Lone Justice/Maria McKee

sorry, this should go in the Misheard lyrics thread

About damn time too.

Since this thread died, she returned to studio recording with the arty High Dive released in 2003 and then put out a live album for the first time. I haven't heard the live release, but I have heard her live and she is impressive.

Maybe there is no point (given that this thread's been dormant for nearly 3 years!) but she just released another album, Peddlin' Dreams.

Still, I doubt she'll ever top You Gotta Sin To Get Saved.

Come on, show some faith!

I picked up "Peddlin' Dreams" about a month ago. It took me a while to get into it but i'm obsessed with it now. Well, the first half at least, the first four tracks in particular are killer. It's the album I put on at bedtime at the moment, which is why the second half is growing on me very slowly.

evidently Maines sang "Panic Beach" on CBS This Morning recently

tim just put me on to life is sweet, what an incredible record

Isn't it amazing? Her other records have their moments, but Life is Sweet is flawless.

Also love the bruised and sullen country-folk of 2005's Peddlin' Dreams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyU56WqdbGk

okay so my use of "sullen" slightly overdetermined there.

I don't think anyone has a voice that sounds so shaped by years of hard deep living. Everyone else who goes for this general vibe just tries to be Janis Joplin (or Amy Winehouse now, I guess) but with Maria it sounds so distinct and individual, birthed from a new vocal lineage entirely (caveat: this is probably not true).

So weird that Feargal Sharkey got used a conduit for Maria McKee and Benmont Tench to write songs directed at each other: "His best-known solo material is the 1985 UK chart-topping single penned by Maria McKee, "A Good Heart", which went to No. 1 in several countries including the UK in late 1985. He also had a UK Top 5 hit in 1986 with "You Little Thief". This song had a link with "A Good Heart": "You Little Thief" was written by Benmont Tench, a member of Tom Petty's band, about his relationship with McKee in response to her writing "A Good Heart" about him."

I was familiar with A Good Heart (but Feargal's and her own versions), but I'd forgotten what a bitter fucking song "You Little Thief" is.

both Feargal's and...

Feargal Sharkey! Still best rock name ever. Fun LJ/Maria stuff on this rockin' West Coast indie 80s thread:

TS: Lone Justice or Cruzados or Drivin' & Cryin' or Green On Red or Del Fuegos or Jason & The Scorchers or Long Ryders or Bodeans?

including re This Is Lone Justics, hot live studio tape finally legitimized in '14.

Justice, even.

Damn, listening to the new Miranda Lambert has driven me back to Peddlin' Dreams (owing to a vague vibe simpatico) and I'm always astonished at how powerful this album secretly is.

always thankful that you introduced me to life is sweet tim

How good is it??

I myself bought it without hearing it based on this review by Glenn McDonald back in the day:

http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas&id=twas0066

lol if i had a dollar for things i listened to just bc glenn talked about them

And now you must do the same, because this album is brilliant, and if you don't buy it now, you'll find out twenty years from now that I was right, and then you'll feel silly and it might be out of print or something, and that would be very bad.

damn glenn

I wore out my 7" of "Shelter" and this performance on SNL in '86 was amazing:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv2kjt_lone-justice-shelter-i-found-love-saturday-night-live-12-20-86_music

That was also the Shatner 'Trekkie Convention' episode, so amazing all around.

Yep, that's where I first saw/heard Lone Justice. She was thrashing all over the stage and I was like "WHAT. IS. THIS??????"

Only got to see Lone Justice once - opening for U2 at the LA Sports Arena in '84 - and am still kicking myself that I never made the effort to see them in a club.

Thread revive got me listening to High Dive again. May just be my favorite.

Thread revive eventually reminded me that the Voice changed their tracking system at least once, so the xpost "Alias In Wonderland" link prob leads nowhere---anyway, here's the part re Maria:

