Beyond the Bro - A Brilliant Tyler Childers Set in Detroit

Masonic Temple, Detroit, 6.6.2023

Only four years ago, I saw Tyler Childers at a festival and felt the day was too hot, there was too much cigarette smoke (because it was outdoors), and I was not nearly “bruh” enough to hang with the aesthetic in the fanbase. I don’t consider Tyler “bro-country” per se but the bro vibes were as thick as the nicotine haze that day. 
I’m not saying there weren’t some bro-vibes tonight (I overheard someone in the men’s room talking about an upcoming Morgan Wallen stadium show), and the marijuana vape pens made things plenty smoky for an indoor show where that shit is surely prohibited, even though recreational weed is legal in my former hometown.
Confession is I love too many genres to allow my own sense of my own identity, to deter me from loving great lyrical folk art, genre fanbase stereotypes fulfilled, yet notwithstanding.

So this show was so different, because I have had more time to learn Tyler’s music and continue to feel compelled to see him live, like it was a hunger and a course to correct that disappointing summer day back in 2019.

Granted I am sure Tyler was fire that day too, but I wasn’t ready. At a dedicated sold out show on a sold out tour, I was in for something else entirely. Tyler: A still rising star and a master of his craft in every way, with his voice an instrument, a conjuring spell, a distinctly unforgettable Kentucky-inflected wailing, howling, transcendent moaning, inimitable outlaw twang.

I met a fan from Iowa who said she was staying at the same hotel as him. Then she showed me a video of Tyler with his dog. Tyler is into his dog. The album is about dogs, really, dogs and heaven and so much more. But there’s a universalism to his Universal Sound that attaches itself to you like dirt attached to the side of your truck, stuck to you like the threads of your lineage to place and people.

Now I know that the Ryman is the mother church, but the Masonic Temple is another mother church. His stage set is so perfectly to convey that homey comfort and rustic rural wow, with an old-school TV, with black white cowboy shit on.
And the crowd, and this was perfectly evident in the first four acoustic songs. They know every song and every word to every song and they sing loud and in unison and they actually sound good. I admire Tyler, but I am not a superfan at their level and it puts chill bumps all over my arms.

During Creeker, I’m like how sad is this song and is this song about suicidal ideation and wow how can a sad AF song with suicidal ideation be so freaking holy. But it’s the late set rendering of the aforementioned Universal Sound and the sacred-dance-hall keyboard-and-drums smoking “Way of the Triune God” that has me “screaming and shouting” and slapping hands with a few thousand strangers.

In this catalog spanning set, he still packs in covers by SG Goodman and Kenny Rogers. He only samples from the recent gospel album but those songs are some of the funkiest (think the Country Funk compilation) and not the least sectarian and abiding a universal impulse toward inclusion. It really is church but the whole concert is church not just the newer songs, especially those churches of the honky tonks and highways and camping trailers and hunting lands.

At the end, which is just the last song, he does the most talking of the night.
It begins with an ask:
-be good to each other
-eat lots of vegetables
-drink lots of water

Then he starts talking about lyrics that were thinking about psychedelics, that were about letting go, and then he is telling us about a dying friend and moonshiner and hippy dear brother and Tyler is bringing music to hospice. Then Tyler is crying and introducing an acapella rendition of Sour Mash by Cory Brannan.

Then he is holding up one of those disposable shot glasses they have at shows. And it looks like it has whisky in it. And my brain is like wait and what and I thought you were sober. He holds up the shot while rendering the song more emotional and eerie than the original version. I really am terrified he is going to drink it, but at the end of the song, he turns the glass upside down and sprays the caramel-colored shine into the crowd.

Tyler songs are humming in my head on the way to the car, and I put on the "Purgatory" album as soon as I start up the silver Toyota with Tennessee plates.

