Cowboys in Cyberspace

29 Dec 2007 - Barbara Morison of All Kinds Of Country on 2SER 107.3 FM spoke to Bob Howe about the highlights of the year at Canterbury Country and the 2007 Cowboys In Cyberspace columns .

CowboysInCyberspace.com brings you video from the Sydney media launch of the 2008 Tamworth Country Music Festival - featuring some of the finalists of the 36th CMAA COUNTRY MUSIC AWARDS OF AUSTRALIA.

CLICK HERE to view the video…

The ladies dominate the web this month…

TAMARA STEWART has always had a keen eye for the World Wide Web and has even ventured hands-on into the mysterious realms of HTML coding! Cowboys In Cyberspace asked her to nominate her five favourite websites and while taking time out from promoting her brilliant new single, Drive, this is what she answered:

www.myspace.com

“I love this site. It’s such a great way to stay connected. I use it as a first stop - even before I check my emails. I cruise MySpace for anything new from fans - or to keep in touch with friends and family.”

www.youtube.com

“I find some great music clips on here. I discovered k.d.lang’s version of Hallelujah live at the Sydney Opera House - balled like a baby watching it on my Mac! Brilliant!”

www.country.com.au

“I’m always checking out the latest CM news on here. Seeing what’s happening- I’m a member of the CMAA so I utilise the links and things all the time.”

www.ebay.com.au

“Coz a girl’s gotta shop! I rarely get time to get to the real stores coz I’m flat stick during he day…my most recent splurges? 3 leather jackets!!!???”

www.dreammoods.com

“I quite often go to this site to analyse my dreams. Since the seed was planted that I should be working on my music again, I have had some really weird and vivid dreams. I remember every detail. So I have a look at the dream dictionary and note what it says they represent.”

If you would like find out more about Tamara and her forthcoming and much anticipated album, cast your eyes towards her brand new site.

www.tamarastewart.com.au

Music fans around the globe had a unique opportunity last month when SARA STORER launched her new album Silver Skies with a live broadcast/webcast via the ABC and Saturday Night Country. With a full band that included the album’s two producers, Matt Fell and Josh Cunningham, Sara debuted many of the songs in front of an invited studio audience and the performance was streamed out directly to the Internet for the world to enjoy (pictured right, Sara and Josh at the ABC). Silver Skies places Sara firmly in the upper echelons of Australian singer/songwriters, in the starry firmament alongside John Williamson and Paul Kelly. The initial copies of the CD include a second bonus ‘Limited Edition’ DVD that contains two excellent short documentaries that focus on the making of the album (including interviews with the producers and studio engineer) and Sara explaining the stories behind the songs with great charm. Praise is due to video producer/director Duncan Toombs (yes, not just a brilliant guitarist) for the excellent visualisations. If you miss out on the DVD, look for the videos at YouTube.com

More videos can be found at the website of those gifted Grafton girls, THE McCLYMONTS, including an interview that was featured last month on the homepage of the prestigious news.com.au and the video for their latest single, My Life Again. Recently, as a guest presenter at the Australian Club Entertainment (ACE) Awards, I was delighted to be onstage as The McClymonts won the coveted ‘Best Country/Group’ trophy; yet another well-deserved acknowledgement of their talents.

Until next time, happy holidays and merry seasonal surfing!

Bob talked to Barbara Morison on 2SER 107.3 FM about this month’s column and more…

During September, October and November of 2007 the Cowboys in Cyberspace camera caught glimpses of the country music scene in and around Sydney. Included are the Galston Country Music Festival, the Hank Williams Birthday Bash, Graeme Connors and Fiddlers Feast at The Basement, Sara Storer at ABC Radio, the Tomkins Guitar Showcase at Canterbury Country and much more.

CLICK HERE to view the video…

 Thanks to the Galston Country Music Festival, Nicki Gillis, Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL Club (Denis, Debbie, Michael, Ian, Richard, Will), Graeme Connors, Fiddlers Feast, John Elliott, Sara Storer, John Nutting, John Nutting, ABC Radio, Dan Driscoll, the Legends of Bandstand, Kenny Kitching, Tomkins Guitars, and everyone else…

The Kinkster, the Killer, the Cowboy and the Fat Man…

Political comment in a song is a tricky skill to master; just ask Randy Newman and (more recently) Steve Earle who received a lot of misguided criticism when they tried to make a point through the words of a character (Rednecks, John Walker’s Blues). KINKY FRIEDMAN - LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX (New West NW8044 via Shock in Australia) is anything but politically correct and there is often an ironic sting in the tail of the Kinkster’s songs. Before he became a celebrated crime novelist and long before he tried to run for Governor of Texas, Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys were outraging America with their irreverent humour and outrageous shows. This DVD features the only Austin City Limits program in over 30 years that never went to air. While Australian TV is more broadminded and Kinky has enlivened our airwaves, this unseen 1975 concert has lost none of its edge over time and is still as cutting and irreverent as it was at the time it was filmed. Wickedly funny.

