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Well, I couldn’t care less about baseball, but I’m very busy and need to phone this one in. It’s Woodie Guthrie giving it to a “Philadelphia Lawyer” who made a little love to a cowboy’s “Hollywood maid.” There’s actually a lot going on here that I could get into if I had the time — not least of which is that I think I could pretty easily tie this to the anti-intellectualism that has taken deep root in the modern socio-political scene and the complicated mythos of westward expansion, frontierism, and…wait for it…maverickism (seriously) — but I ain’t got no time (is that better? Does that make me seem more patriotic?)

Anyway, because Philadelphia’s been in the news, because I’m swamped, because it at least mentions places, and because it always helps to have Woodie Guthrie around, feel free to do with Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” what you please. But I’m dropping it wherever TeleAtlas tells me “Philadelphia” is (also because I’m too lazy to research the story that supposedly inspired this song).

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Say what you will about the ACLU, they…know about GIS. Their “Constitution-Free Zone of the United States” would be a good primer for GIS newbs, for what it’s worth. That is, if you weren’t afraid of introducing social politics into the classroom.

Oh, apparently GeoServer isn’t the dog everybody thinks when it comes to raster data. Benchmarking at FOSS4G puts GeoServer right up there. And who serves up shapefiles anymore? (I’m not sure that’s a joke or not. Of course people do, but less and less, right?)

Ordinarily, heavy-handedness ain’t my bag. In any sphere, but especially in music. So, yeah, I would like to have seen a little more subtlety from Warrant with “Cherry Pie.” But Roger Waters is one who almost always gets a pass from me. Something about his anger appeals to me. So bulky metaphors like “the wall” in the old days and those obnoxious backup singers and saxaphones he tours with these days — all of which are usually wont to disqualify an artist from my library and, by extension, the geoMp3 of The Week — are given the go-ahead because they’re in service of a bad-ass flood of vitriol and frustration.

So this week’s track is a live cut from Waters’ recent Dark Side of the Moon tour, specifically from the stop in Santiago, Chile. It’s a song I had never heard before (I’m not a great follower of Waters’ is the truth), but I love it for all the reasons we should all hate Warrant’s…well, everything from Warrant and all of Warrant’s kin. The song is bold, not in any real way innovative, and in no way whatsoever nuanced. It will be placed in Beirut, Lebanon, the site of the song’s nominal story arc, which centers on a family that once took in a young, wandering Waters and showed great hospitality. Waters, now singing this song many years later, wonders aloud about the fate of that gracious family of — gasp! foreigners — who showed a shaggy Englishman real, genuine, old-timey (do I go against everything I know and say “Biblical”?) hospitality back in 1961 in “that cauldron that was Lebanon.”

Anyway, this performance (I’ve never heard the studio version) starts out strong with “But now an Englishman abroad is just a US stooge.” Okay, so the scene is decently-set: we’re outside of the U.S., post-9/11, taking in some of what the Bush Doctrine has begotten. If you can let your ears bleed out during the synth parts, you’ll eventually be treated to a rousing condemnation:

Are these the people that we should bomb?
Are we so sure they mean us harm?
Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime?
Is this a mountain that we really want to climb?
The road is hard, hard and long
Put down that two by four
This man would never turn you from his door
Oh George! Oh George!
That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small

I warned you about the instrument. Don’t blame the player. But that part I can take or leave. Bush himself is an easy target. It’s the part that addresses the U.S. itself and the promise we’ve drawn a big scar over this last decade that makes me choose this one. As vicious the condemnation, the plea (to us, Americans) is more intense still:

Is gentleness too much for us?
Should gentleness be filed along with empathy?
We feel for someone else’s child
Every time a smart bomb does its sums and gets it wrong
Someone else’s child dies and equities in defence rise
America, America, please hear us when we call
You got hip-hop, be-bop, hustle and bustle
You got Atticus Finch
You got Jane Russell
You got freedom of speech
You got great beaches, wildernesses and malls
Don’t let the might, the Christian right, fuck it all up
For you and the rest of the world

It’s a protest song at a time when nobody seems to give a shit about protest songs. But you’re not likely to hear a more direct, honest, deserved request than that one verse. Except for maybe “Cherry Pie,” second stanza.

“Leaving Beirut,” from the 50,000 Lunatics on the Grass bootleg (Santiago de Chile, March 14, 2007.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Edit for an important reminder:
Vote and prove you’re not anti-American.
(It wouldn’t hurt if you also vote for a ticket that doesn’t support anti-intellectualism and jingoism.)

Pete at Ickmusic.com has posted a quick thing about Greg Brown’s “Eugene.” I have some Greg Brown entries in the geoMp3 of The Week archives, but no “Eugene.” Truth is, I don’t really like it that much (I prefer the emotionally drained, long-walk-home Greg Brown to the hippie Luddite). But nonetheless, I of course applaud bloggers who include the natural mystique of place as a criterion in their choice of music.

Dylan could get a little heavy-handed in the old days. When he wasn’t being intentionally obfuscational and impressionist, I mean (shot a fire full of holes, did he?). But for all of “Hollis’” plot, it still has exactly what you want Dylan to do. For every “You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells” you have one of these to offset it:

There’s seven breezes a-blowin’
All around the cabin door
There’s seven breezes a-blowin’
All around the cabin door
Seven shots ring out
Like the ocean’s pounding roar

Any emo treading into blues territory (are there many of those?) could easily drop a gunshot into a stanza, but I guarantee they wouldn’t have seven breezes blowing around the door.