Setlist (my notes mostly check with the version on Setlist.fm, although a couple on there may be out of order)

Acoustic-just Tyler
Nose to the Grindstone
Lady May
Shake This Frost
Follow You To Virgie

with Full Band - Food Stamps
Whitehouse Road
Country Squire
Bus Route
Creeker
Tom Turkey - Charley Crockett cover
Rustin in the Rain
All Your'n
Purgatory
Cluck Ol’ Hen
Two Coats
I Swear To God
Old Country Church
Take My Hounds To Heaven
Oneida
Space & Time - SG Goodman cover
Percheron Mules
Tulsa Turnaround -- Kenny Rogers cover
Way of the Triune God
House Fire
Universal Sound
Honky Tonk Flame
Heart You Been Tendin
Sour Mash - acapella Cory Branan cover

Queer Art In Tennessee

[Pictured - Bertha (Grateful Drag); Cookeville Pride & Madness of Lady Bright; Lela & Maxzine from the Vaudeville Circus & Jug Band review in Cannon County)

Pride month begins today. Queer art is in the community. 

There’s something especially sacred & galvanizing but also terrifying about Pride this year. Our local Pride, which I have missed many times due to my annual June travels, comes on the late pioneering poet Allen Ginsberg’s birthday. It is almost 3 years to the day after Cookeville’s historic BLM rally, which turned out to turn my entire life upside-down & inside-out. 

The day before our Pride, Melody Walker & Mercy Bell will drop the official release of their "Jesus Was A Drag Queen" song, which has already been making the likes & listens on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. "Jesus Was A Drag Queen" mirrors for me a poem I wrote about the queer Jesus, more than 30 years ago. More than 30 years ago, we marched on Washington for the LGBTQ rights movement, when it seemed like a time of rising hope, not hateful reactions. 

I was thrilled to learn that Melody Walker is also part of Bertha, an amazing “Grateful Drag” band that brings the queer & Deadhead communities together. Their April 29th debut at Dee’s in Nashville was the same day two punk bands & the Eggplant Faerie Players were playing a fierce, fiery activist-benefit show here in Cookietown. Sometimes you want to be in two places at once! But it was great to have Maxzine & Tom Foolery back in Cookeville. And I was happy to find that Bertha’s entire show is available on YouTube.

When I first moved to Tennessee, it was to join a rural artistic counterculture community, “in the hills & hollers,” as we would say. In a sense it was theater, too, that drew me here, as I was really following my dear friend Maxzine, who had moved down from Ann Arbor a couple of years(or was it months?) before I made the trek from Detroit. So it seems fitting to me that Maxzine & I have recently reconnected bunches, mostly in the streets of Nashville to protest the fascist GOP & support our queer & POC friends. But this past weekend I saw Maxzine in their other home, besides the streets & the rural gardens, the performance venue, juggling in many fabulous costume changes, with their collaborator Tom Foolery & the Murfreesboro band Jake Leg Stompers. Before the show Maxzine wrote me: “I am performing tonight and tomorrow, including using drag in a provocative way, given Tennessee making drag illegal in public in many cases (a law that is on hold as a judge mulls it over).”

Back in Cookeville, there is a new queer theater collective called “Friends of Oscar Wilde” that aims to produce openly LGBTQ plays, year-round. The local Pride committee has been incredibly active, well-supported, outspoken, courageous, & vibrant in face of considerable local backlash from several explicitly nazi hate groups & *some* churches (#notallchurches lol). So their new theater endeavors are such a clarion call for radical art in our community. Of course our beloved Backdoor Playhouse has been at the heart of the struggle, as one of the only venues platforming drag shows on a regular basis, after one venue was evicted and another had to close its doors for various reasons.  

The “Friends of Oscar Wilde” debut is “The Madness of Lady Bright,” directed by Mark Harry Creter & starring Matthew Melton. The play is an edgy avant-garde mental health meltdown in the style of something you would expect from Tennessee Williams. Lanford Wilson’s revolutionary pre-Stonewall text teaches us what the accumulated harm of a hostile society could do to an aging lonely neurodivergent queen. It’s beyond touching cute moralism to touch raw nerves with traumatizing truth-bomb heartbreaking beauty. It’s an emotionally psychedelic journey as the walls all collapse inside the heart-brain of our protagonist, that we as audience get to inhabit with them.   

We could say that Matthew Melton is the lead, but there are three of them. That is, in a way, it’s a one person show, but with other actors to perform the voices in their head. Matthew has thrown themselves into this role in such an immersive & all-encompassing fashion, such that the audience is invited or imposed upon to forget their butts-in-seats & just bear witness to the inner world as reality slips away.