The first time I laid eyes on another Hellywood Kid, Maria McKee, fronting
her "cowpunk" band Lone Justice (a name that makes the same kind of sense as
Blazing Saddles), I saw her as an ancestor/descendant of Bette Midler and Stevie
Nicks: a Gold Dust Woman, (re-)born to raise the stakes and stage in Silver
City (prospectors shooting down chandeliers in appreciation). (Bette Midler?
Western as Hawaii, as in "Who you think brought-um steel guitars, Paleface?" Also Midler's
Jewish like Annie Oakley a/k/a Phoebe Moses.)
Maria's new Ultimate Collection (Hip-O) spins a great yarn, but leaves out
her self-written, unreleased "To Deserve You" (credibly covered by Midler, on
Bette of Roses). Here, a young girl avidly peers out the window at women whose
otherworldly beauty and grace come from their virtue. She wants to "shine in
your eye like a jewel," to be as good as, well, gold. This song clarifies
Maria's sometimes distractingly refracted raised-religious-in-Tinseltown
sensibility. She was onstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with her big brother Bryan McLean,
ex-member of punk-psych pioneers Love (also a Christian-speculative songpoet),
when she was only three. And "Soup, Soap, and Salvation" depicts the wee McKee
as pounding a tambourine (and even the Sunset Strip?!), with her reportedly
ex-beatnik/born-again parents, belting Gospel to the glitz-blitzed.
But Bryan also turned her on to Broadway, and her teen dreams included
studying with Sondheim at Juilliard. Widely regarded in her hometown as a
proto-alt-country sellout, then as a Corporate Rock wash-out, she wrote (and released)
"Panic Beach" (included on Collection): She finds herself spending another day
by the bee-yootiful sea, taking her place in the sideshow of invisible
friends, eternal Hollywood Hopefuls, utterly ignored. It's like being trapped inside
the ever growing mural of "The Burning of Los Angeles" in Nathanael West's The
Day of the Locust. But all in her mind—which is finally obligingly
noticed—and then swallowed, by the depths of the now alarmingly reverberating stereo
sky.
However, once in said sky, she learns to ride the whirlwind she hath reaped,
playing guitar like Mick Ronson and swinging by the star once called Ziggy,
into her personal-space odysseys (freshly cherry-picked from her 1996
breakthrough
Life Is Sweet). She even whistles like in "Golden Years," but spookier, a
coded refrain, on "If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)"—from the Pulp
Fiction soundtrack, appropriately enough. She's one of those Western Women, like
Belle Starr and Calamity Jane, Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena, forever having to
migrate through dime novels and disappearances, trespasses and transports.

That's the story as of 2001, anyway.

My Queerness makes @YahooEnt and btw, I would never “self describe” my self as a cult artist, unless I had always been described as a cult artist. Also recent photo of me is by Queer London photog Anna Sampson. https://t.co/ksQQsthZBX

— Maria Mckee (@realmariamckee) October 12, 2019

Thanks Eazy! Had forgotten about this thread. More LJ/Maria here:
TS: Lone Justice or Cruzados or Drivin' & Cryin' or Green On Red or Del Fuegos or Jason & The Scorchers or Long Ryders or Bodeans?

Omnivore's kept the prev. unreleased (except for boots maybe) early LJ coming the past few years: this past March, it was Live at the Palomino. Your revive also reminds me I gotta check that, so thanks again.

Never followed in any detail this artist, but am finding this 2020 album extraordinary; dense in imagery, verbiage and arrangement, where it continuously changes which of those I love and which I do not love so much.

all intriguing, I should have said

I didn't realize there was a new one. Listening now. It's quite nice, but her voice is way different! This is like a Madonna pre/post Evita difference.

Great album. I don't really hear a massive shift in her voice from the last few albums though? From the 90s, certainly.

Tempted to say the songwriting here isn't as strong as Peddlin' Dreams, but I think it's perhaps more correct to say that she leans a lot harder into her own idiosyncrasies here and forces the songwriting to bend: hence lines like "What kinetic architecture is evolving like a science before my eyes? And this geometry which haunts and so perplexes me, and that lack of stillness which I find so mesmerising..."

I mean these songs are pretty much cover-proof, right?