The Austin City Limits repackaged shows on DVD keep on coming: From that wonderful melting pot that spawned rock and roll out of country music and rhythm and blues, we get FATS DOMINO - LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX (New West NW8029). This 1986 concert gives us a seminal artist still at the top of his game, some thirty years after Blueberry Hill first topped the charts. As an interesting companion piece, a new double CD album, GOIN’ HOME - A TRIBUTE TO FATS DOMINO (Vanguard Records via Shock) brings together a huge array of artists from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams and Norah Jones. For a moment it looked like Fats Domino had been lost in the floods that followed Hurricane Katrina until he was ultimately and thankfully rescued. Proceeds from the tribute CD go to aid the restoration of his area of New Orleans and also the city’s musical cultural heritage.

On his DVD, Fats Domino sings Your Cheatin’ Heart, while on JERRY LEE LEWIS: LIVE FROM AUSTIN TEXAS (New West NW8042) ‘The Killer’ declares that “…Hank Williams wrote this and Hank Williams sang this, but Jerry Lee got a gold record for it!” before launching in to his classic arrangement of You Win Again. This is an excellent rollicking performance from 1983 which covers country, boogie-woogie and Great Balls of Fire!

It was 1956 when Jerry Lee Lewis arrived at Sun Records studio in Memphis, Tennessee. The owner of Sun, Sam Phillips was away on a trip, and so it was that producer and engineer ‘COWBOY’ JACK CLEMENT discovered and recorded Lewis for the Sun label. Cowboy Jack would also record (among many others) Johnny Cash and they became lifelong friends. Cowboy also wrote Ballad of a Teenage Queen and Guess Things Happen That Way and other hits for Cash. From there Cowboy’s life continued to influence the path of country music, launching the careers of Charley Pride and Don Williams and producing Waylon Jennings (see www.cowboyjackclement.com for more). Now we get a peek behind the scenes in a DVD entitled SHAKESPEARE WAS A BIG GEORGE JONES FAN: COWBOY JACK CLEMENT’S HOME MOVIES. In this surreal collage of film snippets, arranged loosely in chronological order, we get a fascinating glimpse of a genius at work and at play. We see the uncensored Johnny Cash, a candid John Prine in performance, many excepts from Cowboy’s unreleased television specials (including Waylon with Jessi Colter), gruesome scenes from his flop horror flick and much more, all wrapped up with Cowboy’s philosophy and universal truths. Despite the option of turning on the audio commentary (what would home movies be without one?), it remains equal parts exhilarating and eccentric and completely mesmerizing. Available from www.shoutfactory.com and yesterdayandtoday.com.au

Until next time, happy surfing!

From Bakersfield to Texas and an Angel from Montgomery… 

While the majority of the Austin City Limits repackaged shows on DVD feature the hour-plus full versions of their edited television concerts, sadly on BUCK OWENS - LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX (New West NW8043 via Shock in Australia), a mere 34 minutes was the full extent of the show. Sad for us, because Buck was in excellent form this night of October 23, 1988 although somewhat ironically, he appeared onstage prior to Dwight Yoakam. Buck brings Dwight into his spotlight to sing Under Your Spell Again with him and we know from Dwight’s DVD (reviewed Jan 2006), he returned the favour bringing Buck back to sing with him on Streets of Bakersfield. The rest of the show is all hits, from Act Naturally to Tiger By The Tail and Together Again.

Buck once flew to Austin on his private jet to make a surprise appearance at a club that regularly held a Buck Owens Birthday night each year. No such surprises at the annual Sydney HANK WILLIAMS BIRTHDAY BASH last month, but his ghost was in the air when more than two dozen singers and musicians convened to honour his songs and the music of his era.