This critic partially wanted a play of pure rainbow empowerment in these times that feel strangely pre-Stonewall, at least here in Tennessee. The riveting performance left me with more questions than answers, with a fire of love for all my queer siblings & a rage at the world that doesn’t want to know them, much less love & accept & celebrate them. After the exceptional less-than-an-hour whirlwind one-act opening-night debut, I stayed for the Q&A with cast & director, where we could really explore these issues more deeply. Matthew’s honesty, transparency, & yes joy, were all hanging out, with the jester makeup still flowing & glowing with their smiles & commentary.

I encourage everyone to see this show & to, like I needed to, set aside their PC purity code about wanting perfectly well-adjusted, happily partner, & mentally healthy queer characters to stick in the face of our local normies & haters. But like we discussed last night, this play is not for the normies, it’s for our arts & activist community & for our LGTBQ community, allies & accomplices included.

So please get to the Backdoor Playhouse tonight; Show is at 8pm Central and tickets are available at the door. Look into the EGGPLANT Faerie Players & the Jake Leg Stompers. Listen to Melody Walker, Mercy Bell, & Grateful Drag!!! Then get to Pride this Saturday at 11am in Dogwood Park or to your local Pride, wherever & when it is. 

Check out:

Jesus Was A Drag Queen: 

https://youtu.be/jrabu70m1AA 

Check out Grateful Drag:

https://www.youtube.com/live/LtLYFUA28hY?feature=share

Tickets are available for the next Grateful Drag show in Nashville in October at the Analog:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bertha-grateful-drag-tickets-641581847577

"The Cat's Meow: Cathouse is simply profound" - from the Detroit archives

"The Cat's Meow: Cathouse is simply profound"

You can listen to the Cathouse cassette only album Virtue Undone here -- for entertainment and educational purposes only, a lofi rip from my personal collection:
 https://soundcloud.com/teacherontheradio/sets/cathouse-virtue-undone
 
The Other End - arts and entertainment supplement to the South End
the Wayne State University student newspaper
Detroit, Michigan
1992 

by Andrew/Sunfrog, writing as “Ellen Carryout”

Finney’s Pub, Detroit, July 1992
Eric Walworth is creating a feedback warzone with his guitar. As I bask in this aural onslaught, I ponder the possibilities down tall glasses of beer. I watch the glassy audience's eyes animate with the knowledge of dreams.

And Elizabeth sings: “If you look inside your dreams you will find me.”

She breathes big ideas in this tiny room. The band builds bridges of sound, past pitchers of beer and into pictures of reverie and hope. 

This Corridor band is, of course, Cathouse. They’ve been receiving an abundance of praise in the press in recent days, and this cozy pub is overflowing with old friends and curious seekers. What they’ve created is actually quite simple, yet profound. Cathouse is a passionate rock-n-roll band for the people of this neighborhood.

Just when I thought the tired flesh of rock music had been trivialized and parodied beyond repair, a band like this comes along to inject a new boogie into my aching bones. I never thought something as old-fashioned as four-piece could translate rock-n-roll into a transcendent noise to transform my soul.
“Don’t believe all that shit about rock-n-roll being dead,” says Elizabeth. “That’s propaganda designed to separate you from things that help you feel alive.” 

She has become a sort of spokeswoman for forgotten ideals and the darker side of her own heart, which she wears out in her vocal verisimilitude with embarrassing honesty. With an innocent flare, she lets her music flow as any artsy-extrovert should, declaring, “I’m serving the community. I’m serving the people who see the band. I’m serving the music that comes through me.”

In Every Direction, Without A Drummer, Detroit 1989
In October 1989, Cathouse played their first gig as an uncertain 3-piece at the Paradigm Center for the Arts, a dance studio/loft in Harmonie Park. The show was a Community Concert Series benefit for the Womyn’s Own Collective and a bashfully brave beginning without a backbeat. Elizabeth had that loud, clear voice. Eric and bassist Jim Johnson made a lot of noise. 

It would be many moons and a thousand mood swings before Cathouse would get into the tight-knit, groove-giving, post-garage geniuses that they are today. Finding drummer Tim Suliman was the turning point to take them beyond the modest aspirations of only playing clubs on the Corridor circuit. 
A growing hunger and insatiable ambition have taken them on many midwest mini-tours, and it now seems only a matter of time until some van gets packed full of gear to take them places they’ve never seen before. 