Like, the lyrics to "Courage" are both amazing and hilarious:

Sweet Beatrice is rooted to the earth in such an arresting way
A magnetic pulse grounds her with singular authority
And her charge is surging upwards and out
Then cascading down so at odds with her fragility
It is a disarming gift held in someone so young
And so winsomely arranged
And I search her motions
In an attempt to find the primer
To read all that she discloses
Just short of calculating her mystery
I hope to never uncover from afar with a view
Until the distance rocks my body with gloom
And I drift hollow through my days
Blind to the world and all of its
Treasures and betrayals
And I know that she may be the only one
To rescue me out of this
If she were to somehow know
And to find my affection for her ridiculous
Oh but that would kill me
But I will never find the courage to tell her
I will never find the courage to tell her
And she walks by and I must love suffering
And she walks by and she walks by and I must love suffering
I have decided I will not confess
To these words fraught with urgency and longing
I will hedge and I will deflect
And talk of metaphor and broad stroking
Before I give myself away
Before I implicate my undoing
It is nobody's business
If I should hoard this sacred thing among my ruins
And I cannot help but drink in all of her beauty
As it is now peaking
And so much about her
So informs the graceful story I've been seeking
And I, I thought I'd seen everything
But I will never find the courage to tell her
I will never find the courage to tell her
And she walks by and I must love suffering
And she walks by and she walks by and I must love suffering
In the Witching Hour, in the night
When the words descend like Manna from the throne
And the pumping at the pedal
And the lingering echo of my left hand drone
I will go down into the pit
And to the edge of any length
Where lies the magic and the wit
And the power to invent
And I'm so grateful that she fell into my vision
Just as she is, so winsomely arranged
And I am working at a fevered pace now
Just to transcend her
And elevate her ways to a context of high art
That will defend her
And I, I pray that I am worthy of this
But I will never find the courage to tell her
I will never find the courage to tell her
And she walks by and I must love suffering
And she walks by and she walks by and I must love suffering
Sweet Beatrice is rooted to the earth in such an arresting way
A magnetic pulse grounds her with singular authority
And her charge is surging upwards and out
Then cascading down so at odds with her fragility
It is a disarming gift held in someone so young
And so winsomely arranged

Yeah, leaning into idiosyncracies sounds right, and I find it really striking, in a good way (and those exact lines maybe the most so on first couple of listens).

2021 is a trip. I learned that the LJ/MM's long time drummer passed away via Van Dyke Parks' twitter:

R.I.P. blessed Percussionist Don Heffington (12/20/‘50-3/24/‘21).
R.I.P. old Saddle Buddy. pic.twitter.com/JF0cO6ehWt

— Van Dyke Parks (@thevandykeparks) March 24, 2021

Oh man! The impression that I got from booklets w LJ reissues and prev. unreleased on Omnivore was that he was pretty involved in working up a lot of arrangements, when the suits didn't get in the way; also, as wiki sez: Don Heffington was an American drummer, percussionist, and songwriter. He is known for his solo albums, his work with Lone Justice, and his extensive touring and session work with artists such as Lowell George, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, Barry Goldberg, Big Kettle Drum, and Victoria Williams. Much more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Heffington

As for the album, great pick, pretty much the theme song---here are my
comments from last year's Nashville Scene ballot (re hacked-in Imaginary Categories):
In the middle of this our life, Maria McKee comes to a clearing and plunges fearlessly into thickets of imagery, following her Beatrice not into Afterworlds, so much as La Vita Nuova ---she to whom the term “Pre-Raphaelite” has long been among the many applied, so you can also call some of these blossoms Pre-R glam or art folk rock, though sometimes it’s just her tirelessly faithful piano, maybe with upright bass, or poised orchestral sojourns---and her voice is in great shape for answering all calls and seeking more. Almost as exhausting as it is astonishing to listen to all the way through with no bathroom breaks, nevertheless it always pulls me right around the rim ov void, along the path of Passion. While she sings and plays and conducts it, I’m a believer, pert near--no time or space to think otherwise, in my case.
as re-posted previously over on
TS: Lone Justice or Cruzados or Drivin' & Cryin' or Green On Red or Del Fuegos or Jason & The Scorchers or Long Ryders or Bodeans?

Aw, just heard this news. He played on sooooooo many good albums.

Apologies, I didn't see this thread and posted this news in the other thread.

Dave Alvin of the Blasters broke the news too.

Dylan fans may know Heffington from "New Danville Girl"/"Brownsville Girl," and Dylan liked them enough to donate a song and sit in on harmonica:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdJviGnDpY

I actually prefer Lone Justice's earlier recordings - they were a great band, and it's too bad the majors were initially reluctant to sign them for being too "country." When they finally signed with Geffen, they managed at least one respectable album with their debut, but it also sounded more conventional and less distinguished, like meat-and-potatoes rock. To be fair, I don't think the band had any interest in being a "prestige" signing. They wanted to be big like Petty and Springsteen, and it's not like Jason & the Scorchers or the Blasters were lighting up the charts. Pains me to say that because I love those bands too.