Pictured above backstage at Hank’s Birthday Bash 2007 - L to R: DALE HOOPER, DWAYNE ELIX, MARY ANNE BURTON & MARY HEARD, NICKI GILLIS, SALLY BURGESS, ROSE CARLEO, MARK LUCAS, ADRIAN PAYNE, DAVE COOK (back), RAE MOODY (middle), DONNA BOYD (front), BRYEN WILLEMS (back), TRACY KILLEEN (front)

The packed house proved that Hank’s popularity has not waned. The show was co-hosted by Nicki Gillis, still elated from her Cooper’s Golden Saddle win the previous weekend at the GALSTON COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL. The Galston Festival celebrated its 11th year with a bumper line-up featuring Travis Collins (pictured right), Karen Lynne, Kirsty Lee Akers, Amber Lawrence and many more, plus a brand new website that profiled all the artists and the three-day programme. Look there for links to the latest festival photos.

The daughter of successful songwriter Terry Gilkyson (Greenfields, Marianne, The Bare Necessities), ELIZA GILKYSON sits stylistically alongside Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin Carpenter. At her web site she mentions having appeared with Bill Chambers and that she wants to come to visit Australia. Meanwhile, we can watch her LIVE FROM AUSTIN TX DVD (New West NW8041 via Shock in Australia), which features many songs from her album Hard Times In Babylon, released in 2000. In the set-list, Easy Rider is a song about her father (and named after his band) while the encore features the only non-original, a beautiful rendition of Bob Dylan’s Love Minus Zero/No Limit which she also recorded on the covers album, Nod to Bob. Amongst her talented and sensitive band, look for guitarist Nina Gerber who would later team up with our own Audrey Auld Mezera in 2005 for the live CD, In the House.

I hope you are enjoying our revamped on-line layout and improved interactive features like the video podcasts. Why not leave a comment when you visit our new easy-to-remember address at www.cowboysincyberspace.com 

Until next time, happy surfing!

Bob talked to Barbara Morison on 2SER 107.3 FM about this month’s column and more… (apologies for the static on this one…)

The September 2007 edition Cowboys in Cyberspace Video Podcast is now on-line!

 It features live snippets from ALBERT LEE in Australia, MICHAEL FIX launching his new CD and Songbook and a few other familiar faces as well…

CLICK HERE to watch the video…

A decade of Cowboys In Cyberspace on the web and in Capital News… 

Some of you younger readers may not remember a world without the Internet, let alone without computers! Before we look back over the last ten years, let’s go a little further back for some personal perspective. In the mid-seventies I worked with computers in the Rural Bank and they were so big they occupied their own floor of the building. No personal computers back then, so I wrote on a manual typewriter and praised the day that Liquid Paper came on the market.  

In the mid-eighties I wrote commentaries on country music for CAPITAL NEWS from the USA and the UK. By then I had a DRAGON 32 personal computer with 32KB of memory – less that you find now in the average stuffed toy - and it stored and loaded data to and from a standard audio cassette in real time. In England I would type the articles, store them on a cassette and then catch a train to the next town. There I knew a shop that had the same brand computer hooked up to a dot-matrix printer. They would print my work for 5p a page and I’d then put the pages in an envelope with an airmail stamp and post them to Tamworth.

Fast-forward to September 1997 when we began to explore the World Wide Web together and look for that all-important country music! Right from the start in the first column we warned you that surfing was addictive and time consuming (bet you wished you’d listened now, ha!) and we gave a surprising example of ’six degrees of separation’ that took us from Emmylou Harris, via Albert Lee, Music Man guitars, Ernie Ball strings and Steve Morse to end up far away at the Deep Purple website! Guitar legend ALBERT LEE made a return visit to Australia last month for a series of blistering shows. He was accompanied by the wonderful local band Wheelers & Dealers, fronted by the multi-talented Chris Wheeler with Ged Corben on guitar and our old friends Mike Kerin on fiddle, Michael Vidale on slap bass and Malcolm Wakeford guesting on drums. 

ALBERT LEE features strongly in the September 2007 Cowboys In Cyberspace on-line video podcast extra this month as does local fretmaster MICHAEL FIX who launched his new retrospective album Rewind and the songbook Noted! in Sydney at The Basement. The book contains transcriptions of ten of his wonderfully distinctive acoustic guitar tunes. Michael was mentioned in our second column, way back when we still wondered if there would be enough country music to be found on the web each month! Pictured right: Michael Fix at The Basement, Sydney August 2007.  

