Django All the Way

Gypsy jazz has settled permanently with guitarist John Jorgenson

Ask guitar master John Jorgenson why he has devoted much of his professional career to the music of Django Reinhardt, the legendary 1930s and '40s Gypsy swing-jazz guitarist, and the popular country and jazz picker is quick to reply.

"He was the first," Jorgenson says in a soft, but matter-of-fact manner. "He was the first guitarist to be the frontman of his own band. I mean, there were other guitarists, like Eddie Lang before him and Charlie Christian later on, who were featured in various bands, but they weren't up front like Django.

"Django was the first guitar hero."

Jorgenson is something of a guitar hero in his own right.

In the 1980s, as a member of the Desert Rose Band, along with ex-Byrd Chris Hillman, Jorgenson racked up three Country Music Awards as Guitarist of the Year. After leaving the band in 1990, Jorgenson co-founded (with Will Ray and Jerry Donahue) the critically acclaimed triple-threat roots-rock guitar band the Hellecasters.

Two years ago, Jorgenson reunited with the Desert Rose Band for five shows and is currently on a second reunion tour.

But it his longstanding connection to the Hot Club music and Gypsy-jazz style shaped by the late, great French/Belgian guitar master that occupies most of his professional pursuits these days. He's currently touring as part of the annual workshop and concert package that is Djangofest.

Jorgenson—a classically trained Southern California native whose father served as music director for jazz great Benny Goodman's band—was first bit by the Django bug in 1979. "I had just gotten a job at Disneyland—it was supposed to be a three-month job playing bluegrass and Dixieland music," recalls Jorgenson during a phone call from his vacation on the Florida Gulf coast. "I didn't know how to play either of those styles of music, but I bought a mandolin and started learning. A couple of guys I knew who were really into 1920s and '30-style swing jazz told me I should check out Django. So I bought an album.

"As soon as I heard it, I freaked out! No one else I'd heard played with the wildness and intensity of Django—he reminded me of Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix."

Since 1988, Jorgenson has gone on to release eight Gypsy swing-jazz recordings and toured extensively with his talented quintet.

His enthusiasm for Django hasn't waned.

"The vitality and the excitement of his recordings have never lost their appeal," he says, "much in the same way that early Beatles recordings or early Elvis records—the music is of a certain period, yet there is a timelessness that appeals to people throughout the years.

"You don't need to be a jazz fan or a guitar aficionado to be reached by that music. It has an exotic side—that Gypsy element is in the music and adds to the mystique and the mythology. Django's music is romantic, accessible, joyful and melancholy—all at the same time.

"There's also an athletic element—I know that I certainly enjoy watching Bireli Lagrene and other adherents of Django's music vaulting all over the fingerboard."

—by Greg Cahill

I Walkman with a Zombie

I woke up this morning with zombies on the brain. That's on the brain, not eating my brain. I don't know what the deal was, but when I hopped into the car later to head for work, my iPod was cued up to the 1960s voodoo-pop classic "I Put a Spell on You," by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who used to make his stage entrance from a coffin and sport a plastic skull as a sidekick.

Then I learned that a zombie walk—a flash mob for the life challenged—was being organized in San Francisco the next day, a stunt for filmmaker George Romero's zombie epic Survival of Dead, opening May 28.

I've been summoned by flesh-eating corpses.

Swept up in the zombie zeitgeist.

Zombies are everywhere, which is to be understood, what with the impending rapture, plagues, zombie banks and the Mayan-certified global disaster right around the corner.

They're in Christmas musicals, video games, Hollywood films, the local mall (a popular place for zombie walks), literature, 115,000 YouTube videos and more than 5,000 iPhone apps.

Still, truth be told, I don't dig zombies.

Oh, I appreciate all those campy 1940s horror flicks—what's not to love about Jacques Tourneur's silly 1943 classic I Walked with a Zombie? And Romero's 1968 gore-fest Night of the Living Dead, with its post-Apocalyptic spin and racial undertones, is a bona fide classic.

