Category Archives: kentucky

Long Live the Experimental Pollen

Jon Cook ca. 1994.

Back in 1996, fans of lo-fi music, Crain, and Louisville’s particular brand of homegrown rock might’ve been following Experimental Pollen, a short-lived Jon Cook project.  As it looked like Crain was about to split up, that small community might’ve paid particular attention to what a possible Crain follow-up would be. Experimental Pollen had a pretty mighty presence that summer, with a crack rhythm section composed of Troy Cox (Evergreen) and Will Hancock (Four Fifty Six), but the very few released recordings never really measured up to that lineup, and the band folded as Jon got more interested in noise music and his decline began to inexorably take hold.

However, before all that, he managed to release a 7″ EP on the one-off Gene Rick label (sporting a St. Cloud, Minnesota P.O. box for reasons that remain obscure to me). Essentially a split with New England indie rocker Mike Flood (also obscure), I got my hands on a copy of it recently and am pleased to post the two best solid songs from it, both recorded in “that electrifying spring and summer of ’94.”  I’ll second the electricity.

To cop from the liner notes, “long live the Experimental Pollen!  Happy!!!!”

***UPDATE: I’ve added a couple more Experimental Pollen songs to the playlist so readers/listeners don’t have to jump around the links in the last sentence of the first paragraph.

Evergreen – On Another Dimension in Indiana

Sean McLoughlin as rendered by Caleb

Several years ago, I wrote about an Evergreen show at the 1995 St. Francis Battle of the Bands at the Grand Theater in New Albany in which drummer Britt Walford (Slint, many others) was lifted off the throne, practically still playing. I was thrilled to see that Vice’s Party Legends features an episode with Dave Pajo that re-tells that story with animation. Sandwiched between segments talking about wild and decadent L.A. parties, once again, little Louisville punches several classes above its weight. Pajo’s description of Walford also gives the episode its title — Britt was, in those days, as so many of us were, “clearly on another dimension.” Pajo’s portion starts at 11:15.

I remember the cops pulling Britt off the kit. Pajo remembers that it was band members Sean McLoughlin and Tim Ruth. His version makes a bit more sense, because I clearly remember everybody meeting up later at the “Dixie House” — the ramshackle two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Louisville where Sean lived with Richard and Joe from Wino. Had it been the cops, then Britt likely would have been in a cell. [Update: one of the “hardcore partiers in town” who was there wrote to say that he clearly remembered that it was the cops who pulled Walford off the kit. They then just stared at him, and he took off. This jibes with my recollections as well. I’m trying to imagine that happening in today’s world of police-civilian interactions.] I also remember taking some alternate route away from the Grand to the Sherman Minton Bridge. Today’s kids will take solace in the fact that they’ll have far more bridges to choose from when running from Indiana’s finest — which I hope they’ll have occasion to do.

Pajo does conflate a bit the straightedge bands and the scene. (I don’t blame him.) The band that played and that he is talking about is Metroschifter, but there were far worst offenders in onstage preaching — I can’t not mention Endpoint’s Rob Pennington and Guilt’s Duncan Barlow. But Metroschifter frontman Scott Ritcher was the one to make a couple of bids for entry into local politics, first as mayor in 1998 and then as state senator ten years later.  The animation is a good composite of the blather endemic to straightedge sub-scene at that time. Post-high school, for me, anyway, the sanctimoniousness of Minor Threat-inspired hardcore had started to wear thin. Although a lot of girls were certainly into it, its puritan ethos seemed to contradict the whole rock ‘n’ roll spirit.

Britt by Caleb

I don’t know much about animator Caleb, but he did a great job capturing details like the wild look in Sean’s eyes, Britt’s lack of facial expression and determined drumming, the pompousness of the preachy straightedge bands, and in general the vibe of a show in the middle of nowhere over two decades ago. Kudos to Caleb. The music is also well done, with strains of what sounds like live or practice versions of Evergreen’s “Klark Kent” and “Petting the Beast” running over Pajo’s re-telling.

