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JamBase Questionnaire: Truth & Salvage Co.

July 8th, 2010 | No Comments

Welcome back to JamBase’s baker’s dozen to the bright lights in the jam scene (and beyond). Last time we heard from Reed Mathis, and this time we visit with a bright light on the rock scene.

Warm, harmonious, rootsy and inviting, Truth & Salvage Co. stir memories of The Band, The Jayhawks and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Yet this young band with roots in New Orleans, Indianapolis, Ohio, Tupelo and elsewhere also sound like their own men, coming at listeners from multiple angles due to four singer-songwriters in their midst. The combination of ancestral textures and self-determination makes for an awfully winning sound that’s immediately likeable but also offers nuggets for the long haul. Their self-titled debut (released May 25) is a quintessential grower, a song cycle that slowly but surely insinuates itself into one’s life. Produced with a light hand by The Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, the album is a wonderful handshake for a band that only seems to be growing stronger as they gig furiously around the U.S. and abroad bringing some awfully sweet music to any friendly folks that’ll have ‘em. (Dennis Cook)

In a first for the JamBase Questionnaire, four members of the band decided to chime in. Here’s what Truth & Salvage Co. had to say to our inquiries.

Truth & Salvage Co.

Name: Scott Kinnebrew
Instrument(s) of choice: 1973 Gibson SG Pro. 60′s Carvin lap steel. Fuchs (fooks) guitar amplifiers
Nicknames: Skinny, Kinny

Name: Walker Young
Instrument(s) of choice: piano, organ, vocals
Nicknames: Snakehandler Slim

Name: Bill Smith
Instrument(s) of choice: 1971 Gretsch drum kit and vocals
Nicknames: Smitty, The Mohican

Name: Tim Jones
Instrument(s) of choice: ’73 Fender Telecaster Deluxe, Shure SM 58 (Beta)
Nicknames: Jonesy, Springbreak (from Chris Robinson)

1. Great music rarely happens withoutÂ…
A great song. Give me a great song and I won’t care if your guitar is out if tune. But please do try to keep it tuned. (Scott)

2. The first album I bought wasÂ…
The first album I bought wasÂ…Best of Lou Reed. On cassette tape. I was like nine, I bet, and I heard “Walk On The Wild Side.” Somebody told me Bob Dylan wrote it; this was also the first time I ever heard of Bob Dylan. So, I went to the record shop and asked for “Walk On The Wild Side” by Bob Dylan and, of course, the record store kid looked at me like I was stupid. Record store people seem to still look at me like I’m stupid. I don’t take it personally; I’m sure they struggle with disillusionment. Anyway, so they inform me that the song was by Lou Reed and I bought his greatest hits and listened and loved it and so became the gender bending rocker I am today. Thanks, Lou! (Scott)

3. The last song or album to really flip my wig wasÂ…
“If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys. I grew up in New Orleans and the big soul pop station in the 80s was Q-93. All day they would play the best R&B of the time. Don’t get me wrong I like where R&B has gone but when I heard “If I Ain’t Got You” it instantly reminded me how innocent and emotional R&B used to be. I downloaded and listened repeatedly and honestly teared up every time. On a more “hip” note, I’ve been wearing out Leon Russell’s debut album, especially the tune “Delta Lady ” (Scott)

4. When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to beÂ…
A State Highway Patrolman. Stability was important to me coming from a blue collar, working class family. I knew a couple of “statey’s” growing up and they had nice houses. I thought that was my calling. Then in high school someone told me how bad of a drummer I was and it was then that I set out to prove them wrong. 20 years later I am still on that path and lovin’ every minute of it. (Bill)

5. My favorite sort of gig isÂ…
Playing for people that need musical salvation. (Bill)

6. One thing I wish people knew about me isÂ…
That I am the son of a third generation dairy farmer. I was very fortunate to come from a very loving, hard working family of six. I used to have to practice my drums in the barn. (Bill)

7. I love the sound ofÂ…
Sunday. When it’s quiet and peaceful in the afternoon and there’s a collective stillness in the air. (Tim)

8. One day I hope to make an album as fantastic asÂ…
The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Let’s shoot for the top. (Tim)

9. The best meal I ever had on tour was atÂ…
DFAC at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Iraq. (Tim)

10. I always find the coolest audiences inÂ…
Asheville, NC. We lived in Asheville for about ten years. There is an amazing creative energy there and the residents love great music. They have been incredibly supportive through our evolution as a band and are excited as ever for T&S Co. (Walker)

11. The worst habit I’ve picked up being on the road all the time isÂ…
I drink so much alcohol that I can’t remember what my bad habits are or aren’t. In fact, I can’t remember anything. Guys, are we on the road? (Walker)

