We have two weekly "alternative" papers - the Bay Guardian and the SF Weekly. Here are their articles on the Bad Livers: http://www.sfbg.com/AandE/33/19/grooves.html Bad Livers Industry and Thrift (Sugar Hill) SINCE SIGNING to the Sugar Hill label, Austin's Bad Livers hew about as faithfully to bluegrass traditionalism as you can expect from a band that used to cover Iggy Pop tunes. One might think that by stripping down to a duo (fiddler Ralph White's replacement, guitarist Bob Grant, is nowhere to be heard on this, the band's fifth album), Mark Rubin and Danny Barnes might sound even more like Flatt and Scruggs. Hardly. You won't find too many bluegrass bands whose bass player (Rubin) takes jazzlike liberties with harmonies and rhythms, doubles on tuba, and moonlights in a klezmer band, or whose banjo- and dobro-picker has as much fun playing funereal tempos as blistering breakdowns and recently entered into a side project with jazz-rock guitar icon Bill Frisell. Barnes and Rubin don't really pretend to be a duo, getting plenty of assistance on Industry and Thrift from nearly a dozen friends, including the record's producer, pedal steel ace Lloyd Maines. A few tracks feature acoustic picking that accelerates into bluegrass festival overdrive, and are dead serious in their old-timey temperament. But most wear their iconoclasm with giddy pride: "Hollywood Blues" sounds like a Harry Nilsson-meets-Jimmy Rodgers offspring crooning over an old John Fahey orchestration; and "A Yid ist Geboren inz Oklahoma" brings the klezmer revival to its knees, which pretty much sums up the implicit Bad Livers philosophy that any tradition worth saving had better be able to take a joke. Bad Livers perform Wed/10, Amoeba Music, S.F. (415) 831-1200, and Great American Music Hall, S.F. (415) 885-0750. Derk Richardson ===== http://www.sfweekly.com/1999/current/tudor1.html In a week dedicated to saccharine hearts and cloying phrases like “Be Mine,” it does an old sour-mash soul good to hear tunes like “Lumpy, Beanpole and Dirt,” in which a disenchanted beau tells his lady love to “Buy me some wine and some good old turpentine and give yourself a healthy little squirt.” The Bad Livers began as an Austin-style lark: A single banjo/guitar picker, optimistically billing himself as the Danny Barnes Trio (with the hope other players will show up), hooks up with an upright bass and tuba player named Mark Rubini and they release a psychotic bluegrass rendition of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life.” Local music critics were happier than pigs in shit when the pair broke onto the Austin scene in 1990, but since then, the integration of country and punk has grown as commonplace as milkweed. So the Bad Livers deserted their bucolic covers of Motörhead and Metallica tunes and turned to more fertile pastures. Over the course of four increasingly eloquent and consistently mirthful albums, the Livers have continued to merge rock posture, klezmer abandon, and bluegrass instrumentation with a jazzy virtuosity, but lyrically they have settled comfortably down-home. Industry and Thrift finds our boys joined by a slew of friends pluckin’ and blowin’ their way through a joyous mutation of the klezmer traditional “A Yid Ist Geboren inz Oklahoma,” a solemn nod to Walt Whitman in “Captain, Oh Captain,” and the slap-giddy “Brand New Hat” with its hard-pressed clod of truth, “It makes you look like somebody else/ It’s hard enough to keep track of yourself.” The Bad Livers perform at Amoeba Music for free on Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 5:30 p.m.; call 831-1200. And at Great American Music Hall that same night with the Tony Furtado Band opening at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10; call 885-0750.