A House on Commonwealth Street
Cathouse began in a townhouse with nine cats and high ceilings. Elizabeth and Eric lived there alone with the feline scent and the Fender Strat. Elizabeth used to listen to Eric practice. She’d be upstairs. He’d be downstairs. The music would bring them together. 

“He was young in it, and I’d encourage him,” Elizabeth recalled. “I’d see him doing this wild-man, sensual, crazy thing, pulling the shit out of his strings and throwing his guitar around. I’d say, “Oh my god! That’s hot. You gotta do that onstage in our band.’ He’d get all shy and everything. I can’t think of Cathouse without Eric. i just can’t. We’re very different, and the friction between us makes it mean something, that we stay together as an example of cooperation.”  

As Cathouse became a band, each member became more of a musician, and they grew together. The critical response back in those early days was rather dismal. What is now a devoted following was then just a scattering of sympathetic friends.

Elizabeth expands: “I was singing simple straight songs in a simple straight voice. As time progressed, I became more mature and free with my gift. I’ve been able to understand singing as a place where I can be tortured, be angry, be growling, be violent, be lust and be afraid. It’s been an evolution for me to understand all the places I can go with my voice and all the sensations that can emanate from my body onto an audience through my voice. My vocabulary has grown.”

Fierce, Bold and Resourceful
 
Much noise has been made about the gritty, grunge guitar roots of Detroit rock-n-roll as made manifest by the MC5 and the Stooges. I’ve heard critics wave that obvious flag a thousand times it seems. Elizabeth has pulled down some reason for this mythos and put it in its proper contemporary context:

“This band wouldn’t be what it is without this neighborhood. I don’t know if I can even comprehend us existing without Detroit, because we’re so much in this place. We’ve had the good fortune to learn how to perform in front of audiences that have been accepting, loving, and curious. This neighborhood, from Woodward to Trumbull, from Mack to Antoinette, is where Cathouse comes from. We are poor, fierce, and resourceful. And incestuous sometimes. The desire to commune gives us strength. Our ancestors had it. Now that communing is less possible, for people to join and unite seems like a miracle to me. But it’s an old impulse, an organic impulse.”

So Detroit gives bands a “heat-hunger-bare bones-no bullshit-intensity” that Elizabeth has noticed in other groups such as Mick Vranich and Wordban’d. This energy is most palatable when bands leave Detroit to gig in other places. You can feel the difference.

From singing to painting and back again
As an actress, songstress, painter, and poet, Elizabeth is clearly a multi-dimensional artist. The canvas and the song seem to inspire her the most as they come from one body.

“I have a personal vision almost all the time. Singing is the place I give voice to those pictures in words. Painting is where I give voice to those pictures in paint. Painting helps me be quiet, it helps me be still. Being in the band is a more social experiential thing. I’m in a sea of people and a sea of noise.”
As Elizabeth sings about big ideas in her shameless uninhibited manner, she runs the risk of having her sincerity overshadowed by its own grandiosity, no matter how genuine it may be. How does she feel about that challenge?

“I feel uncomfortable speaking in a language that doesn’t feel appropriate to me. That makes me feel icky. I don’t want to project an image of myself onto the world, I just want to be myself in the world.”
In contrast to our collective urban backdrop of “abandonment, desolation, waste, and fear,” we have voice, which Rico Africa called the “siren of industrial noir,” crying out, shouting out, singing out loud:
“I’ve got this eerie feeling coming over me . . ."

Cathouse, “Don’t give it up.”  

Cathouse's album - from the Detroit archives

 

“Cathouse’s album”

The South End

the Wayne State University student newspaper

Detroit, Michigan

1992 (?)

by Andrew/Sunfrog, writing as “Ellen Carryout”
 

Virtue Undone is the first full-length musical offering from the Corridor rock band Cathouse. These are ten searing songs of characteristically crunchy bass and guitars from Jim Johnson and Eric Walworth, pulsating beats from Tim Suliman, and gutsy lyricism and latent emotion from Elizabeth Underwood’s versatile vocal range.   