12. The Beatles or the Stones? Por que?
I really prefer the southern rock style of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Growing up in Georgia they had much more influence on me and the music I write than either the Stones or The Beatles. (Walker)

13. The craziest thing I ever saw wasÂ…

A beast that stood 14-feet tall, with eyes blacker than night, teeth like a shark and a nose like a bull with a cast iron ring through his septum. He was a behemoth of a creature covered in buffalo fur, steam rising from his sweat-matted shoulders, and with a scent not unlike fried potatoes and fish. He asked, “Do you have something to smoke?” I replied, “Weed or tobacco?” “Weed,” he opined. “Well, you’re in luck, buddy, because we happen to be in the great state of California!” I retorted. To this day we are still the best of friends. (Scott)

A medicine man in the bush of West Africa. (Bill)

An electric pink and blue neon Vishnu come down from a wooden ceiling when I was 15-years-old. (Tim)

I went to a protest at a Tennessee weapons plant where four nuns crossed over into the weapons facility. After 9/11 this was seen as a terrorist act, which would land them in jail for four years, possibly more. The emotion surrounding that day and the fact that our government threw four nuns in jail for peaceful protest seriously impacted me. It is something I think of often: The dedication of those four women, risking everything to bring awareness to the destructive nature of war; Their dedication to a cause higher than themselves. This is the same reason we play music and attempt to reach people through song. (Walker)

Truth & Salvage Co. Tour Dates :: Truth & Salvage Co. News :: Truth & Salvage Co. Concert Reviews

JamBase | Rollin’ On The River
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Pak plan for Afghan peace leaves US wary

June 28th, 2010 | No Comments


NEW YORK – US President Barack Obama and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency were at variance on Sunday in assessing the Afghanistan peace deal being promoted by Pakistan between the Afghan government and some Taliban militants.
While urging caution, Obama, in Canada, called the Pakistani move “useful step”, saying a political solution to the conflict was necessary and suggested elements of the Taliban insurgency could be part of negotiations. But, earlier in the day, CIA Cirector Leon Panetta forcefully expressed his doubts about the plan.
“We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce Al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society,” Panetta said in Washington on ABC’s “This Week”.
Acknowledging that the American-led counterinsurgency effort was facing unexpected difficulty, Panetta said that the Taliban and their allies had little motive to contemplate a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan.
But the President was diplomatic when asked about whether efforts by Pakistan and Afghanistan to reintegrate Taliban were a good idea.
“I think it’s too early to tell. I think we have to view these efforts with scepticism but also with openness,” the President said while responding to questions at a Press conference marking the end of the G-20 summit in Toronto, Canada.
According to the New York Times, the US President avoided any direct comment on whether the Haqqani network, the Taliban group reportedly proposed by Pakistan as part of a power-sharing deal, could become part of AfghanistanÂ’s future leadership.
But, he said, “conversations between the Afghan government and the Pakistani government, building trust between those two governments, are a useful step.”
Obama also said a political solution to the conflict was necessary and suggested elements of the Taliban insurgency could be part of negotiations.
He noted that as the Afghanistan war approached its 10th anniversary, it was the longest foreign war in American history, and that “ultimately as was true in Iraq, so will be true in Afghanistan, we will have to have a political solution.”
As for Pakistan’s effort to broker talks, Obama added, “I think it’s too early to tell. I think we have to view these efforts with scepticism but also with openness. The Taliban is a blend of hardcore ideologues, tribal leaders, kids that basically sign up because it’s the best job available to them. Not all of them are going to be thinking the same way about the Afghan government, about the future of Afghanistan. And so we’re going to have to sort through how these talks take place.”
The comments Sunday were the administrationÂ’s first public response to a report of PakistanÂ’s deal-brokering efforts last week in The New York Times.
On Saturday, The New York Times said AfghanistanÂ’s minority communities – Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara – have vowed to resist, and if necessary, fight, any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with President Hamid KarzaiÂ’s government.
In an earlier dispatch in The Times, Pakistani officials were quoted as saying they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al-Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement with the Afghan government.
American commanders have concluded that only a political settlement can end the war, the report said. But in helping Karzai to make a deal, they risk reigniting AfghanistanÂ’s ethnic strife.
The leaders of these minority communities say that President Karzai appears determined to hand Taliban leaders a share of power – and Pakistan a large degree of influence inside the country, according to The Times. The Americans, desperate to end their involvement here, are helping Karzai along and shunning the Afghan opposition, they say.
Agencies add: US President Obama contended America would be less secure if Al-Qaeda still could be housed in Afghanistan, and contended there remains “a vital national interest that Afghanistan not be used as a base to launch terrorist attacks”.
He also said the US intends “to be a partner for Afghanistan for the long term, but that is different than us having troops on the ground”, adding that a political solution is needed as well as a military one to the Afghan conflict.
Obama sought to shelve what he sees as a false choice between “either we get up and leave (Afghanistan) immediately because there’s no chance for a positive outcome or we stay indefinitely.”
Still, Obama said, “We’re going to need to provide assistance to Afghanistan for a long time to come.”
The US President said that he will conduct a review of his new strategy in December, fix what is not working and then begin the transition next year.
“That doesn’t mean that we suddenly turn off the lights and let the door close behind us,” Obama said.
Obama acknowledged that “there has been a lot of obsession around this issue of when do we leave.”
But he said he is more interested in implementing his strategy and seeing results, and he will review whether or not the strategy is working after the December review.
Obama offered a rationale for the nationÂ’s very presence in Afghanistan.
“You’ll often hear, why are we in Afghanistan when the terrorists are in Pakistan?” Obama said.

