Album

Life

Jim Wurster is from the sunniest corner of the Sunshine State, an idyllic, palm-fringed paradise where workers of the world seek refuge, trading the weight of modern life for South Florida’s dreamy light.
But Wurster has never allowed himself to be blinded by such sublime imagery — a sham, after all — and in this superb new collection of music he has written a profound postcard from the edge, where greed and deception are ascendant, truth and human connection elusive.

This is rock ‘n’ roll storytelling that echoes with Townes and Tom Petty and the working-man reportage of Woody Guthrie. In his quest, Wurster finds no paradise, no cheeseburger. What else could this album be called than, simply, “Life.”

It has been 30 years or so since Wurster ruled the South Florida indie-rock scene as the leader of Black Janet, and he still wields his guitar with purpose, whether sweeping through the gloom of “Master of Deception” like the welcoming beam of a lighthouse or giving the folky “One Last Call” a perky defiance.
During much of his rock ‘n’ roll life Wurster was moonlighting as a high-school American history teacher, which burnishes his criticism of today’s duplicitous morality on the funky “Cold Hard World” and the scorching rocker “Standing in the Fire.”

Perhaps nowhere do the many threads of Wurster’s life bond so completely than on the final track, “Guns and Money,” a blistering indictment of the gun lobby and its distorting influence over day-to-day life in America. He sings, “They talk about rights / But it’s all about greed / All about money / Not the protection we need.”
After 33 years in teaching, Wurster retired in 2016 from Cypress Bay High School, which is about a 30-minute drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 souls were lost in a shooting on Feb. 14

But all is not gloom and doom in “Life.” There is love, as Wurster and Diane Ward allow their voices to curl around each other on the poignant, country-rock ballad “Sweet Melody in the Wind.”
And the album opens with the sunny optimism of “What a Life It’s Been,” an infectious, windows-down sing-along about one man’s logic-defying determination to overcome. It demands to be turned up to 11, as Wurster sings, “I’ve been smitten / I’ve been bitten /Thought about quittin’ / But here’ I’m sittin’ / What a life it’s been.”

It’s just the way that “Life” ought to begin. And end. After the album closes with “Guns and Money,” let it roll back through for one more mood-boosting listen to “What a Life.” It’s even better the second time around.

Everybody’s Talkin’: A Tribute to Fred Neil

“He was freckled like a spotted dolphin”

It’s only right that this tribute to Fred Neil begins and ends with one of his most beloved and personal songs, “The Dolphins.” With few exceptions, Fred Neil preferred the company of dolphins – sleek, sensitive, majestic mammals of the oceans – over people.

The native Floridian was very much like a dolphin himself, enigmatic, mysterious and intractably smarter than he let on. “I met Fred in Coconut Grove during the Flipper years,” recalls Ric O’Barry, who trained the bottlenose dolphins used on the popular 1960s television show. “We became good friends. Diving and sailing buddies.”

They were approximately the same build, with curly reddish-brown hair. “Except,” O’Barry says, “he was freckled like a spotted dolphin.”

Neil had complete access to the animals in O’Barry’s care at the Miami Seaquarium, where the trainer lived on-site. “Fred spent a great deal of time trying to communicate with the Flipper dolphins using his 12-string guitar,” adds O’Barry. “His human/dolphin communication work progressed into dolphin protection; something that he became passionate about.” He would sit for hours at the edge of the lagoon where a dolphin named Kathy lived, strumming his guitar for her.

It was Fred Neil who introduced Stephen Stills to O’Barry in 1970 – the three of them went sailing in Biscayne Bay, and the talk, naturally, turned to dolphins. O’Barry discussed his recent epiphany, that dolphins were sensitive and highly intelligent creatures, and that keeping them captive, as playthings, was inhumane.

Lit up like a roman candle, Neil told his pal the rock ‘n’ roll star about his sonic experiments. “It’s not necessarily the music,” he said, in a conversation recounted in O’Barry’s book Behind the Dolphin Smile. “It’s the tone and the sound of sustained chords. When Kathy heard a chord on the 12-string, she had the gentlest way of putting her snout on the vibrating strings themselves and on the wooden box, feeling it like it was something special. And it is, to them. I’ve worked with them a lot, and they seem to like the D chord best.”

When O’Barry left the Seaquarium to begin his Dolphin Project, it was Stills – already a multimillionaire at 25 – who provided the initial seed money. “Fred didn’t have any money in those days,” O’Barry said. “He didn’t donate money, but he donated much of his time to the Dolphin Project.”

“People idolized Fred Neil,” says John Sebastian, who knew the Floridian troubadour from the early 1960s folk scene in Greenwich Village. “Once you’d heard him, you realized there was no competing with him: ‘There’s no doing this any better than he does it.’”