Recorded in a homemade Detroit neighborhood studio, mixed downtown, and pressed down south, this cassette chronicles the aural evolution of an energetic idea, born, appropriately enough, from house full of cats in 1989.

At first exposure to this female-fronted four-piece, audiences are tempted to conjure up vocalist images and irresistible icons from the historical fabric of women in rock. Listeners will serve their reception of Cathouse well if they leave all those Janis Joplin and Pretenders comparisons behind.

Elizabeth’s soulful vocal spattering hits like paint splashed on canvas. She’s here “to teach you how to love,” as she carves out a mythic place between transience and grounded mystery which eludes description the moment one thinks it can be pinned down. 

On this visceral yet visionary level, Virtue Undone shall always seem virtually done. Ten songs slither to your heart like a great unfinished novel or a spiritual ascendance which never attains nirvana. Something sought after is always missing as each song lingers, poised on the ephemeral void of vocalized consciousness.

We can sense this unnamed place as Elizabeth sings, frequently sliding out of articulated words into passionately uttered tones which defy placement on intellectual and musical scales alike. Perhaps this is what Elizabeth means when she says she has no place in the world. Or when she sings, “I’m a woman trapped inside, the things they said, I should be.” These songs can heal, or momentarily transform, that universal sense of displacement.

Cathouse touches a groove laid down by Eric’s gritty guitar and rides straight into your heart. Maybe they don’t have a place in the world -- at least the world which inhibits the soul liberation and intimate passion their music portrays. They have a place in the crucial cacophony which reinvents rock n roll every time they take the stage.
Listen to the album -- a lofi rip from my personal collection, shared for educational and entertainment purposes only -- here: https://soundcloud.com/teacherontheradio/sets/cathouse-virtue-undone

Hey Jack Kerouac - in honor of Natalie Merchant & all music superfans - from 1987

 

Finally transcribed this to share, in honor of a new Natalie Merchant album & tour. 

I had just turned 20-years-old, was about to drop out of college & end my brief stint at Antioch.

I had just started writing under the name Sunfrog for a fledgling fanzine. 

Hey Jack Kerouac

Originally published in Babyfish (lost its momma) #1, late 1987

October 1987 - Yellow Springs, Ohio and Bloomington, Indiana

I had just seen 10,000 Maniacs the Saturday before. They opened for R.E.M. in Columbus. I was in the balcony, and Natalie and her music were just too far away. The set was much too short. I asked Natalie about their tour plans on their own. When would they be playing Detroit. They wouldn’t be. That had a gig on Wednesday in Bloomington, Indiana, on their own.

I asked around campus for the next few days, hoping to find someone who wanted to drive to the show. I could find no one. At about four or five in the afternoon on that Wednesday, I had some friends drop me off at Interstate 70. My sign said “Indiana Please” in red paint. Bloomington was 200 miles away.

My first ride was with a trucker. His polyester print shirt was all full of energy and stories. He had a neat silver case full of cigarettes. His metal handcrafted work of art watchband was made by an Apache Indian. It got dark as we drove down the highway. I had about three dollars in my pocket and my mind on the Maniacs show.

This last album touched spiritual and artistic levels of folk-rock poetry. Full of calls to social and political awareness as well as many different images of America. And then that great song about Beat Generation life and poetry and Jack Kerouac. IN MY TRIBE was easily one of my favorite albums of the year. 

As this trucker Dave and I sat in a Truckstops of America stop, he ate chicken, noodles, and gravy. He shared is life of trucker folklore. A life of CB radio jargon. Of the women who wandered truckstops. Of sleeping when he needed to and never driving too far. I drank water. I wanted to hear Natalie sing her melodies and words of the tribe. I was stuck in this temple of the trucker life. We window shopped for trucking accessories. Back on the road, back on the CB radio, my life slipped into darkness. He left me off at Highway 37, the road south to Bloomington.

I got several short rides, each time afraid that another would not come. One ride was with a man pulling a racehorse in his trailer. Finally, I was in Bloomington, standing in a phonebooth looking for the address of a place called Jake’s. I asked directions at a gas station and ended up walking the entire 2 or 3 miles through this strange hilly town. Near midnight on a Wednesday, the city slept with an almost ghost-like presence. Finally, I was walking through downtown Bloomington and found my way to Jake’s.