I even read S.G. Browne's satirical Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, about members of a support group for zombies who start fighting for civil rights. Ex-stripper-turned-award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, United States of Tara) has optioned the film rights. Hopefully, she'll tap the fun-loving side of the undead and spin a suitable soundtrack.

Musically, the past five decades have been a mixed bag for zombies. Remember 1968's chart-topping hit "Fire," from the bombastic Brit singer Arthur Brown? Yeesh. On the other hand, Dr. John's night-trippin' New Orleans classic "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," with its evocation of voodoo priestesses, was the real deal.

Since then, everyone from the Cranberries and the Hooters to Michael Jackson and My Chemical Romance has paid homage to the undead.

Zombies can even be found on Seth Green's animated TV series Robot Chicken—the chicken-clucking tune heard over the end credits is a version of "The Gonk" from Romero's 1978 zombie paean Dawn of the Dead.

But most zombie flicks are larded with metal (though Woody Harrelson's 2009 film spoof Zombieland did cagily incorporate lots of country music). It's time for filmmakers to embrace the gloom-and-groove of psychobilly, with its dark brew of punk, surf and rockabilly fused with themes from cheap sci-fi and horror flicks.

Such psychobilly acts as the HorrorPops, the Rev. Horton Heat, the Creepshow, the Meteors, Coffin Nails and the Nekromantix (whose frontman plays a coffin-shaped upright bass), the Hellbillys and the Bay Area's own Phenomenauts all fit the bill. But the night belongs to the seminal L.A. psychobilly band the Cramps. Their campy catalog includes "Zombie Dance," "Rockin' Bones" and "Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon," as well as the sardonic 1986 album Date with Elvis, all rife with the tongue-in-tattered-cheek humor and menace of the undead.

You can just hear them rattling on the opening credits now.

Hey, Diablo Cody, are you listenin'?

—by Greg Cahill

Peter Rowan: A Darker Blade of Bluegrass

"For me, a bluegrass song should have an otherworldly quality to it. One of the great strengths of bluegrass is this inherited, Celtic, almost beyond-this-world sort of feeling," says singer, songwriter and guitarist Peter Rowan during a phone interview from the Nashville airport, bound for the annual Merlefest bluegrass gathering in North Carolina.

"Bluegrass can handle really big themes," he continues, "but bluegrass has lost its topical flavor—traditionally, it was informed by tragic events and the lives of everyday people. It often is expressed the dark side of life."

Rowan knows a thing or two about the haunting side of bluegrass music. As a member of the pioneering band Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, he co-wrote, with Monroe, the oft-covered bluegrass classic "Walls of Time," one of the most haunting songs in the bluegrass canon.


A Grammy Award-winner and five-time nominee, Rowan has lived up to that standard during a career that has spanned five decades.


Still, he's not above spinning some "slinky, funky" bluegrass tunes himself, but these days his music is steeped mainly in the legacy sound that infuses most of his latest material—the night before his flight, Rowan and his new band had wrapped up a weeklong Nashville recording session for an as-yet-untitled album slated for release on the Compass label. The special guests included country stars Ricky Skaggs and Del McCoury as well as the progressive bluegrass duo Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.

"If there is a theme to the songs [on the new album] it's built around redemption, probably family redemption and reconciliation," says Rowan, "the intensity of interpersonal relationships and how they drive our lives, really."


The core band—Rowan, guitarist and vocalist Keith Little, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jody Stecher and bassist Paul Knight—has roots in West Marin, a waystation of the cosmic cowboy sub-culture: It coalesced when Rowan sat in at the occasional Sunday jam sessions that Knight hosts at the Station House Cafe in the rural coastal town of Pt. Reyes Station, California.


That lineup returned to the restaurant this month for a benefit dinner and concert to raise funds for the cash-strapped art program at a local elementary school. Rowan and his band captivated the audience with such Rowan favorites as "Panama Red" as well as classic Bill Monroe tunes. The new songs, including the standout "Night Prayer," are among Rowan's best.