“His throat gave out those deep sonorous, mellifluous tones,” Eric Andersen explains, “like the kind of tones you hear in the low range of a tenor sax of Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, or in the low-tones of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. Fred’s voice actually bore the trademarks of having its own unique intrinsic thing, not found anywhere else on the scene with the possible exception of the amazing Tim Hardin.”

“There were always beautiful women chasing him,” declares Sebastian. “We were growing up in Greenwich Village, and all our cute girls were Italians, and Jewish. And here was this guy whose girlfriends all looked like Yvette Mimieux.” It was said that Fred could “pull waitresses from 40 yards,” Sebastian laughs. “It came down to a kind of Piscean sadness about him that women could not resist. As well as the fact that he sang so well.”
His big baritone voice could reach down so low – often when you least expected it – and hit a note that would rattle your ribcage. His songs brought blues, jazz, rock and roll and the fluid rolls of Indian ragas together.

No, there was no one like him, not even close.
“I always trusted and felt of Freddie as a big brother I never had,” Andersen adds. “Of all the Village people and songwriters, he was my favorite, the real deal. I didn’t see him a lot, but we connected.”
Recalled Sebastian: “Fred had something nobody else in Greenwich Village had, with the possible exception of Odetta: A gospel background. He knew what singing in church was. I think a lot of his vocal signatures, also, came from that rockabilly, early rock ‘n’ roll Southern influence … Odetta would always tease him and say ‘You see all those freckles, Fred? You’re one of us.’”
Eventually, Neil left New York for South Florida for good. Bobby Ingram remembered the first time he laid eyes on him, in a brand-new Grove coffeehouse called Trivia. It was 1964. “He was onstage, wearing a sport coat – which you didn’t do in Florida – and he had his cuffs folded up outside the sport coat sleeves, the way we did in those years. And he was wearing these goddam leprechaun shoes. As I recall, they were green. Them stupid pointy-toed things you see at the renaissance fair. And he was playing rockabilly on an acoustic guitar.”
Everyone, Ingram says, followed him.
“It was all about Fred. Fred was the bait. When people knew Fred Neil was hanging around Coconut Grove, the ones that mattered started coming down. Sam Hood built the Gaslight Café South, and Simon and Garfunkel came. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and on and on.”
Unfortunately, the main attraction didn’t always show up. “Fred was always kinda scared,” notes Ingram. “You had to coax him up onstage, until you got him wound just right, or if he was happy with who he was playing with

Between 1965 and 1971, Neil recorded five albums (one as a duo project with Vince Martin). Subsequently, he never signed another contract. It wasn’t so much that he was skeptical about the music business (although he was); it wasn’t that he had fallen victim to substance abuse (although the stories about his intake were legion).

From all accounts, Fred simply lost interest in music. He didn’t burn out; nor did he fade away. He simply slow-dissolved into the universe. He raised a family in the Grove, and eventually moved to Summerland Key, where he died of skin cancer in 2001.

All these years later, what we have are the songs, some fun and frolicsome, others filled with a beautiful, aquatic sadness, weary and blue. The lyrics are prescient: On “Everybody’s Talkin’” he details the life he longs for (“I’m going where the sun keeps shining through the pouring rain/Going where the weather suits my clothes”). Then there’s “The Other Side of This Life,” “Ba-De-Da” and “The Dolphins,” all of which chronicle the continuous search for something intangible.

Fred Neil went looking for the dolphins in the sea – and he found them. And he found so much more.

Bill DeYoung

3 Chords & and a Chorus of Lust: Songs of Jim Wurster

3 Chords & A Chorus of Lust-Songs of Jim Wurster
featuring: Charlie Pickett, Rob Elba, Diane Ward and Jack Shawde, Karen Feldner, Matt Sabatella, George Zhen, The Atomic Cowboys, Adzima, Blue Sky Drive, Daphna Rose, Amy Baxter, Bob Wlos, Matt Calderin The Fortune Tellers, Chris DeAngelis, Williamson & Patterson, Omine, Brian Franklin.

What defines a great songwriter? Captivating melodies and hooks, loyal fans, respect and admiration from fellow musicians? Since the 1990’s, tunesmith Jim Wurster, has honed his craft, creating over 150 songs and producing 17 albums of original music. That type of prolific creation is rarely seen in the original music industry, whether it be in South Florida, Nashville or LA. Since his early days as the leader of influential South Florida rockers Black Janet, his records have been reviewed in No Depression and Billboard, as well as in South Florida newspapers the Miami Herald, Sun-Sentinel and Miami New Times. His albums have been released by indie labels as well as his own, and have won awards, including Florida’s prestigious Jammy Awards. Jim has received airplay in the US and throughout Europe and has co-written and performed with other notable songwriters throughout the country.

