My California compadre Charlie McGovern, who produces records by interesting people like Tony Gilkyson (Goodbye Guitar), Victoria Williams (Sings Some Ol' Songs), and Mike Stinson (Last Fool At the Bar), is also Salinas, California's biggest booster and amateur historian. It's all in a day's work for me to receive out-of-left-field emails from McGovern telling me he just visited Doc Ricketts' lab (the "Doc" in John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat) or some other mind-boggling piece of history associat
Who 'Dat?The Jayhawks circa 1992Emerging from "The City of Lakes" in 1985, the Jayhawks showed that Minneapolis could produce a band at the forefront of another genre besides pioneering alt-rock (The Replacements, Hüsker Dü) and funk (the Purple One); namely, the nascent alt-country/"No Depression" movement. Named as a nod to the Band's original moniker - the Hawks - and not the bird, the original lineup included Mark Olson (vocals/acoustic guitar), Gary Louris (vocals/electric guitar), Marc