From what I've heard/read, they built a buzz around LA for a decidedly more country-sounding approach than was heard on their debut. Jimmy Iovine essentially said, "enough with the hick stuff, you need to be Maria McKee and the Heartbreakers!" So it was yet another instance of "You've got a following! We'll sign you! Now stop doing the thing that built that following."

Great post by Dave Alvin, thanks for the link---hope he'll write a memoir someday, if he ever has time.
Those live and demo Lone Justice round-ups that Omnivore's put out in the past decade (and maybe before?) are pretty refrshing, and Hip-O's McKee Ultimate Collection incl. some LJ with the Big 80s blare toned down--but I've always suspected that those who wanted her to be cowpunk *or* Pettysteen misunderstood her own driven theatricality etc., like I said in this ancient Voice piece about several female artists, "Alias In Wonderland":

The first time I laid eyes on another Hellywood Kid, Maria McKee, fronting
her "cowpunk" band Lone Justice (a name that makes the same kind of sense as
Blazing Saddles), I saw her as an ancestor/descendant of Bette Midler and Stevie
Nicks: a Gold Dust Woman, (re-)born to raise the stakes and stage in Silver
City (prospectors shooting down chandeliers in appreciation). (Bette Midler?
Western as Hawaii, as in "Who you think brought-um steel guitars, Paleface?" And speaking of Midler, she's Jewish, as possibly was Annie Oakley a/k/a Phoebe Moses---O rabbithole, spare me over for another point.)
McKee's new Ultimate Collection (Hip-O) , while discreetly tweaking Big 80s blare, nevertheless unleashes a careening career saga, yet leaves out her self-written, unreleased "To Deserve You" (credibly covered by Midler, on Bette of Roses). Here, a young girl avidly peers out the window at women whose otherworldly beauty and grace come from their virtue. She wants to "shine in
your eye like a jewel," to be as good as, well, gold. This song clarifies (or at least uncovers an especially striking facet of) MM's sometimes distracting, refracted raised-religious-in-Tinseltown
sensibility. She was onstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with her big brother Bryan McLean,
ex-member of punk-psych pioneers Love (also a Christian-speculative songpoet),
when she was only three. And "Soup, Soap, and Salvation" depicts the wee McKee
as pounding a tambourine (and even the Sunset Strip?!), with her allegedly ex-beatnik/born-again parents, belting Gospel to the glitz-blitzed.
But Bryan also turned her on to Broadway, and Maria's teen dreams included
studying with Sondheim at Juilliard. Regarded by some in her hometown as a
proto-alt-country vanguard artist turned Corporate Rock wash-out, she wrote (and released)
"Panic Beach" (included on Ultimate...): She finds herself spending another day
by the bee-yootiful sea, taking her place in the sideshow of invisible
friends, eternal Hollywood Hopefuls, utterly ignored. It's like being trapped inside
the ever growing mural of "The Burning of Los Angeles" in Nathanael West's The
Day of the Locust. But all in her mind—-which is finally obligingly
noticed—and then swallowed, by the depths of the now alarmingly reverberating stereo
sky.
However, once in said sky, she learns to ride the whirlwind she hath reaped,
playing guitar like Mick Ronson and swinging by the star once called Ziggy,
into her personal-space odysseys (freshly cherry-picked for UC, from her 1996
breakthrough, Life Is Sweet). She even whistles like Bowie did in "Golden Years," but spookier, a
coded refrain, on "If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)"—-from the Pulp Fiction
soundtrack, appropriately enough. She's one of those Western Women, like
Belle Starr and Calamity Jane, Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena, forever having to
migrate through dime novels and disappearances, trespasses and transports.
Straying is the tradition—that Satellite o' Love always needs more lasso.
(In mentioning the trans-living Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena and Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" and Bowie and Midler etc. I didn't mean to imply that McKee was Queer, as she says now; didn't know about that, it just went with the dime novel, reinventive, shape-shifting aspect of the Wild West and so on. Oscar Wilde visited, as well he might.)

Oh yeah, and the Natalie Maines cover of "Panic Beach," on a tape her Dad Lloyd played for Marti and Emily of the Dixie Chicks, was what got her a meeting with them! Hasn't been on any of their albums, alas, but would think those DC/C royalties for "Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way?)" have come in quite handy since the days of '98.

