The Times Herald from Port Huron, Michigan • Page 50

Records Mori Sahl pipes up on Watergate George McGovern. "Because I want to have a hand in what goes on in this country, good or bad. I'm not Jack Parr. I don't retire. I want to be as active on as many fronts as possible until I'm dead.

"I lean to the left to correct the drift in my country. If they continue to attack Nixon I'll have to defend him to restore the balance. You want to know my politics? I'm floating in orbit until I'm cleared for landing. I just have to keep attacking people, shoot on both sides. "I've known Nixon 20 years.

One time at a dinner in Los Angeles in 1964 he said, 'You have an epic chance to be Will Rogers. If you remember to keep a fire under our behind as well as theirs, you can make us I doubt that; it's too late for that; but those were his words. I don't know what happens to Bob Hope in that instance. "Our job, as comedians, is to take national tragedy in America and make it funny. Example World War II was not funny.

Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon of two officers in Italy looking at the sunset and one said, 'What a beautiful view. Do the enlisted men have one, and made a grim subject funny. I make people laugh at the government's blundering efforts to suppress evidence. People are much more open to the truth when they're laughing." Sahl says, "Fifteen people were doing Watergate albums but none of them were political comedians. I knew there was plenty to say.

One track of my album is Watergate and the rest is stuff I've been doing for the last 10 years. mrkitnlw Commander CodV COUnYry. to Kinky Friedman "But I have a natural affinity with tugene iwcanny. ne mtroaucea me to -Catholic humor and Irish humor. I'm' sick of Jewish umor.

For the past six years, Sahl hasn't cut an album and hasn't been on TV very much. He cut one album while Lyndon Johnson was President but it wasn't released because Capitol Records feared that Johnson would sue. Sahl disagrees. A number of TV shows haven't hired Sahl since he started talking a lot about the CIA. "I have the reputation of being an outlaw.

But all the shows I worked, submitted material two weeks ahead to the legal staff. I saw no reason to penalize the people I worked with. We) share a common problem libel. "A man without his work is really 4 eunuch. I never understood guys who want to retire and -play golf.

I want to be part of the action. "I worked somehow. I moved to the colleges. The kids are very dull at the) schools now, now that there is no drafti I can make them laugh, as a professional comedian, but they don't have) the same perception. "It is all going to turn around now, my acceptability.

It's going to change) because I waited. It is the third act nowi I didn't accept the second act as the) curtain." The curtain went up 20 years ago; when Sahl made the very first comedy album. i Sahl has a follow-up LP in mind, "It's going to be about: when you train an agency to overthrow governments, it is likely to rehearse here at home." He's also writing his autobiography and will be in the movie, "The Head of Alfred Garcia." It's about a bounty hunter, played by me. We start Sept. 3, 10 weeks in Mexico City.

We're making it outside the country to help the bal ance of payments." I Singles out on Watergate mciuae "Watergate," Dickie Goodmann the) only one on the best-selling charts "Son of Checkers," Don Imus; "Tricky Dicky Rides Again," Jim Capaldi; "The) Watergate Blues," Tom T. Hall; "Th Watergate Blues," Red River Dave "Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell ana Dean," Robert Warren, and David Allen Coe's "How High's the Waterj gate, LPs take longer to come out. Ten are planned at the moment, including "Watergate Comedy Hour" and BS," by comedians Burns and Schriber, and one by George Carlin. 39 MILITARY -984-51 91 By MARY CAMPBELL AP Newsfeatures Writer The Watergate break-in is being investigated and the voice of Mort Sahl is once again heard in the land. Sahl, now 46, has a new LP out, his 11th, made and processed in 17 days, called "Sing a Song of Watergate," on GNP Crescendo.

It isn't the only recording about Watergate in fact there's a flood of them. But before we list some of the others, we'll chat with Sahl. Sahl talks fast, skips quickly from one subject to another, smiles engagingly, tells facts, opinions and one-line jokes, shooting, as he says, at both sides. He has thoroughly digested that day's newspapers, which provide him with material for comment. He made the record, he says, By JOHN P.

MORGAN Gannett News Service The use of country music and country music styles by musicians who did not grow up in the rural South is a custom as old as the commercial recording industry. The first national hit of a country Prisoner's Song" I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would was recorded by a trained light-opera tenor named Vernon Dahlhart in the late 20's. The currently working pop musicians who use country music styles range from folkies like Gordon Lightfoot to rock idols like Neil Young. There are back rooms all over the nation where young men are furiously trying to learn to play the pedal steel guitar. artists like Young and Steven Stills and Poco use country idioms but are far removed (by intricate drumming and other tricks) from a close relationship to hillbilly.