And then comes the punchline, so to speak:
There’s seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
There’s seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There’s seven new people born

…which Lyle Lofgren wrote “is probably the coldest piece of poetry I’ve ever heard.” (Nevermind that ten new people were probably born, but this track has enough going for it without the looming spectre of overpopulation and fresh water shortages and such).

So you’re getting “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”, but guess what: it’s a Nina Simone performance instead of Dylan. Why? Because Nina Simone is a kick-ass mama. And recently my own kick-ass mama thanked me for putting some Nina Simone on a playlist for her, which means Nina Simone is here for good in the geoLibro household.

And although there are some ideas about the origin of the song being paired to either true crime events or older folk songs, I’m putting this one down right where it says — rural South Dakota.

So it’s “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” performed by Nina Simone on Let it All Out (1966).

Google Maps Mania posted about a mashup that puts Anton Corbijn music videos in their earthly places. Anton Corbijn as Music Video Director does just what it sounds like, and it’s of note here for obvious reasons. (No, it will not substitute as the geoMp3 of the Week, even though I’m already late on this week’s post).

So “Me and Paul” will always be a Willie Nelson song. And appropriately so given the looseness of the story (”well I guess Buffalo ain’t geared…”) is always perfectly matched by Nelson and family’s loose live style (in particular Nelson’s very loose guitar).

But the version that makes it to geoMp3 of The Week this week is by Doug Sahm, he of the very long career and perhaps most famously for his Sir Douglas Quintent (or maybe most famously for his participation, with Flaco Jimenez, Augie Meyers and Freddy Fender, in the Texas Tornadoes?). Why not use a superior Willie Nelson performance? Because it’s more compelling to think of the “Me” in “Me and Paul” as someone other than Nelson. Willie and Paul (”Paul” in the song is drummer Paul English) may indeed have been coldly greeted in Milwaukee and Buffalo, but it’s sort of hard to imagine these days that Nelson would be treated with anything other than respect anywhere he goes. If you take the song out of Nelson’s hands, then, and have it played by a more ethnically ambiguous San Antonian — one who spent most of his life celebrating the combination of Tex+Mex, both in culture and practice — it means a little more. Buffalo ain’t geared for Willie and Paul, maybe, but imagine Doug and Flaco Jimenez having trouble boarding a plane in Milwaukee. There’s a little more there, no? And if you don’t think so, you’re living in a dreamland. A white, snowy dreamland, if you get my drift.

Anyway, while it’s a more interesting listen if you imagine a band of Tex-Mexers (or Mex-Texers, depending on whether you came to San Antonio from the north or south), you’re crazy if you think I won’t put this one down in Laredo. Dear, dear Laredo. Nelson warns against leaving anything in your clothes if you stay there, which is probably wise, but if you are ever busted in Laredo you’ll no doubt have made friends there who will come bail you out. The wife and I met some great people when we lived down there and that dusty border town will always carry a certain romance with it. But seriously: don’t go leaving anything in your clothes — the joint is crawling with police, feds, military, and…um, para military (that’s a euphemism).

“Me and Paul,” from 1973’s Doug Sahm and Band

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

More from Chuck E. Weiss this week, and again from 23rd and Stout.

Chuck E. Weiss is every ounce a Los Angelino. Full of amusing bullshit, a raconteur, untrustworthy, a little seedy, fun, but ultimately…superficial and soulless. But it’s perfectly appropriate in this track about a Ventura Boulevard antiques shop owner who disappears with his entire stock after “the cigarettes made him dead.”

Not surprisingly, this one goes right where Piccolo Pete used to peddle those (apparently pristine) art deco wares. I haven’t been able to absolultely verify the location of Piccolo Pete’s, but this mention in the Los Angeles Times makes it pretty likely that it’s right.

As advertised, there ain’t a whole lot going on here. And unless you personally have some whistful reminiscence about an unhealthy antiques peddler bottled up waiting for a shuffling honky tonk ballad to set free, this may not mean a whole lot to you (I don’t; I’ve only been to L.A. once and wasn’t impressed). But it’s still a good, loose Chuck E. Weiss song, and you can get it here.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Well somehow Chuck E. Weiss has never been featured here. I would have guessed there were two or three posts from perennial L.A. scenester Weiss (not like Kardashian or Montage et al, but nonetheless on-the-scene), if for no other reason than he’ll be forever tied to the best there ever was, Tom Waits.

Well, it’s a long string on which he’s tied to Waits, because although there’s a certain aesthetic similarity and an obvious penchent for underwhelming characters in inordinately beautiful and progressive songs in both Waits and Weiss, Weiss is missing soul. Plus he’s less consistent.

But Weiss is still plenty colorful and can string together a few songs every album that nobody else could have put up. This week’s track is one example, called “23rd and Stout (An Incident with Marshall Bell)” off of Weiss’ 2006 release, 23rd & Stout.

23rd & Stout is a location in Denver, CO that at one time was apparently, um, unruly. The song’s about Pork Chop, a hustler that promised Weiss that a $.50 donation now would mean he could head down to 23rd & Stout any time and make it out safely as long as he dropped the name ‘Pork Chop.’

Weiss’ impersonation of Pork Chop in the first few bars is annoying (though no doubt accurate), and the song is really not that great. But it reminds me of Tom Waits’ take on what has become of 9th & Hennepin in Minneapolis (see NPR’s Glitter & Doom show). And it is pretty indicative of most of Weiss’ work (a little jazzy, a little bluesy, usually not too much of either, full of deadbeats and ne’er-do-wells).

How Marshall Bell plays into it I’m not sure.

Anyway, it’s decidedly placeable. (Sadly, I was right there last fall but hadn’t yet picked up this album.)

It’s Chuck E. Weiss performing “23rd & Stout”.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.