Hat-tip to Richard for hipping me to this episode. I’m a bit out of the loop about such things.

Happy (belated) birthday, Hunter Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Louisville, would have turned 79 this week. With the Republican National Convention in full swing and on the cusp of a truly ludicrous election, we need him now more than ever. The Paris Review’s lengthy interview from 2000 is worth re-reading, and quotes the following from 1988’s Generation of Swine:

. . . I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.

This week, the New Yorker ran a satirical bit that started as such:

The 2016 Republican National Convention became embroiled in another controversy on Tuesday, as Biblical experts accused Republicans of plagiarizing the entire Convention scenario from the Book of Revelation.

So HST’s ghost still walks with us.  I wish he had stuck around for another decade or so. There will be much unfinished business to come, it seems, in the matter of the “autopsy of the American dream,” a job at which he excelled.

Dry Heat

Ali, accompanied by Jimmy Ellis, runs along Regent Street; London 1966
Ali, accompanied by Jimmy Ellis, runs along Regent Street; London 1966

When I heard Muhammad Ali, the Champ, died Friday, I thought I would go for a three mile run. I figured that it would be a small thing to do for someone who had done so many big things. There had recently been a shooting at my gym so I thought I would go outside.

***

The Champ made it ok to be from Louisville, Kentucky. When traveling, it is much better to be able to talk about the Champ rather than fried chicken chains or whiskey or the other things that people talk about if they think about Kentucky. 

The Champ helped my brother out in Serbia. We were at a music festival in Novi Sad in 2004, and although it was a festival designed to promote peace, Americans still had to be careful and respectful. Even though the NATO bombing was five years past — an eternity in cable news cycle damaged American minds — it was like yesterday in Serbia. In case anyone might’ve forgotten, the bridge connecting the island where the festival was to Novi Sad was a temporary pontoon bridge, the original having been struck by NATO bombs. My brother had crossed the bridge and was held up at security by Serbian police officers intent on searching all he had. But when they looked in his bag and found the The Fight by Norman Mailer, with Ali’s picture on the cover, one said in the manner of being let in on some tremendous and wonderful secret, “ah, the Champ,” and then they let him pass. 

The Champ helped me out in Italy, too. Wandering the industrial zone around Lodi TBB station which was the only place my magazine could afford an office, where I watched whores trick on the tracks and Gypsies shoot up in the thin tree lines along the track, I found a coffee place tended by a lone and gaunt Italian. The bar, like many things in Italy, seemed from a different era. He had a photo of the Champ on the wall.  I said, “è il mio paesano,” as I waited on my coffee and the gaunt barista came over and started talking to me. We talked for awhile. I went to that coffee place for the rest of the time we had our offices there.

And when some neighborhood bullies acted like they were going to steal my bike one day when I was 11 or 12, my father taught me a few moves in my room and then I overheard him saying to my mother that he was going to send me to his friend Joe Martin’s gym if this went on. My mother groaned. It didn’t go on, so I never went.

Of course all these things could have happened had the Champ not been alive, but here are some that couldn’t have.

In the mid-1990s, my father met the Champ in the lobby of the Starks Building in Louisville, where he had his office. He was working late, as he often did, but it was a Friday and his secretary made him leave before it got too late. As they went towards the catwalk that led to the parking garage, they saw a gaggle of people surrounding the Champ. My dad slid through them and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Champ,” he said. The Champ already had Parkinson’s but smiled and took my father’s hand in his and made a little time for him. When my father caught up with his secretary, who walked faster than he did, she said, “I can’t believe you did that. That was Muhammed Ali.” He said, “I know.”

But that wasn’t the first time he saw him. He saw him walking down Walnut Street by himself in the late summer of 1960, right after he’d won the gold medal in Rome, the one they say he threw in the Ohio River later. My father said he was walking down Walnut Street by himself like he owned the place. He didn’t then, but he would.