This column, however, is concerned with three groups who have plunged totally (stylistically if not in lyric content) into country style. The connecting link between Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Asleep at the Wheel, and Kinky Friedman is their relationship to a distinct style of country called Western Swing. BY THE EARLY 30s the Southwestern country musicians had developed a sophisticated string band style much different from their Appalachian counterparts. Because of oil, industrialization and urbanization developed more quickly in Texas, Oklahoma, and Southern California than in the mountains of the Southeast. Western Swing musicians borrowed from the blues and, most importantly, from the city big band jazz stylings they often heard and incorporated them into a string band setting.

Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys- the most popular of these artists, ultimately featured a brass and reed Delicious Barbe-Q-Ribs Pizzas (Delivery to Port Huron and Marysville) 987-4330 DINNERS 5-9 pra HOT LUNCHES 1 13 527 HURON "In the Basement of the Algonquin Hotel" Wild MORT SAUL The CIA is in it. It's only the CIA's latest plot. You've got to know what the origins of this are; it's not a government that suddenly went crazy. "I only made one track about Watergate because I like my albums to have a historical perspective. "I know a lot of the principals in the case, including the President if he is involved." Placing his tongue in his cheek, he adds, "I find it hard to believe that he knew.

He has a quality of innocence, I've found, over the years. "I said in Miami this administration would be more corrupt than Harding and not as colorful. At least the British have some women in their scandals. "The liberals have no sense of humor. My following is never the liberals.

They hate me and I hate them. How do you think the country got this way? The indifference of the liberals. It is not that people don't know. They hope the rat-infested ghetto will stay on one side of town and they can stay on the other side. But they know.

They don't want to know so they don't have to do anything about it. "Jack Webb is a close friend of mine in LA. You shake hands with him or Duke Wayne and you can put it in the bank. Jack said, 'I believe in law and order and Nixon and I don't agree with anything you say but there is room for what you believe I never heard liberals say, 'There is room for I'll take George Wallace any day not Happiness is Being where Happiness is section along with fiddles, electric guitar, and the whining sliding steel guitar. They regularly drew more than 5,000 fans to dances and once outdrew Benny Goodman on the same night in Oklahoma City.

The Western Swing fiddlers were jazz fiddlers and often sounded a world removed from Appalachian fiddlers. Modern country bands the kind backing stars like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard feature a compressed Western' Swing Style with a single fiddle and a pedal steel, but the big sound of Wills and Leon McAuliffe has died out, probably because it was primarily a dance band sound. THE LONG-HAIRED freaky kids playing country today may have chosen Western Swing styles because such styles are electric and so many kinds of music an be presented in that format. Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen (County Casanova, Paramount PAS- 6054) is the best longhaired country band by a wide margin. They began musical life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but are now based in San Francisco.

This is their album for Paramount and is my favorite album of the year. Andy Stein is a superb fiddler featured on most tracks. Billy C. Farlow is the lead singer on most and is best in the understated and mildly obscene "Everybodys' Dopin' It" recommended for He also does a fine Buddy Holly imitation on "Rave On." The Commander who has had one boogie woogie piano hit Red is featured on "Rock that Boogie" and sings lead on the Phil Harris-Tex Williams blast from BRAISED SHORT RIBS of BEEF JARDINIERE Complete with mashed potatoes, salad, choice of dressing, rolls, butter, tea or coffee. $A45 I the past "Smoke Smoke Smoke (That Cigarette)." Asleep at the Wheel (Comin' Right at Ya-United Artists UA-LAG38-F), another San Francisco band, is fanatically faithful to Western Swing.

They open with a Will's standard, "Take Me Back to Tulsa," and also credibly imitate Moon Mullicvan, the finest of the country piano players, on "Cherokee Boogie." They've composed a number of new songs which sound surprisingly like old ones Down Home is and also feature a skilled female lead singer named Chris O'Connell. They are not as funny or as eclectic as Commander Cody but are musically every bit as good. FINALLY, THERE Is Kinky Friedman, the first and the only Texas Jewish country music star (Sold American-Vanguard VSD-79333). The image of a Jewish cowboy is like that of a black cowboy both existed but somehow the movies and comic books never told us. Kinky is always as outrageous as possible, and I can believe his rabbi who states on the opening cut, "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Services to You." He offends womens' liberation "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the his own people 'em and everyone else Ballad of Charles All of these are performed in front of a chugging hokey Western Swing style band (The Texas Jewboys logically enough).

Friedman is the outher musician of the year and may be habit-forming and certainly dangerous to your standards. o-4 TRAVELERS' INN A A Oft IT! AT Rl lift "Always a Pleasant and Courteous Staff to Serve You" I Where the Ter-Cels are Tuesday thru Sunday A NICE PLACE TO BE I liOfftl hlMiftl MARYSVILLE tke All MAJOR CREDIT CARDS HONORED Free lighted Paved Parking Phone 364-8900 THE TIMES HERALD SUNDAY, JULY 8, 1973 PAGE TWO.