Surprisingly there's many more demos from those sessions, but I can see why they pared it down to something resembling an album rather than tapes just rolling at a demo session. (There's a great birthday performance that incorporates a caterwauling birthday song, followed by two takes of "Sweet Jane" since they don't make it all the way through the first one.)

Where did you hear all that?! Please point me in the right direction. Maybe Omnivore will put it all out there someday, like they did Big Star's Complete Third.
(Sorry for posting that Voice thing again, totally forgot I'd put it on here in 2016.)

I wish I knew. Sometime in the '00s, I must have downloaded, torrented or did a blanks-and-postage trade for that boot, and I forgot about it until I found it again and listened to it to compare to the officially released cuts. Not surprisingly, the official releases sounded like they were done from the original masters while the boot (which I labeled and misidentified as "The Complete Geffen Demos" or something close to that) sounded like a heavily noise-filtered transfer of a cassette dub.

I don't know where I put it, but it's got to be online somewhere. It was two discs total with no omissions (and had space leftover on both discs).

I did a cursory YouTube search and found what may be take 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uFeftHhqss

(Note the Merry Christmas ad-lib at the end - I'm wondering if I misremembered the happy birthday when it was a Merry Christmas message?)

Have always really liked the MK (of Nightcrawlers and "Burning" fame) remix of "To Deserve You" and had no idea McKee wrote it.

I had no idea video of their Palomino shows existed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX715b2PgcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUu-DYEaZlU

O man, thanks! Yeah, as I prob mentioned upthread,and on xpost TS: Lone Justice or Cruzados or Drivin' & Cryin' or Green On Red or Del Fuegos or Jason & The Scorchers or Long Ryders or Bodeans?, Omnivore's released Live at the Palomino, The Western Tapes 1983: earliest known demos, and The Vaught Tapes: also 1983, their club setlist of primo material, live in the studio with no overdubs, (also a Martin E. solo album): https://omnivorerecordings.com/product-tag/lone-justice/

Excellent suggestions! I was caught me off guard by the different line-up on the Palomino and Western Tapes releases (which is pretty remarkable considering all three Omnivore releases were recorded in 1983). Different rhythm section on the Western Tapes, but by the time they play that Palomino show, Etzioni takes over on bass. Then the Vaught tapes ends the year with Heffington taking over on drums from Don Willens.

Had to do some digging to see what happened with Willens, especially given Etzioni and Hedgecock's very generous thanks in their liner notes for the Palomino CD. There's not much that's out there, but unfortunately what did turn up was incredibly sad - a book interview mentioning addiction problems and an obituary that suggests donations to the American Liver Foundation. (Willens was only 44 when he passed away.)

According to social media posts, Marvin Etzioni, Ryan Hedgecock and Maria McKee are working on a new Lone Justice album. Apparently Marvin showed Maria some old demos and they decided to contact Ryan about making some new recordings. As mentioned, drummers Don Willens and Don Heffington both passed away years ago, so this basically reunites the surviving core members.

Hello Lone Justice Heads!
In the studio with Ryan Hedgecock working on the forthcoming LJ album.
He's playing his 1982 Telecaster reissue. pic.twitter.com/PGFKTSeKcW

— marvin etzioni (@marvinetzioni) July 2, 2022

McKee also mentions working on the album in an earlier Instagram post.

oh wow

Honestly surprised she would be up for this, given how far afield she’s shifted

For those without Instagram, this is from Maria McKee's account, the text under a photo cropped from the cover of The Vaught Tapes 1983 from Omnivore Recordings:

(April 20) It's hard to believe it's been over a year since Don died. Marvin and I meet every few weeks at Factor's deli for latkes and do a stroll through the neighborhood, stop for rugelach and coffee. We talk about old times but not just old times. New life too. He recently spruced up some demos we made during the recording of Sin To Get Saved. "How do you want to release them, as MM? Or LJ?" "As LJ," I said. But we can't release it as LJ without Ryan. You will have to overdub some Ryan!" So that's what they are doing today.

And in the comments, there's a nice one from Benmont Tench saying he can't wait to hear these.

jesus what a voice

“If Love Is A Red Dress” just shook me to my core

yep