There was no coffeeshop or restaurant or bar in Louisville that would have served him then and in the next year’s mayoral race, Louisville’s Fourth Street Democratic organization would run segregationist candidate William S. Milburn, president of the Board of Aldermen, against republican William O. Cowger.  Milburn lost overwhelmingly. By 1978, the Board of Aldermen had changed the name of Walnut Street to Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

***

Where I live, it was 117 degrees today. By the time the sun went down, it was only 107. I made it to four miles.  It’s a dry heat.

The Miss – Live in Louisville

Back in 2000, I was living in Baltimore and fronting a band called The Miss. We were invited to play in my hometown of Louisville at a birthday party for local musician and man about town, Chad Castetter. Being the Friday after Thanksgiving, it was a gala homecoming affair and, with about 300 in attendance, was without a doubt the biggest crowd we played to in our short two year career.

The show was at a space managed by a certain Mia, who also managed the Mercury Paw on Main Street (previously known as the Zodiac). The place was a former strip club — note the pole and mirrors onstage — and last time I checked, which was over Labor Day, had been burnt to the ground. The Paw, of course, is part of the historic Whiskey Row renovation effort.

It was our second show and we played a short set including “Vast Deference” which was a tune from the Brogues, my previous band with co-conspirator and drummer Damir.

Tyler Trotter, then of Strike City and now of Watter, set the show up. Strike City opened and featured a stripper as the closer of their act — that’s what the initial interview, which I included here, is about. (For a different take on the exotic dancer, see this piece in Never Nervous.) Also on the bill (but not in this clip) were good friends Front Porch Campaign and precursor band to Phantom Family Halo, Starkiller.

Technical note: BMX superstar Jimmy Levan filmed this on a digital video camera, so cutting edge at the time that we had to transfer it to VHS. The transfer then made it back onto DVDs at some more recent point, the digital originals having long been lost by the time digital became standard.

 

Some Jon Cook Music

Jon Cook & Tony Bailey playing together; Crain @ the Cherokee 1995
Jon Cook & Tony Bailey playing together; Crain @ the Cherokee 1995

I didn’t make it to Louisville in time for Jon Cook’s memorial on March 9th, but I was in Louisville recently and I did extract some Jon Cook gems from my archives. The first two feature Jon’s collaborations with a couple of other recently- and tragically- departed Louisville musicians.

“Unhindered Perception of the Happy Machine”

For some reason I always liked this song a lot, even if the lyrics are barely intelligible and the song meanders along. Never recorded in a studio, this is from a show in Chicago in the mid-90s, featuring versatile drummer Tony Bailey, who also left the earth far too early in 2009. Listen to how the song verges on falling apart near the end, but Tony manages to bring it back together. Critics usually call Crain “math-rock” which implies an incredible level of tightness. I don’t dispute that Crain went through a period like that, but a lot of late Crain seemed fairly loose, held together by solid musicianship and that elusive intuition that all musicians seem to chase.

“Broken Heart of a Neutron Star”

Live at a 1994 Simple Machine gala emceed by Jason Noble, who also died last year tragically young. Not really my favorite take of this tune, mainly since Jon Cook doesn’t sing it and it’s his song, but this version is notable mainly for Jason Noble’s hyperactive and hyper-enthusiastic introduction. Louisville is indeed a muddy horse farm as well as something of sprawling metropolis, at least if you are from elsewhere in Kentuckiana. The rumor in 1994 was that the original title of the song was “Noble Attitude” and that Cook had written it about his friend.

“Double-Cross Pollination”