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The week ahead

June 13th, 2010 | No Comments

Iraq’s new parliament will be in session; oil executives will be grilled by Congress

•IN IRAQ, the first session of the new parliament begins on Monday June 14th. Iyad Allawi’s Iraqi National Movement, known as Iraqiya, narrowly won the general election (which took place at the end of March), giving him the right to try to form a coalition. This will not be easy. Making a stable government out of the available ingredients—which include the State of Law alliance, led by the current prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; a Shia religious alliance that includes followers of a populist cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a Kurdish alliance—could take months.

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6 Former Draft Dodgers Who Sent Others to War

June 10th, 2010 | No Comments

Not a fan of warfare? Don’t join the army. However, if you’re sending your country to war it’s probably for the best if you didn’t avoid military service. Here are 6 contemporary American draft dodgers!

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Wikileaks: Wiki Gaga

June 10th, 2010 | No Comments

No technology can protect whistle-blowers from themselves

MUCH can be lost because of the loose talk of a 22-year-old. Wikileaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources, but it cannot control them. At the end of May the American army arrested Bradley Manning, who was said to be the source of a leaked video, shown on Wikileaks, revealing how soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed unarmed civilians in Iraq. Mr Manning, an intelligence analyst, apparently betrayed himself by boasting of his actions to a stranger in an e-mail. The case is a reminder that Wikileaks is only as robust as the humans who use it.

Julian Assange, an Australian former hacker, founded the service in 2007. It now has perhaps 800 volunteer technologists, activists and lawyers around the world. Media groups such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times provide legal advice. In addition to the Iraq footage, it has published evidence of corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, procedures for detainees in Guantanamo Bay and a string of Sarah Palin’s e-mails. It has been so well run that Daniel Ellsberg, an ex-Pentagon analyst who leaked an internal history of the Vietnam war in 1971, assumed on first sight that it was a honeypot run by American intelligence. …

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Hosts with the most

June 7th, 2010 | No Comments

The most (and least) popular domains on the internet

THE .net domain is the most popular on the internet, with more than 260m hosts counted by the most recent Internet Domain Survey. Hosts are separate computer “addresses” that are contacted when a website or domain name is called up. Japan’s top-level domain .jp has the most hosts, counting over twice as many as Italy’s. The biggest generic top-level domains are .edu, used by education institutions across the world, and .mil, which is used only by the American military. At the other end of the scale, only 47 hosts with the Afghanistan suffix .af were recorded, fewer than the Holy See’s 67. Iraq and North Korea are even less popular, ranking joint 251st and 261st out of a possible 268 domains. And two went unused: .sj and .pm.

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Mr. T Slams “The A-Team” Movie: “It Was Too Graphic For Me”

June 7th, 2010 | No Comments

Mr. T “pities da fool” who scrambles to the box office this weekend in hopes of checking out the big screen adaptation of The A-Team.Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Liam Neeson, Jessica Biel, and Quenton “Rampage” Jackson are trying to fill some pretty big shoes in the motion picture remake of the ’80s television hit. The [...]

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Single Sean Penn to devote more time to charity work

June 5th, 2010 | No Comments

‘Milk’ star Sean Penn has revealed that now that he is single he can devote more of his time to charity work.
Penn, 49, who separated from his wife of 13 years, Robin Wright, last year, has been busy with charity work since the breakdown, and he has been instrumental in supporting aid efforts in Haiti.
The [...]

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Paris Hilton USO “Songs For Soldiers” Celebrity Ambassador

May 28th, 2010 | No Comments

Heiress-socialite Paris Hilton is throwing her weight — and her wallet — behind American troops by becoming the Official Celebrity Ambassador for the new initiative from United Service Organizations: Support Our Troops (USO). Hilton has teamed up with the military charity’s new Songs for Soldiers campaign. The charity aims to present every American soldier – who [...]