Rowan and his brothers grew up playing bluegrass around their home in Wayland, Massachusetts. In 1964, at age 22, Rowan became the first non-Southerner invited to join Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys.


He stayed with Monroe until 1967, leaving to join mandolinist David Grisman in the progressive folk-rock band Earth Opera. Moving to the Bay Area, he teamed up with Grisman, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and others on 1975's breakthrough progressive bluegrass album Old & in the Way, and contributed the song "Midnight Moonlight."

Beginning in 1982, and for the next 25 years, Rowan released a string of critically acclaimed and artistically diverse albums, ranging from folk (1990's Dust Bowl Children) to straight-ahead bluegrass (2002's High Lonesome Cowboy) to hybridized country (2005's Reggaebilly).

The ability to straddle the joyful sounds and otherworldly fare, he says, is something of a balancing act. "I'm always trying to write that bluegrass tune that might have something real in it, writing a song that's based on a real-life experience as  opposed to simply crafting a song in the singer-songwriter style," he says.

"These darker tunes range from challenging authority to mournful kinds of songs—bluegrass is famous for its mournful sound. But still, we also express joy in our music—we don't want to be hidebound. So it's a dance, really. After all, we're in a business called 'show.'"

—by Greg Cahill

The Rolling Stones—Gathering No Moss

The music world is mired in reviews of the newly released remastered version of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album Exile on Main Street. There's lots of talk about this flawed masterpiece and the fact that for a double album it spawned only two hits: "Tumbling Dice" and "Happy."

Commercially, the album was a success: it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 Pop Albums chart. Critically, well, we're still singing its praises 38 years after its release.

Murky? Sure, after all, the band (or at least songwriter and guitarist Keith Richard) was deep into a heroin habit. If you've ever done smack, you have to marvel that he could function at this high artistic level at all.

But drugs don't tell the story—smack is just a small part of the tale.

The title Exile on Main Street refers both the fact that the band was sequestered in  French chateau while escaping the taxman and to the band's self-imposed exile following the 1969 fiasco at Altamont Speedway, where members of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang, hired as security, bludgeoned a fan to death right in front of the stage and threatened to beat members of the Jefferson Airplane shortly before a guy pointed a loaded revolver at Mick Jagger who was performing just a few feet away. That sobering scene, and the singer's horrified look as he reviewed the film's rushes, are captured on the Maysles brothers' disturbing 1970 film documentary Gimme Shelter.

After Altamont, which is widely regarded as the end of '60s innocence, the Stones stopped touring, though they were at the height of their careers. Sticky Fingers was released in 1971, but Exile—recorded between 1969 and 1972—marked their real return.

Allegorically, Exile served as the perfect soundtrack for an exhausted generation struggling with the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the breakup of the Beatles and drug use that had gone far beyond the recreational stage.

Exile on Main Street is the first real '70s album, and it reads like a collective sigh—for the Stones, a chance to scrape the shit right off their shoes (to paraphrase "Sweet Virginia"). It includes an exorcism (the voodoo beat of "I Just Want to See His Face," also a clever commentary on the nascent Jesus movement) as well as a frantic effort to escape the past ("Ventilator Blues") and a slew of high-octane blues-based rock songs intended to reconnect with the band's roots through a filter of cocaine and creeping cynicism ("Rocks Off," "Rip This Joint," "Turd on the Run").

The real meaning of Exile lies between the lines of "Sweet Virginia," the autobiographical "Torn and Frayed," "Let It Loose" and "Loving Cup," songs that are routinely dismissed these days because they are seen as poor candidates for some critics desert-island picks.

But the significance of Exile is summed up in the album's closing track: "Soul Survivor."

The band—and its fans—had been through hell, a little worse for the wear, but still capable of bringin' the noise.

Exile still evokes the power of rock 'n' roll to serve as a sonic salve for our collective soul.

—Greg Cahill