Not a Crain tune, but an Experimental Pollen tune. Experimental Pollen was a ferocious live band that featured Troy Cox from Evergreen on bass and engineer Will Hancock from 456 on drums. They played the party circuit ca. 1996-1997 and were most noted for headlining a New Year’s party at the Lausman’s family farmhouse on the outskirts of Louisville. An all-star AC/DC cover band featuring Cook, Britt Walford and Crain alumnus (and musician in his own right) Jason Hayden warmed the crowd up. This being New Year’s in Louisville, we didn’t need much warming up. Pollen took the ‘stage’ which was a hardwood floor, in front of several hundred sweaty, intoxicated kids with great anticipation around midnight. Will counted off, 1-2-3-4, and the crowd reared up, ready to jump as one to the sound of the rock. The first note rang out, the crowd all hit the floor at the same time, and there resonated a horrendous and violent creak — the sound of the floor giving way. The music abruptly stopped, the whole ugly engine of the bass and drums grinding to a halt. Cook sheepishly spoke into the mic: “Uh. I think we broke the floor.” One of the elder Lausman brothers ran downstairs, perfunctorily checked the foundations, and came back upstairs, giving the all-clear sign, and the rock commenced into 1997.

This song doesn’t have that raw energy but is a bit more subdued, which was another side of Cook’s songwriting. Experimental Pollen released a 7″ with guest appearances from noted producer indie rocker Flood, which is pretty worth hearing (if memory serves) and also a split LP with Louisville heavies Wino. The split LP is worth hearing for the Wino songs; let’s leave the review at that.

Coming soon, I hope: a live 1992 recording of Crain doing the Misfits’ “Teenagers from Mars,” as well as more live material. Watch this space.

 

Goodbye, Jon Cook

You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer exists, I told myself.

Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

Jon Cook from Crain and Rodan, two of my favorite homegrown bands, was finally taken off life support tonight, ending two days of tortuous rumors and speculation. He was a bright spot in Louisville’s underground in the ’90s, which makes his senseless death sadder still. I guess he had been going through a long decay for most of the last decade, maybe longer: drugs, alcohol, dereliction.

Crain’s music was huge; sometimes angry, sometimes delicate, not unlike the people who made it. But more than the music, Jon was a rallying point, someone who repeatedly left our little provincial burg to travel the country in a van, bringing treasure and glory (well, not much treasure — it was rock ‘n’ roll, after all) back to us.

I remember running into him at an all-ages club one cold night in fall 1992. He and Crain had just gotten back from Albini’s studio in Chicago, where they’d recorded songs for a new EP. He was energetic; manic, almost, but who wouldn’t be? Steve Albini was a legend to anyone who played non-commercial pop music in the ’90s; the fact that a kid in a band could just drive up to his studio and record was special, particularly from a teenager’s viewpoint. People like Jon fulfilled that basic need to feel part of something bigger, important to a frustrated adolescent.

Jon was a friendly and kind man. Bands wanted to come to Louisville because in the ’90s he brought every touring act on the indie circuit — from Fugazi to the Jesus Lizard, from the Riot Grrl! bands to the Rollins Band, from Sleepyhead to Hammerhead — to Louisville and let them stay in his mom’s house, where she’d make them hearty spaghetti dinners.

Later, the old Victorian mansion he owned called the Rocket House became a sort of creative crash pad. There was always a band playing there, or maybe staying there while on tour, and the walls were festooned with the numbers and names of virtually everyone in the ’90s underground — Ian McKaye, Kathleen Hanna, Jenny Toomey, Corey Rusk — written in magic marker. If you stopped in, you might see Jeff Mueller making a sculpture out of junk, or you could hand Bob Weston your joke band’s demo, or you might end up as the extra in an indie movie, or you could hang out with older, perhaps not-always-wiser people.

But what I didn’t think of as a teenager was that Jon Cook had a Victorian mansion at age 21 because his own dad had passed away, I think, in a house fire started by a cigarette. I met his mom, Peggy, on several occasions. She was nice, too, and I thought it was funny that a woman my mother’s age would pour me such stiff gin and tonics. Maybe there’s something to be learned there that I still don’t know.

Back in the ’90s, I heard he was supposed to take meds but didn’t. I heard a lot of stuff.  I heard he wrote a novel. He definitely drew cartoons. He kept making music. Once, I walked into a bar and saw him play on guitar, unaccompanied, a song written by a friend of mine that I didn’t think anyone else knew very well. He played it beautifully, and then indie legend Lou Barlow got on stage and played. And then Jon was nowhere to be seen. The last time I saw Jon was in summer 2010 and he seemed friendly — too-friendly; unbalanced. I got spooked, and I took off.

