B-list Country

I once did a tour playing keyboards for the undisputed queen of country Dolly Parton. That would be a better opening sentence than the following one which is longer but more truthful. I once did a tour playing keyboards for the undisputed queen of country Dolly Parton’s lesser known sister Stella Parton.

There you go, that’s Madden’s life in a nutshell. The gigs were smaller, the pay was terrible, the fans were dubious (about the music and whether they were actually fans) but the setlist was full of Dolly tunes and was immense fun to play. Stella was good, she had a few tunes of her own peppered throughout the set but she knew where her bread was buttered and did a set heavy on her sister’s hits. She didn’t have the high, borderline chipmunk, voice of her sister either but she had a gamely crack at the catalogue. She was good too, to be that talented in any other family would be a blessing but in the one she was born into it meant a life confined to being “the other sister.” That’s overstating it a bit actually, they’re a pack of fifteen siblings and Stella falls right in the middle. She’s written a lot of her own songs on 22 albums that have had 28 charting singles. Imagine all the famous people you know with weaker credentials than that. But with that surname, with a sister so famous she has her own theme park, it doesn’t quite cut it. She lives in that floating netherworld of reflected celebrity, aimlessly bobbing around with Chris Jagger, Mike McCartney, Simon Thownsend and Andy Gibb.

The tour was fine anyway, meagre audiences in some places but she really gave it her all. She had some good stage patter. She’d give a little tale every night of someone coming up to her on the merch and saying “I’m not sure you should be covering your sister’s songs, them’s pretty big shoes to be filling” to which she replied “Mister, it ain’t her shoes I got trouble filling.” Good one eh? It’s about Dolly’s breasts. Get it?

She told me lots of lovely stories about Dolly and growing up in their famously large and poor family. One of my favourites that stuck with me, she actually wept while she was telling me it, was that long after she was famous her Dad would get up before dawn to clean the birdshit of Dolly’s statue in the centre of their little town. He said he couldn’t bear the thought of people seeing his daughter messed up like that and kept up his daily duty till he died. I loved him for that.

My mate Brian was on the tour, he’s absolutely amazing at everything he turns his hand to but he was quite ill on this tour. She made him sing a few duets with her every night including Islands in the Stream, I was taken aback by how much I loved playing that. She also made Brian sing one of her own from the 70s- Legs, which is kind of dogshit but was fun to play and I cried laughing every night watching Brian sing it. Here’s Stella singing it in the 70s, it’s kind of everything that can go wrong with country but it’s also weirdly fun.

What was my favourite Dolly Parton song to play, is that what I hear you ask? It was Here You Come Again, not what I was expecting myself but it’s a pretty joyous tune. Oddly enough I made an arse of the piano intro on the first night and from that point it was the monkey on my back for that tour, I’d start sweating at that point and cock it up half the time. Whatever tour you’re on you’ll end up deciding there’s a moment in there that’s “the difficult bit.” The easier the tour is the more trivial that part can become but nonetheless your body will decide to throw all its fight or flight reserves at that moment, I think Brian had it with the start of Coat of Many Colors which he was playing beautifully but he gulped and sweated a bit regardless. Here You Come Again is full of rich changes slipping under the radar, such was the way in the 70s. Here she is performing it after a questionable introduction from the Man in Black.

Reverberation Radio

On the Stella tour we played at Bush Hall one night, a venue that looks better than it sounds. After soundcheck we were sat around eating and drinking and the engineer left some music playing and went about his business tidying up cables and labelling things. After a while I became aware that everything I was listening to was amazing and pulled the guy over to intensely tell him so. It turned out it was a mix, released monthly via podcast, by a band called the Allah-las. They’re an easy band to love if you like 60s psychedelic rock and adjacent genres. Obviously JM was making the amazing Secret Broadcasts when the Allah Las Mums and Dads were necking on park benches and drinking cider or whatever the Californian equivalent is. They seem to have stopped making Reverberation Radio in 2023 after making it to a respectable episode 421. If you’re ever unsure of what to listen to next though I highly recommend any episodes of this wonderful, eclectic labour of love.

In My Mind There’s A Room

Are you finding Royal Mail to be problematic these days? They’ve taken to once a week in Clitheroe, sending a weighty thud of out of date junk through the letterbox on a Wednesday. If you ever needed proof of the folly of privatisation just look at… actually look at the water companies. If you need a second piece of proof though…actually you’d be looking at rail second. Sooner or later though, when cataloguing the folly of privatisation you’ll get to Royal Mail, a right royal fuck up.

That said, they delighted me this week by embellishing my half kilo of no longer relevant correspondence with this beautiful piece of vinyl from Mull Historical Society. Last time I was up on the Isle of Mull, in 2023 I think, my good friend Gordon McLean of the KC band asked me to throw some organ on a few of these tunes and then I forgot about it.

Colin MacIntyre of Mull Historical Society has had a solid quarter of a century in the music business and is a published novelist too. Seeking to bring the two worlds together he reached out to a bunch of his friends from the literary world asking them to write 25 lines or so about a room that has had significant importance in their life. He’s got some big hitters on there too, I feel quite gratified to have played organ on two tunes that have been co-written with two of the biggest, Nick Hornby and Ian Rankin. Some weeks I feel like I’m not do anything and then a little reminder pops through the door that I occasionally do. I’m glad to own it, at the least its worth a listen.

More of The Band

Ben Redfearn has been sending me clips of the Band again, which come to think of it is how this all started nearly thirty years ago, although he would have lent me tapes and CDs then. It turns out that The Band’s Youtube channel is something of a goldmine, fuck Knows who’s running it but we can at least all be sure it isn’t one of them. This clip of W.S. Walcott’s Medicine Show is wonderful, I hadn’t really been thinking about how excellent a saxophone player Garth was, his brilliance really was a transferrable skill. I noticed straight away that even though it’s obviously from the Academy of Music gigs it isn’t the same take that wound up on the Rock of Ages double album. It turns out that there was a further 56 track release from the gigs mixed by Bob Clearmountain in 2013. Who knew? Call me inattentive but I wasn’t looking for new releases from the Band in 2013. That’s this week’s work cut out.

A Complete Unkown

I’m a few weeks behind the curve and you probably didn’t need me to tell you, but A Complete Unkown is marvellous. I feel like I’m primed to watch Timothy Chalamet in anything after loving Wonka so much but he really pulled this off. It would have been easy for most actors to slip into a pretty crass and annoying impression of Dylan but he avoids that, he sings a bit more nasally than he did as Willy Wonka but you’re not being snapped out of the moment by some comedic mimicry. I thought I was done with musical biopics after Ray, where I felt I was just watching someone do a pretty awesome Ray Charles impersonation in the middle of a muddled film that tried to cover too much. This one really benefits from focusing in on a couple of pivotal years and a few key relationships. It looks amazing, like you’ve moved into the world of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover for a couple of hours, and is the most convincing and detailed depiction of 1960s America I’ve seen in a film. The performances are all amazing too. Monica Barbaro is a stunning and intense Joan Baez, Ed Norton is a quietly brilliant Pete Seeger. I’ll probably watch it again, imagine that.