No Luck at Home and Tennessee TV

"No Luck at Home" which almost always goes on the Stone Spiral set list, is one of the first country tunes I wrote... I think. Wrote it back in 1993 perhaps.

I wrote a short screenplay called Tennessee TV and there was a country singer in it called Torry Don. Part of the movie was going to be some of his music videos. I even tried to write it "in character" as in what would be some things that Torry does with melody when he writes a song, vs. what I did. I decided he ended his phrases going down to a note vs. going up to a note.

The band recorded it back in 2013 on the What Kind of Love album, and you can hear it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu98uDxQOWo

At the time we had a clarinet and alto sax in the band, and there was a challenge of putting them into a country tune, but it worked out pretty well. We've got two St. Louis music celebrities on it: Roger Netherton added fiddle, and Chris Powers, a former band member, came back to put in some guitar.

The last chorus was inspired by the Oak Ridge Boys, who would do a lot of acapella at the end of the song. I put a fiddle behind the vocals, so it's not really acapella. It's half-capella. Anyway, it sounds cool and folks seem to like it when we do it live. Enjoy!

Meanwhile, Tennessee TV the movie never got finished, the film maker had to leave town and he left all the footage on my doorstep. He didn't do "takes" but we did come close to getting it done, just never happened. However it has been performed as a play several times, and there's a sequel, Tennessee TV Take Two; recently I got to see them both done in the same afternoon.

"If it ain't happening on Tennessee TV, it ain't happening!"

I wrote the sequel on a plane from Kansas City to Portland. I didn't bring anything else to do to make sure I would get it done. Unfortunately I finished it half way there; since it basically took the first play and did it backwards, it went quickly. I'm glad folks still do these shows on occasion. They're talk show spoofs, at the time I wondered if the trashy talk show would go out of style and the play would be obsolete, but not quite.

Anyway No Luck has a life of its own, and I'm glad it's well received.