We have an idea that someday, we can go home and things will be a little bit like they were when we left. But the people that defined my home keep leaving for good. Tony Bailey, Jason Noble, now Jon Cook — these people who were larger than life once keep leaving life behind. What they leave behind is a gaping void.

Goodbye, Jon. Rest in the peace that seemed so hard for you to find, and rest knowing that for the brief period you were on this planet, it was a better place.

 

Zombie Rock and the Duke of Hazard

What’s going on with hipster music? It’s an interesting question. About ten years ago I wanted to write a piece for my local weekly, Baltimore City Paper, on how the fuzzed-out, overdriven indie rock of my youth, largely springing from the AmRep and Touch & Go labels, had been replaced by another genre with the same name but sporting not only a totally different style of music, but seemingly a different ethos towards life. They never bought my pitch and I moved on to other things for most of a decade.  In that decade, it seems like rebellion turned into reflection which turned into introspection which just devolved wholesale into whining.

This week we’re got the LA Weekly treating us to a pretty snarky, if not accurate, takedown of the 20 most annoying hipster bands. I take some issue with putting TV on the Radio, who treated me to a phenomenally energetic and sweaty set in London in 2004, on the list, but for the bands on the list I’ve heard, it’s spot-on. Beirut has the sound of a precious kid who just discovered world music, pilfering from the Balkans and the Middle East equally blithely. The Decembrists play the same sort of bland pop that was just taking over a decade ago. As for Black Keys, remember Jon Spencer Blues Explosion? People accused him of stealing from the black musical tradition (a silly premise, given how most of what’s good about American music comes from free-flowing musical miscegenation), but at least he smashed things and “fucked shit up.” Most of the music in the LA Weekly piece is more about image and solipsistic preening than the raw emotional release that blues, rock and punk are famous for. It’s a funny piece, but there is some anger in the last write-up, a takedown of Bon Iver:

What happened to us as a generation that this guy gets to bear our sonic torch? Those who came before us rocked, bumped and grinded. They exuded raw sexuality and riotous anger; sweaty human realism. They hoovered drugs or angrily rejected them, they humped strangers in club bathrooms in adolescent indiscretion; they broke shit, laughed, cried, partied on rooftops or in warehouses, exercised cultural demons and personal failures, made spectacles. We, instead, get a whiny guy who built his own studio in the woods; perfectly exemplifying that narcissistic hipster ethos of “Whatever man, I’m just gonna go over here and be chill, I don’t want to be bothered or have my mellow harshed.” Bon Iver coos the celebratory ballads of hip poseurs who refuse to get their hands dirty, that is, unless that filth is quaint and photogenic.

Well said.

There are a couple of different issues going on with rock music lately — Sasha Frere-Jones is particularly trenchant in his examination of the lack of miscegenation in a New Yorker piece from a few years back. He also points out that “pop music is no longer made of just a few musical traditions; it’s a profusion of strands, most of which don’t intersect, except, perhaps, when listeners click ‘shuffle’ on their iPods.”

For this reason, Michael Jackson was the last pop star in the way that Kurt Cobain was the last rock star — there are so many subgenres and subsets now with the new media that it seems like it might be hard to have that one unifying figure. More to the point with punk and guitar music, one can see some kind of clear line between the fifties rebels, the hippies, the punks, and grunge/aggressive nineties loud guitar music. “Wild Thing” played really loud is a pretty great anthem no matter what decade you’re in, if you’re into guitar sounds. Black Flag covered “Louie Louie” as a sort of goofily, violently frustrated punk anthem in the eighties, and  the glorious Laughing Hyenas covered “I Want You” by the Troggs regularly — reclaiming heart-on-the-sleeve anger for the grunge generation from the MC5’s revolutionary fervor. A lot of the early punk sounds a lot more ’50s than ’60s. There was continuity.

