After the Tornado: Talking with Gillian Welch for WaPo

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch (Alysse Gafkjen)

I spoke with the great Gillian Welch about one of my favorite subjects — setlist-making — and about how she and David Rawlings put a (great) song called "Hashtag" on a (great) album otherwise populated by (great) tunes with titles like "Lawman," "Turf the Gambler," and "Howdy Howdy." For The Washington Post.

America's Ass: "There Was Nothing You Could Do," reviewed.

The about-to-turn-40-year-old blockbuster album that came wrapped in an Annie Leibovitz closeup of the Boss-terior isn’t any true Bruuuuuuuce fan’s favorite, but it was a cultural landmark all the same. I reviewed Steven Hyden’s new Born in the U.S.A. reflection There Was Nothing You Could Do for the Paper of Record.

Notes on Mellencamp

A Cougar in his natural habitat. (Myrna Suarez)

There were so many parts of my tet-a-tet with John Mellencamp a couple weeks back that I knew I’d never be able to use in the <1,000-word piece the Paper of Record commissioned but that I was loath to lose all the same. When he started, I told him that I’d been listening to his music for as long as I’d been listening to music, so it was exciting and a little intimidating to be speaking with hime. “Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t put that much emphasis on it.”

I told him how it was only in 2021, after hundreds of exposures to his 1985 song “Small Town,” that I realized the line I’d always heard as hate the city was in fact hayseed. Such a specific, regional insult! He told me that audiences at his shows always mime holding a cigarette to their lips while singing along to the chorus of “Cherry Bomb,” his typical set-closer: “That’s when a smoke was a smoke.” Only that’s not the line, despite the evidence of their ears and mine. It’s “That’s when a sport was a sport,” which he said he got from the caption of a photo of him with David Bowie in some British paper in the 70s, probably not too long after Bowie’s then-manager, Tony DeFries, slapped his new client Mellencamp with the regrettable stage name Johnny Cougar. (His grown daughter Teddi Jo still calls him “Coug” to roast him, he said.)

We also talked about the consistent placement of such excellent album cuts as “Minutes to Memories” and “Jackie Brown” is his otherwise heavy-on-the-hits setlists, and why he opens his performances — not concerts — with a clip reel of scenes from films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paper Moon. I misidentified the director of the first two of those as Billy Wilder, realizing after I’d said it that they were both Elia Kazan films — but I pulled the name of screenwriter Bud Schulberg before his assistant could, preventing him, maybe, from thinking me a hayseed.

Completing THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT!

Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.

Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.

Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.

ctklimek · THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side B]

"Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story" REVIEWED IN THE WASHINGTON POST

Reviewing Bono’s memoir for the Washington Post was a big deal for me. U2 was my first favorite band, and I remain, as I say in the piece, “wearily devout.” It’s been a few years (but only two albums) since the Paper of Record let me rank their albums! (I’d like a word with circa-2009 me about some of my decisions.)

I didn’t find space to point out that the only two living world leaders for whom The Fly has anything less than an admiring word are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Or to point out that two episodes from the author’s career — though I would not call them successes — go unmentioned entirely: U2’s 9/11 memorial performance at the 2002 Super Bowl halftime show, and Bono and The Edge’s ill-fated foray (with Julie Taymor!) into musical theatre with the Broadway flop Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Though it you want to know about that exercise, I can recommend Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History.

Anyway. My review of Bono’s memoir is here. Am I boogin’ ya I doon’t mean to boog ya.

"Like a Rolling Stone: A Memoir" Reviewed in The Washington Post

Rolling Stone’s first issue, from December 1967.

Turns out you can’t say “starfucker” in the Paper of Record, even if you spell it “starf***er.” So I subbed in “starstruck to the point of myopia.”

There’s lots else I could say about Rolling Stone co-founder and longtime editor Jann S. Wenner’s new memoir Like a Rolling Stone, but the Washington Post kept me to 1,000 word or so. It was a genuine honor to write about this very superficial and self-serving book by a man who created a magazine I loved.

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side B) Cometh

In this second half of my XVIth senses-shattering installment in the apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, I attempts penance for appropriating the podfeed of A Degree Absolute! to give listeners an album they never asked for, U2-style, by roping in my co-host Glen & our theme song singer-arranger Casey in for some festive preamble before we get to the damn tape. I beg your forbearance.

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side A) Cometh

My 2021 holiday mixtape, Cheer Is the Mind-Killer, has arrived. It’s the sixteenth installment in what has become a venerable holiday tradition that invariably makes me feel unhinged in the final couple of months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast. The Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable compilation series, most installments of which remain available to stream via the Christmas Mixtapes drop-down menu at the top of the page, is now as licensed to drive as any Cory. In the chronology of the EON Productions James Bond film series, it is Licence-d (sic) to Kill.

Side B TK!