Wurster would humbly downplay his level of productivity with a smile and a wisecrack, but his influence was duly noted when a bevy of top Florida artists got together to cover Wurster’s songs. The call for participants reaped some of the most acclaimed local and national artists, and Jim was humbled when he heard the eclectic and diverse sounds his songs could make when other singer-songwriters performed them. South Florida music critic Ben Crandell, in his review of “3 Chords and a Chorus of Lust: Songs of Jim Wurster in Florida’s Sun-Sentinel, referred to Wurster as “a revered eminence grise of the South Florida singer-songwriter scene.” This double album featuring the areas best musicians is certainly a testament to that title.

The ensuing work, a double album called 3 Chords and a Chorus of Lust, features singer/songwriters, producers, musicians, artists, designers and photographers, who have contributed and participated in Wurster’s projects since the 1990’s. From the punk rock version of the ballad, Party Girl’ by Rob Elba, to the vocal pyrotechnics of Sweet Melody, co-written and sung by Diane Ward, each of these interpretations are distinctively well-crafted and delivered. Scan the cuts and sample Matt Calderin’s rendering of the yet unreleased, Saline, and the intense Shine Down on Me recorded by George Zhen, who played on the original Black Janet release. Legendary punkabilly artist Charlie Pickett puts his own spin on Goodbye Paradise from Jim’s first solo CD.

Jim’s tour band, The Atomic Cowboys, backed many of the artists and guest producers included Bob Wlos, Roger DiLorenzo, Jack Shawde, Ron Taylor, Dave Thompson, and George Zhen and the cover art concept & design (Rose Garguilo – Imagine Media Concepts.)

3 Chords will raise money for a cause close to Wurster’s heart, 100+ Abandoned Dogs of Everglades Florida Rescue, manned by volunteers who work miracles every day saving the lives of abused and neglected animals.

Hallelujah

Singer-songwriter Jim Wurster mines the same field as he did on his previous, more-rocking effort, Wake Up!, which was recorded with his sometime band, The Atomic Cowboys. Lucky for Wurster, that field — the many foibles of the Bush administration and the ongoing shame of the Iraq War — is a mother lode for acerbic liberals. On his new CD, Wurster loses the Cowboys and offers 11 songs of mostly acoustic music that, informed by folk and alt-country, makes excellent use of his Dylan-esque vocals. The opener, “Blind Man,” with its chorus of “Blind man, what do you see/Living in the land of the free,” lets listeners know from the opening salvos exactly where Wurster is aiming his guns. The disc’s first five tracks address the war, the greed of corporate America and the sad state of our country’s middle class. One of these songs, “Gilded Again,” pays homage to historical left-wing labor heroes such as Eugene Debs and The Molly Maguires. The next three songs cover the tried-and-true alt-country subject of boozing to forget lost love — here done most effectively on “Have Mercy on Me” — before swinging back to the album’s main focus with “Ridin’ With Jesus,” “Armageddon” and “Hallelujah.” With this final trio, the subject shifts slightly from the administration to the religious crazies who put it in power. But when Wurster wraps up the album by singing, “The sun’s gonna close its eyes, hallelujah/No more light, just darkness in the sky, hallelujah,” he does so in almost-hopeful terms, suggesting that conformity and close-mindedness are not impossible to overcome. For people who agree with Wurster’s pointed point of view, this album represents some of the best political songwriting to come out of Florida since a few hanging chads put the cowboy president in office. For the roughly 30 percent who still approve of the man, this CD can’t be recommended. But, hey, those folks are probably too busy listening to Newsboys or something. Dan Sweeney / City Link Magazine

Straight To Me

Ten self-released CD’s, a series of awards, comparisons to everybody from John Prine to Peter Murphy, just what are we to make of Jim Wurster. There is no shortage of critic’s analysis on South Florida’s prolific singer/songwriter and not many artists can musically dissect the state of this country and the state of love better than Jim.

In 2010’s “Straight to Me”, Jim’s perpetual musical journey, into the darkest and sweetest temptations that love has to offer, seems to arrive at a new juncture of clarity. The album’s male character wears his heart on his sleeve, offering solace to the love shy woman in “Straight to Me,” while offering sensual pleasures to the chanteuse in “Angelique.” He is a chameleon of sorts, morphing into the image that each lover demands. While Jim’s earlier work with his band, Black Janet, was an atmospheric and haunting free-fall through the dark recesses of taboo relationships, Jim’s new album, seems at times, downright optimistic. In “So Lucky,” boy gets girl, much to the envy of the troubled and dark world around them. “If Not Forever’s,” vivid imagery tells the tale of a modern relationship, “If not forever, then maybe just tonight, Another rendezvous on our short distance flight.” Though all of Jim’s characters face the dark feelings of love gone awry, “Straight to Me’s” ensemble grab on to the precious moments of connection, “I Know that you’ve been hurt, a broken heart behind a wall, so tear it down and let it fall, let it run free, let it run straight to me.”