Many of the bands slammed in the LA Weekly‘s piece emphasize style over substance, image over guts and cuteness over beauty. (Watch Nataly Dawn’s precious annoucement to her fans if you don’t believe me.) Even in deep in the underground this has been true for most of the last decade. For example, in my erstwhile home of Baltimore, bands were always high on the theatrics but there was also a core of good rock songwriting underneath — Buttsteak and Lee Harvey Keitel Band took pleasure in outlandish names and bountiful literary and philosophical references, but they were good musicians and songwriters, too. A bit later, Oxes dominated the Baltimore scene. They wrote instrumental math rock, played wireless, and their schtick was to run around the audience mugging. Seen once, it seemed to push boundaries — but seen more than that, it seemed like self-conscious schtick. Later still, Dan Deacon got huge with his whole Wham City collective, basing his style on audience participation and performance with laptop electronica songs.

Rock and roll’s death has been proclaimed many times, and each time it proves its resilience. Lately maybe it’s a bit zombified, to borrow from another hipster trope, by navel-gazing one-man shows backing themselves up. But some good can come of all this: one of more intriguing acts I’ve heard lately is Adam Brewer from Hazard, Kentucky who follows in the great tradition of other Appalachian hollerers such as Hasil Atkins. But this isn’t backwoods psychobilly — it’s raw rock and roll.  It seems like no one else in Hazard was interested in playing live with him, so his shows are him singing to a backing tape of his band, of which he is the only member, the Globsters. Some is abrasive noise in the mold of Slap-a-Ham records, but much of it actually displays a refreshing honesty laid over genuine melody; a shiny penny of a song emerging from a zombie-grave dirtclod.

Check out “Pretty Women” (“pretty women, rockin’ and rollin’, gimme a beer, I’m high as a kite”), “Freddy Krueger” (“I’m not afraid of Freddie Krueger, I am absolutely horrified by you/you’re the one/you’re the one that keeps me up all night”) and “Roll You Up and Smoke You” (“you’re so cute/I just wanna roll you up and smoke you/ we were sitting on the couch/listening to records/I just wanna pass a bowl and smoke it with my baby girl”) are honest youth anthems of rebellion, love and angst. Perhaps there is some hope for rock and roll after all.

Check the mini-documentary from august punk bible Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Thanks to Johnny Cuba for the inspiration.

Goodbye, Jason Noble

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaQtK74sF5Q

I knew Jason Noble was sick about two years ago, and I knew it was a nasty cancer, and I knew he’d beaten it for the moment. I didn’t know he was sick again so I was surprised this morning when a fellow refugee from Louisville told me that he’d passed. Jason, along with his musical cohorts at the Rocket House and at ear X-tacy made being a teen in a city where open-mindedness did not come easily a lot more palatable.

It’s rare in the narcissistic, instant gratification-fueled world of 21st-century communications that a person with a public persona passes and is genuinely mourned. To a geeky, bored, often angry kid seeking any kind of interaction beyond teachers and churches, Jason was a kind, gentle and open soul. His art — from post-rock epics to simple sketches — made perfect sense to those who grew up in the same fishbowl. He clarified the distortions and gave voice to the frustrations.

RIP, Jason Noble. As a writer greater than this scribbler once said, his spirit shines through him.

il Kentucky

We’re often curious as to how others see us. To that end, today’s offering is composed of translations from an Italian guidebook to the USA on my home state and city. Factually, it’s largely accurate, with a couple of exceptions (the Louisville Falls Fountain was scrapped 13 years ago), but the amusement for Louisvillians and Kentuckians should come from the nuance. Largely, the Italians give the Commonwealth high marks for natural beauty and traditional culture. Coming from Italy, that’s a high compliment.

**UPDATE**

Upon closer inspection, the book is actually the Italian translation of a UK-published volume, DK Publishing’s USA Eyewitness Travel Guide. Well, although not Italian, it is still foreign, so the basic premise remains, but it’s less fun.

