarist Jimmy Page, and Shawn Phillips on sitar.

The landmark album featured Donovan’s hit single “Sunshine Superman,” issued in July ’66.

In early April 1966 Donovan came to Hollywood and was booked for a well-received week-long residency at The Trip nightclub on Sunset Strip. While in town, Donovan played the Hollywood Bowl and recorded at Columbia Studios on Sunset, and cut “Season of the Witch,” “The Trip,” a tune about the venue he headlined, and “Superlungs.”

Session players on those dates included Bobby Ray on bass, drummer “Fast” Eddie Hoh, and Lenny Maitlin on Hammond organ. Additional musicians on “The Fat Angel,” “Ferris Wheel,” and “Three King Fishers” were Shawn Phillips, “Candy” John Carr on bongos, and electric violinist Peter Pilifian. On “Celeste,” the MFQ’s Cyrus Faryar is heard on the bouzouki instrument. Other songs cut in Hollywood are “Young Girl Blues,” “Museum,” and “Epistle to Dippy.”

“Mickie Most was bar none the most versatile and successful British record producer of the sixties. George Martin had the Beatles, I had the Rolling Stones, Shel Talmy had the Who and the Kinks—all self-contained acts,” underlined Andrew Loog Oldham in a 2008 interview with me.

In 1973, Loog Oldham produced Donovan’s Cosmic Wheels.

“Mickie spotted great talent—Herman’s Hermits, the Animals—and he matched them with great songs, again and again and again. In August of ’64 Mickie had three in the top 10. He could smell a hit off your wrist.

“Mickie Most and Peter Noone. These two guys had a great run together and nailed down that American affection for British song and vaudeville. Mickie Most was a great song sniffer, one of the best. ‘I’m into Something Good’ and ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’ are great records. And then there was his run with Donovan.”

Donovan sound checking at the Hollywood Bowl, April 2, 1966. (Photo by Henry Diltz / Courtesy Gary Strobl)

Donovan was the first recording artist Clive Davis signed to the Epic label after he was appointed vice president and general manager of Columbia Records in 1965, and later president during 1966.

“I signed Donovan to Epic in 1966,” offered Davis in a 2008 interview we conducted. “I was in the business side of it for a year. I was working with Andy Williams, the young Barbra Streisand, and Bob Dylan.

“I was observing. I was seeing the business change. I was seeing music change, but I was waiting for the A&R staff to lead into these changes that were showing evidence in becoming important in music.

“In June 1967, I really came to the Monterey International Pop Festival not knowing what to expect, but seeing a revolution before my eyes. I was very aware that contemporary music was changing.”

(more…)

Death Trip: Iggy and the Stooges 1972-74 by Michael S. Begnal (Reaktion Books)

Review by Duncan Fallowell

Its author was born in 1966, so he wasn’t there. An obsession comes from a desire to reach the unattainable. Much scholarship is driven by this and Begnal is scholarly. Since he can’t experience the Stooges directly he zooms in on the album that followed the London concert, Raw Power, with a forensic examination of how each track came into being. Every reference is immaculately noted. His commitment revs up to an amphetamine squeal.

Begnal’s analysis is a labour of love; and in its way an extraordinary act of performance in itself. However I do feel that it is based on an underlying misjudgement, namely that Raw Power represents the Stooges career high-point simply because it is the first Punk album. Maybe it is the first Punk album. Others have said so. But Punk, for all its seering verve, was a return to snappy little numbers. Begnal’s book duly demonstrates Raw Power’s ancestry in the trad rock catalogue of short songs.

What had happened to the Dionysiac, the long-groove, the unique and special in the Stooges? David Bowie had come into Iggy’s life. Bowie, the genius of rock lieder – and of packaging. Bowie produced Raw Power and packaged Iggy. Perhaps he also gave the album its naff title. When Raw Power was released I remember feeling let down. I gave it a positive review (which Begnal quotes) but more in loyalty and hope than conviction. The promise of Fun House, of King’s Cross, had not been realised.

Dionysiac outburst flared briefly in the Sex Pistols later, then died. As for the book’s title Death Trip – Iggy is still living, comfortably, near Miami. And what of long groove/wall of sound? With the arrival of the 12-inch single, it merged with Disco, Funk and computer electronics, leading to Dance, Trance, Techno, Rave, Drone, and when all that turned into mere knob-twiddling clichés, it slipped over to the classical world where it had always had a sibling, from Corelli to Morton Feldman, and became a fruitful new form among the conservatoire set. You may sometimes hear it, not always shorn of its elemental terrors and drive, on BBC Radio 3’s wonderful New Music Show.