Getting Lost In L.A. And Austin

Tony Peyser
Mirror contributing writer

   Immortalized in Rickie Lee Jones’s 1979 hit “Chuck E.’s In Love,” Chuck E. Weiss is a musical Merry Prankster with his own bus. Years ago, he was in a fondly-remembered L.A. band that I don’t think ever recorded an album but had one of the great names ever: The Sheiks Of Shake.
   Old Souls & Wolf Tickets is his first album since 1999’s Extremely Cool which was everything the title promised. (His only previous album was 1981’s The Other Side Of Town. OK, OK, so he’s not prolific.) That initial effort had Dr. John on it which makes sense since, to this day, Weiss’ albums always partly possess a swampy New Orleans funk in the mix. This is certainly the case with “Tony Did The Boogie Woogie” which swoops in with an intoxicating roar. Weiss co-wrote three songs with longtime guitarist Tony Gilkyson from X and “Sweetie-O” is reminiscent of Weiss’ old pal, Tom Waits. For pure R&B fireworks, “Two-Tone Car (An Auto-Body Experience)” will put the pedal to the metal of whatever you’re currently driving.
   Amazingly, the album also includes “Down The Road A Piece,” a piano-driven song from the heart (and soul) of Dixie. Weiss sings it with the literally legendary bluesman Willie Dixon, who wrote classics like “Spoonful” and “Wang Dang Doodle.” What makes this all the more amazing is this track was recorded in 1970. Even before the endearing whistling kicks in halfway through, this track is irresistible and so is the whole album.
   Bruce Springsteen was about to go on tour again with The E Street Band when he was inducted into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. When he performed at the ceremony that night, many old compositions had new meanings because the intervening years had turned him into a middle-aged man singing a young man’s songs. There was a unique resonance, almost like hearing songs you knew by heart for the first time.
   I thought about that show from a few years back when I listened to Hooray For The Moon, the new album by Texas roots rocker, Jon Dee Graham. He wrote “One Moment” when he was in True Believers, a truly influential Austin band back in the mid-1980s. They recorded the song on Hard Road, their only recently released second album. True Believers had an edge to their version of Graham’s song but his new take on it seems suffused more with wisdom than anger. And what an opening line: “In the name of 53 saints, I will go search, he says … ” In “I Go Too,” the raspy-voiced Graham evokes the aforementioned Waits with whom he’s often been compared. This song addresses a wary lover at one point with these lovely words: “Tell me what you’re scared of/Don’t be so afraid/Climb up on my shoulders/You can see the parade.”
   These are smart, touching and thoughtful songs that rock and also possess a spark that lights up like a bar’s neon sign under a starless sky.
   CDNow has Old Souls & Wolf Tickets for $16.97 and Hooray For The Moon for $16.98.
   The Goofy Band Name Of The Week is … Oedipus Sex.