Over the last ten years it has been a wonderful journey exploring the explosion of the web not only for you, good readers of Capital News, but also for thousands of on-line readers around the globe. Along the way, Nashville acknowledged us with the prestigious Charlie Lamb Award for Excellence in Country Music Journalism and this month, I am truly honoured to be a finalist for the Rex Barry Award at the 2007 CMAA Australian Country Music Achiever Awards. 

Pictured above: Bob Howe presents Australian country music to the International Country Music Conference in Nashville, 2004. 

A couple of months ago we mentioned a great cable television show and website for those of you looking for computer tech help – THE LAB WITH LEO. Since then, Cowboys In Cyberspace has been featured in their Web Workshop segment, with design expert Susannah Gardner giving us not only valuable advice on improving the site for you, but also widespread exposure in Canada and Australia. Here’s hoping you like the new layout and improved features at our new easy-to-remember address www.cowboysincyberspace.com 

Until next time, happy surfing!

Bob talked to Barbara Morison on 2SER 107.3 FM about this month’s column and more…

It’s never been easier to sample before you buy…

The sheer quantity and diversity of music that is available today is staggering and making a choice can be daunting. Luckily for us, the internet makes that process a whole lot easier. Not only do many artist and record company websites offer samples of songs, but if the artist has a page at MySpace, chances are you will find several of their songs presented in full.

The songwriting talents of PATTY GRIFFIN have been recognised by many performers, including Martina McBride, Bette Midler, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Reba McEntire and particularly the Dixie Chicks, who have recorded her compositions Top of the World, Truth No. 2 and Let Him Fly. So too Emmylou Harris, a long-time supporter, who’s also covered several of her songs, and who lends her unmistakeable harmony vocals to the number Trapeze on most recent Patty Griffin album Children Running Through. Music. Trivia spotters will also note two tracks that feature legendary Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan. Much of her back catalogue is also available in Australia (via Shock), including the wonderful 2003 live CD, A Kiss In Time. That release includes a bonus DVD that features behind the scenes footage and music videos.
www.pattygriffin.com
www.myspace.com/pattygriffin

SJANE DOUGLASS is a mercurial artist from Bendigo and her music has an ethereal, wistful quality; think Patty Griffin meets Daniel Lanois. Not strictly folk or country, although the guest appearance of Dave Moore on pedal steel lends a nice touch to her debut EP Ordinary Imperfection. At her web site you can listen to the lead track Waterwall, an enigmatic tale of lovers torn apart by a tsunami.
www.sjanedouglass.com

The web also provided me a preview of the new TEDDY THOMPSON album, Up Front & Down Low (featuring cover versions of country classics by George Jones, Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard to name a few), now just released as this goes to print. I wondered how he would approach the material, especially as he can be as eclectic as his parents - British folk-rock legends Richard and Linda Thompson. The samples I’ve heard suggest respectful yet enthusiastic readings of the songs. In his official biography he reveals, “As strange as it may seem, country music was the music I was brought up on. It’s the music that’s closest to my heart and the music that speaks to me the most, and it’s always been a big influence on my own songwriting. I was obsessed with country music when I was a kid, and it’s definitely had a huge influence on the way I write songs. I was always attracted to songs that had a brilliant pun or a clever turn of phrase, but came from a dark, bitter place. As a writer, I’ve always gravitated towards that feeling.”
(P.S. since writing this, I’ve heard the whole CD…possibly the country album of the year!!) www.teddythompson.com (click the Media tab for eCard samples and video)
www.myspace.com/teddythompsonmusic

Although it may be some time before we get to see a telecast from the recent CMA Music Festival in Nashville, but we can enjoy a preview as it airs in the USA. At the American ABC Television Network site you can enjoy several webisodes that give a backstage peek at the four-day party and music celebration for the special, Country’s Night to Rock.

This is COWBOYS IN CYBERSPACE column number 120 and next month, as we reach our anniversary, we’ll look back at ten years of surfing the information highway and look forward to a brave new world on the web!

 Until next time, happy surfing!

Bob talked to Barbara Morison on 2SER 107.3 FM about this month’s column and more…

Hello cyberCowboys & Cowgirls!

As we get ready to re-launch Cowboys In Cyberspace for its TENTH BIRTHDAY celebrations, you can still enjoy the August 2007 column, all the photos and videos AND the last ten years of articles by clicking on this link:
shownet.com.au/cowboys/oldindex.html

All the old pages will be at their usual address if you have previously bookmarked them!

Come back soon and look for our new site!
Thanks to Susie Gardner and the Lab with Leo for their advice!

Thanks to you for your patience…

cyberBob