As always, Jim’s distinct vocals color the landscape of his musical paintings, and producer Jack Shawde guides the brush strokes, playing many of the instruments on the recording. Singer/songwriter, Diane Ward, lends her majestic vocals to “So Lucky,” “Sorrow,” and the Hank Williams cover, “I Can’t Escape From You.”

Raw

Jim Wurster is traveling lighter these days. The songwriter packs up his guitar, his stomp box, and his vintage pedals, and presents his arsenal of songs exactly the way they sound in his head. “Actually, I first tired this out so that I could do some solo touring in Nashville and out on the West Coast. Then people started coming up to me intrigued by what I was playing. It made me realize that I was able to express the lyrical content of my work, through these different kinds of sounds, as well as my voice.”

Jim began recording these stripped down but amped up songs along with some of his favorite covers, when he noticed that the music was taking a decided bent. These were stories yanked from American headlines: deadly love affairs, battered wives, mistreated children, and vigilante justice. The new approach suited the themes, the distortion predicting the train wreck of life in “Southern Pacific. The name of the album became clear, Wurster decided to call the record, ‘RAW.” In his album notes, Jim discussed the recording process, “All my parts were recorded live and simultaneously…I wanted to reproduce as closely as possible, my touring acoustic show.”

“RAW” will be officially released on January 14, 2014. It features 5 originals and five covers demonstrating the depth and variety of Jim’s influences. A Miami native, Wurster succeeds in showcasing the darker side of his native city, in songs like Ojus and Dade County Jail.

Though Wurster’s sound has changed through the years, it has always kept him in the top tier of accomplished Florida songwriters. His early works with Black Janet earned the band a Jammy Award for Best Independent Release, a Florida Rock Award for Best New Band, cover stories in the Miami Herald and Sun-Sentinel, and extensive play at college radio. Jim’s second band, The Atomic Cowboys, delivered stripped down American roots music with songs that spoke volumes on the state of politics, the state of relationships, and the state of mind of the inscrutable Wurster.

From 1990 through 2011, Jim released 12 albums, with the assistance of top Florida producers including Jack Shawde, Bob Wlos (L7 studios), and Roger DiLorenzo. Inevitably, with a catalog of over 100 songs, Jim’s music came to the attention of an indie record label, Fake Four Music, which had kick-started the careers of several alternative folk and hip-hop bands. Fake Four released, Hired Hand, a collaboration between Jim and labelmates, The Skyrider Band featuring Jim’s stepson Bud. The sound was visceral, like the backdrop for a modern western film. Hired Hand received airplay in the states and abroad, made it to the Top Ten of the Year at Amoeba Records,

No Joke

Created, produced, and supported by homegrown Florida talent, Jim Wurster’s 16th album of original music, “No Joke,” mines the territory that has become familiar to his American and European fans. Government gone astray, love- both dark and seductive, and lives lost too soon, are topics that have dominated his prolific songwriting career. While his signature vocals croon of passion, hurt, and resolve, his words describe his struggle to make sense of it all.

Wurster’s new studio album, ‘No Joke,’ was the result of musician Vinnie Fontana’s long time admiration for Jim as an original artist and the contributions of accomplished SOFL musicians, vocalists, producers, artists, and photographers. Fontana had known Jim since the beginning of Wurster’s distinguished song-writing career, “I was always interested in listening to Jim’s music and realized what a great songwriter he was, so I asked him if he would be willing to have me produce some tracks for him. After I listened to the raw versions of the songs I tried to imagine who would be the right players.” Vinnie, a renowned blues and rock player in his own right, brought in virtuoso musicians like guitarist Jimi Fiano, and drummer Guido Marciano (who also engineered many of the songs). “The three of us have worked in recording together for over 45 years.” Along with the three longtime friends, Atomic Cowboys member Bob Wlos and Frank Binger, Black Janet member, George Zhen, and a host of other musical wizards rounded out the guests players. Jim’s ethereal sound is represented by vocalists Karen Feldner, Trish Sheldon, Daphna Rose, Alyssa McDowell and Omine. Not only was the album a SOFL musician extravaganza, but the artwork (Nicole Arrieta), photography (Teejay Smith, Robert Stolpe), additional recording (Phil Bithel), and mastering (Adam Matza’s Magic Ear) were all done by Florida talent.