I walked into the club and tools the man at the door that I was on the guest list. I was not. Had Natalie forgotten that I was coming to the show? He said he’d take my ID and give me three minutes to go inside and find someone from the band who knew who I was. I gave him my driver’s license, and he told me there was no way I could go inside. “You are not 21. This club is 21 and over.” 

From the other room, I could hear the band kick into “Hey Jack Kerouac.” I walked outside, and the tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to cry like a baby. 

I had hitch-hiked for six hours and 200 miles just to hear Natalie sing and have time to spend talking with her. She had forgotten to put my name on the list, and I was not old enough to see the show. I was standing outside in cold, dark Bloomington. This can’t be true! I walked dejected to the side-stage door and found two guys from the opening band, North Carolina’s Connells. I told these dudes my story. They were extremely sympathetic and impressed with my “rock and roll dedication.” To let me stay outside would be an injustice. They took me into their van and started giving me shots of liquor. When this kind brother felt moved enough by the spirits, he went inside to battle the bar politics. The bar people were unfriendly and cold. He came back out and drank some more. He then went back inside. 

I stood by the side door and listened. The show I had ached for was going on inside, and I stood out in the cold. Songs went by, and I remained outside. I recognized the wild Robert Buck screeching guitars of “Planned Obsolescence,” a blessed B-side from the past

Suddenly, the side door opened, and I was inside. It was warm, and the college children danced and smiled. I immediately drifted toward the stage. Natalie, dressed in black, moved in her own wild way and sang about the weather. My spirits had been lifted from lowly concrete cold chills into the majestic melodies of 10,000 Maniacs.

I caught the entire second half of the set. My heart surged with joy. I don’t remember the exact setlist of the songs they played the rest of the night. I remember how Natalie came to the side of the stage to welcome me, touch my head, and apologize for not remembering. She smiled and later asked me to sing the Michael Stipe part on “Campfire Song.” I declined but was pleased for sure with the invitation. Natalie sang with such verve and confidence, and she moved with her splendid magic. 

I felt as though I was lost in my first Maniacs show in an Ann Arbor basement, feeling like some European poets’ hideout. A bar is transformed into an art gallery. A cathedral of sound, I see flowers and pillars. My body can feel the shaking rails of the “Peace Train.” Come take this country home again. We are running with young children through the tall grass of a field in upstate New York. 

Flashing back, I was ill in bed this past summer with a fever, and when I woke, I found Natalie riding a river boat on my TV screen. With dancing children, she was talking about that peace train. I felt healed.

Swarms of ecstasy filled my soul at the notion that human beings can love. And sing. “Verdi Cries.” An angel sings. To transform the rock n roll bar into a cabaret at summer camp, a coffeehouse with candles or a gentle worship to the dancing gods. I would ride in that truck a thousand times again. I love the road. I love these songs. 

Poet, dancer, folksinger, social critic, and friend. Natalie rides the van to mecca. I get muddied with love, just trying to write this. I find it hard to put and commit it to paper, such admiration and love. It can be embarrassing to say it: The world is clearly a better place because 10,000 Maniacs make music in it. But the world is clearly a better place because 10,000 Maniacs make music. 

I was taken care of that night. I am yelping again, disgustingly alive, a howling madman. The world will never be cruel as long as she sings. I was reading ON THE ROAD by Kerouac at school. I’ve lived in Detroit with those children depicted in “What’s the Matter Here?” And I’ve stolen from my guts, the need to get out on the road with crazy tastes for the passion of America. We are a communal people, creating harmonious relationships with each other and the earth. We are fed by the buckets of rain on the road. The green grass looks  sweet by the side of the highway.