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Realpolitik returns

May 27th, 2010 | No Comments

The National Security Strategy reveals a narrower view of what force can accomplish

EVERY incoming president is required to send Congress a National Security Strategy. Some of these documents are abstract and forgettable but others really do provide a clue to the future. One such was the document George W. Bush signed in 2002, which gave warning that America would act against foes seeking dangerous military technologies before such threats were fully formed. A year later the Bush administration cited precisely this doctrine to justify the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published on May 27th, has a different emphasis. Mr Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq. His document does not endorse Mr Bush’s doctrine of pre-emption. Nor, though, as the Iranians will doubtless note, is pre-emption explicitly disavowed. As a last resort, says the strategy, “the United States must reserve the right to act unilaterally,” albeit adhering to “standards that govern the use of force”. …

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What’s your issue and why?

May 26th, 2010 | No Comments

What issue will press your buttons when you cast your ballot on November 2?

 

Voters deeply care about a world of issues, polls say, including the economy, health care, the federal deficit, education, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism and many others. Which of these topics — or any others — is most important to you?  Why? We want to know! Here’s your chance to sound off. Write us — or better yet — switch on your video camera and tell us what will be at the top of your mind in the ballot booth this Election Day.

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What’s your issue and why?

May 26th, 2010 | No Comments

What issue will press your buttons when you cast your ballot on November 2?

 

Voters deeply care about a world of issues, polls say, including the economy, health care, the federal deficit, education, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism and many others. Which of these topics — or any others — is most important to you?  Why? We want to know! Here’s your chance to sound off. Write us — or better yet — switch on your video camera and tell us what will be at the top of your mind in the ballot booth this Election Day.

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Is It True that Alternative Energy Is Too Expensive?

May 24th, 2010 | No Comments

Many people assume that alternative energy is simply too expensive, and not competitive with oil and other conventional means of energy.While some alternative writers allege that the big oil companies have artificially increased alternative energy pric…

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The Giant Banks, Federal Reserve and Treasury Have All Blackmailed America

May 22nd, 2010 | No Comments

As I wrote last October: Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski and Senator James Inhofe all say that the government warned of martial law if Tarp wasn’t passed. And Rahm Emanuel famously said: Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I…

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Uprooted

May 18th, 2010 | No Comments

The number of internally displaced people grows

THOSE who have been forcibly uprooted by violence within countries, known in the jargon as “internally displaced people” (or IDPs), are often just as vulnerable as refugees, those who flee persecution by crossing an international border. A new report from the Norwegian Refugee Council notes a steady increase in the global population of IDPs, to 27.1m in 2009. Almost 5m people are displaced in Sudan, more than any other country, although the number of IDPs in Colombia is estimated to be nearly as high. Over 1m are also displaced in Congo, Iraq, Somalia and Pakistan, where recent anti-Taliban assaults by the Pakistani army near the border with Afghanistan have uprooted many civilians. Cyprus, which was split after a Turkish invasion in 1974, has the largest share of its population living elsewhere.

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Do You Know Anyone Serving in Iraq or Afghanistan?

May 17th, 2010 | No Comments

On Sunday I will be running the Run to Home Base, a 9 km road race that will finish at Home Plate in Fenway Park. As part of this race I raised $1,000 for a fund run by the Red … Continue reading →

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Baghdad vote result unchanged after recount

May 16th, 2010 | No Comments

An Iraqi election official says a recount of votes in Baghdad from Iraq’s March 7 election has not changed the parliamentary seat allocation. An official with the Independent High Electoral Commission, Saad al-Rawi, said Sunday the number of seats for any coalition will stay as it is, leaving former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s bloc the winner of the most seats.

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US Troops Spoof Ke$ha “Blah Blah Blah”

May 13th, 2010 | No Comments

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is getting the Ke$ha treatment. Just a week after US troops in Afghanistan released a video spoofing Lady Gaga’s video short film “Telephone” — which garnered more than 4 million views on YouTube — their counterparts in Iraq have reworked Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah” to make a statement about the growing debate [...]

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California Is More Likely to Default than Iceland or Iraq

May 12th, 2010 | No Comments

The Federal Reserve isn’t the only one who owns credit default swaps betting that California will default.As Ed Harrison points out, credit default traders have now ranked California in the list of top 10 governments most likely to default, with a 20% …

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Attacks in Iraq kill more than 100

May 11th, 2010 | No Comments

A wave of attacks across Iraq killed more than people Monday, and wounded about 300 others. The violence began before dawn, with gunmen in speeding cars killing soldiers and police at checkpoints across Baghdad. The assailants used silencers, a new gangland-style twist to their attacks.

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