Nashville in the Rearview
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That was just one downer on a roller coaster Ketchum’s been riding for the last few years. In January 1998 he emerged from the Betty Ford Center free from the booze and heroin habits he’d developed since his first Nashville album, Past the Point of Rescue, scored big in 1991. The next month he married his third wife, hair and makeup stylist Gina Giglio, but that spring he was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a rare spinal-cord disorder that caused his arms to become temporarily paralyzed. “They’re still not, and may never be, 100 percent,” he says, “but I’m really fortunate that I didn’t lose my left hand to it entirely. It was really challenging to have to relearn to tie my shoes again. When I played my first C chord I was elated.”
In fact Awaiting Redemption, produced in Nashville by Austin mainstay Stephen Bruton, was so gritty and emotional that just weeks before its original scheduled release–some advance copies had already been sent out to critics–Ketchum’s former Curb A & R rep, producer Chuck Howard, told him the label didn’t think it could get radio to support it. He persuaded Ketchum to recut two of the songs and record six new ones that were more radio friendly. That collection, plus three of the Bruton tracks, became I Saw the Light.
Some three years in the making, the latest issue of the Detroit-based humor zine Motorbooty finally hits the stands this week. Masterminded by cartoonist and former Big Chief guitarist Mark Dancey, Motorbooty has done a better job than most skewering hypocrisy in underground music culture, and number nine is as fierce as any before it. Features include “Unoriginal Gangstas: A Collector’s Guide to White Rap Players,” a series of phony trading cards complete with flip-side factoids (“A self-described ‘redneck,’ Kid Rock funded his early demo tapes by picking apples!”), and an advertisement for a fake self-help book called When Good Guys Join Bad Bands (“My friend Tom isn’t in the Crummies. He would never do that to me”). Motorbooty staffers Barry Henssler (former front man for Necros and Big Chief) and Rob Michaels (who also contributes to Spin) live in Chicago, and they’re throwing a release party with DJs Chamberweed and Natty on Saturday night at the Liar’s Club, 1665 W. Fullerton; 773-665-1110.