No Killing (TOTR 451)

 [art by Mikhaila Markham; photos from Nashville on 4/6/2023 & from the summer of 2020, Teacher On The Radio with Justin Jones] 

-aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 8, 2023

-audio archive drops after live episode

Excerpt from Deadline with Nicole Wallace featuring John Lewis & Justin Jones

Violent Femmes - No Killing

Excerpt from students speaking in the rain, early in the morning, on Legislative Plaza on Thursday, April 6, 2023, recorded live by Teacher On The Radio

The Boomtown Rats - I Don’t Like Mondays

Excerpt from Charlie Kirk (founder of TPUSA) speaking on the calculated and  “acceptable” fact of gun deaths for the alleged good having guns (this is the adversarial view contrast & context), retrieved from Twitter

Steve Earle - The Devil’s Right Hand 

Excerpt from Justin Pearson speaking outside on Legislative Plaza after his expulsion, Thursday evening, April 6, 2023, retrieved from Twitter

Sage, Kesha, & CHIKA - Safe

Excerpt from House Speaker Cameron Sexton comparing March 30th, 2023 to January 6, 2021, from Deadline with Nicole Wallace, retrieved from Twitter

Sunny War w/ Allison Russell & Chris Pierce - Hopeless 

Excerpt from Democracy Now on Friday, April 7, featuring Justin Jones and hosted by Amy Goodman, includes questioning from our Cookeville representative Ryan Williams

Crys Matthews - Battle Hymn for an Army of Lovers

Excerpt from Democracy Now on Friday, April 7, featuring Justin Jones and hosted by Amy Goodman

Natalie Merchant - Tower of Babel 

Crys Matthews - Changemakers 

Excerpt of Justin Pearson speaking to reporters immediately after expulsion on Thursday, April 6, immediately after expulsion, retrieved from Twitter

Crys Matthews - We Must Be Free

Andrew talks back the first hour of this episode

Willie Nelson - The Troublemaker 

Excerpt from Democracy Now on Friday, April 7, featuring Justin Pearson and hosted by Amy Goodman, includes questioning from representative Andrew Farmer from East Tennessee 

Adeem the Artist - Heritage of Arrogance

Excerpt from my friend Jonathan Martin’s Zeitcast “Preaching to the Dead in a Graveyard on Good Friday Night,” in the section where he calls out the recent attacks on the trans community as demonic 

The Mountain Goats - Solidarity Forever 

(this song may switch the theme and vibe of this episode but I had to include it because I heard John Darnielle and the Mountain Goats perform this in deep red Alabama for the recent strike at Warrior Met Coal. Nonbinary “cast iron pansexual” Adeem the Artist was the opening act) 

An excerpt of my friend David Dark doing a livestream on recent events, retrieved from Twitter

Eric Hutchison - Right Side of History 

Possessed By Paul James - When It Breaks 

TN Brando - “Stand With The Tennessee Three” 

An excerpt from my friend and teacher Paige La Grone Babcock, speaking in the rain, early in the morning, on Legislative Plaza on Thursday, April 6, 2023, recorded live by Teacher On The Radio

Holly Near & Ronnie Gilbert - Singing for Our Lives 

American Aquarium - A Better South

An excerpt of expelled representative Justin Pearson appearing on All In with Chris Hayes on Friday, April 7, 2023

The Lumineers - Democracy

Playing for Change featuring Keb Mo, Grandpa Elliot, & the Preservation Hall Jazz Band - Down By The Riverside 

The Fool (TOTR 450)

 

-aired on WTTU 88.5 FM The Nest on Saturday, April 1, 2023

-Includes audio clips from the Weird Studies podcast & the Joker (2019) film featuring Joaquin Phoenix & Rober DeNiro 

-listen to the audio archive here:
https://soundcloud.com/teacherontheradio/the-fool-totr-450

Sam Cooke - Fool's Paradise

Bobby Blue Bland - Who Will The Next Fool Be?

The Beatles - The Fool On The Hill

The Rolling Stones - Fool To Cry 

Led Zeppelin - Fool in the Rain

Grateful Dead - Heaven Help the Fool

Michael Stanley Band - Fool's Parade

Levon Helm - Even A Fool Would Let Go

John Prine - Caravan of Fools

Heavy Meadow - The Fool

Bob Dylan - Jokerman

Steve Miller Band - The Joker

Wolfmother - Joker And The Thief

G. Love & Special Sauce - Rodeo Clowns

John Mellencamp - Rodeo Clown

Charley Crockett - I'm Just a Clown

Bruce Springsteen - Wild Billy's Circus Story

World Party - Ship of Fools

U2 - Stand Up Comedy

Father John Misty - Pure Comedy

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding

The Collection - Love At The End Of The World