Civil War Cannons

Kentucky

With its passages through the Appalachians and hilly pastures where horses run through acres of bluegrass, Kentucky is one of the most picturesque states in the country. The land in the west is mountainous, and was at one time inhabited by Indians who forcefully resisted settlements of the white colonists. Today Kentucky is known all over the world for its horses and in the area around Lexington you can find many thoroughbred farms. One of racing’s most prestigious events, the Kentucky Derby, takes place in Louisville. The state is also famous for its traditional style of country music. Highway 23 along the eastern border of the state is nicknamed Country Music Highway.

Louisville Sluggers

 

Louisville

Founded near the falls of the Ohio River in 1788, in Louisville (pronounced “Luuavol”) you’ll find one of the most famous horse races in the world, the Kentucky Derby. The Derby is to Louisville what Mardi Gras is to New Orleans or what the Masters is forAugusta: the event around which the whole calendar turns. Since the first Derby in 1975, countless three-year-old horses have run down the track at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May. Kentucky’s high society turns out in spring dress for the event, with hats and striped cotton suits. The unofficial drink of the day is the mint julep, a mix of bourbon ice, sugar and fresh mint typical of the south. The song “My Old Kentucky Home” is sung as the horses are led to the track for a race that lasts less than two minutes. The winner brings home the coveted trophy, adorned with a silver horseshoe in the form of a “U” — “so that the good luck can’t escape.”

La mia vecchia casa del Kentucky

The nearby Kentucky Derby Museum shows off the history of horse racing and offers a tour of the racetrack Churchill Downs. A couple of blocks from the old downtown by the riverfront, the Louisville Slugger Museum produces the noted baseball bat in a factory marked by a 36-meter-high bat.

The J.B. Speed Art Museum on South 3rd Street offers a grand collection of paintings and Renaissance sculpture. At Riverfront Plaza on the banks of the Ohio River, between Main and Fourth Streets, there are many paddlewheel boats that offer a tour of the area, and a fountain that sprays water 115 meters in the air. The old warehouses that surround the old downtown have been changed into cafes, galleries and stores.

Three kilometers to the northeast of downtown is Cave Hill Cemetery, one of the biggest cemeteries in the United States. Many Louisvillians come just to feed the ducks or to wander on the well-kept lawns. Fifty kilometers southwest of Louisville you can see the federal gold deposit at Fort Knox.

Country Music and Bluegrass

Poa pratensis, field fodder

Like the Mississippi Delta is for the blues, the strip of eastern Kentucky(along with West Virginia) has one of the biggest concentrations of country music artists in America. English, Irish and Scottish immigrants brought with them their ballads, rhythms and Elizabethan instruments, which they used to create a typically American style now called “country,” characterized by rapidly-played violins, an occasional yodel and lyrics about the hard life in the southeastern United States. Highway 23, which goes from Ashland to Pikeville along the eastern border of the state, is nicknamed the “Country Music Highway” to commemorate the number of musicians born along it. The road passes though the birthplaces of Billy Ray Cyrus, Loretta Lynn, Patty Loveless and Dwight Yoakam. The great fields of Kentucky bluegrass inspired a particular kind of country music that bears the same name, which comes from a kind of music played at the end of the ’40s by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys. The name bluegrass stuck and this style of acoustic folk music is quite popular in the region. The traditional bluegrass instruments are the guitar, mandolin, five-string banjo, bass and Dobro.

If you outlaw whiskey, then only outlaws...

Use and Consumption of Alcohol

Compared to the rest of the country, inhabitants of the south are predominantly teetotalers. Many are Baptists, a religion that disapproves of the consumption of alcohol. In some rural regions, one can find counties, mainly in the mountains, where alcohol cannot be sold or served to the public legally. But the exceptions to this tradition are legendary: producers of “moonshine”, a homemade whisky made from corn, earned their fame as outlaws in the days of Prohibition by hiding from federal agents in the depths of the woods and using their stills only at night – thus the name “moonshine.” Drinking a mint julep on Derby Day in Louisville is local tradition so beloved that local girls begin collecting the traditional silver cups starting at age 12.