Category: Music

Oasis in Dublin and the Ghost of Brendan Behan


The Auld Triangle Comes Full-Circle

A few minutes before Oasis took the stage at Dublin’s Croke Park last Sunday, a curious thing happened. A solitary, unexpected voice issued from the PA and sounded over the stadium and rooftops of Drumcondra. It was not the Who, Beatles, or Bowie that heralded the band’s arrival that night — as has been the custom on previous dates this tour — but the voice of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners belting out a poignant a cappella rendition of “The Auld Triangle,” the song made famous in Brendan Behan’s 1954 breakout play The Quare Fellow and first performed by the playwright on a radio program in 1952.

A good contingent of the 82,000 in attendance that Sunday — most of them well-lubricated and braced for lift-off as 8:15PM ticked closer— sang along to the tune, their voices growing loudest when Kelly hit the lines “And the auld triangle went jingle jangle/ All along the banks of the Royal Canal.”

It was a seriously meta moment in Oasis world that, for many, shattered the fourth wall.

Behan, who grew up in a tenement house in 1930s North Dublin, said he learned the song from a tramp named Dick Shannon in Mountjoy Prison, where the writer was serving time in the ’40s for attempted murder for IRA-related activities. Mountjoy is less than two kilometers from the stadium, and one can imagine an inmate in the prison-yard hearing Kelly’s voice drift along the banks of the canal and humming along.

The Dublin gigs were considered a homecoming of sorts for the Gallagher brothers, and the fans knew it. Liam and Noel’s mother Peggy, who hails from Charlestown in County Mayo, where the Gallaghers spent many childhood summers and first cultivated that trademark spirit of lawlessness, was in attendance both nights and got a shout-out from Liam onstage. (The boys’ estranged father, Thomas, who came from County Meath, was not there.)

Noel Gallagher has said there would be no Oasis without his Irish roots, and for the entirety of this tour, he’s flown the Erin go Bragh flag from his speaker cabinet. “We are Irish, me and Liam, pretty much,” Noel once told a reporter. “There is no English blood in us. Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish.”

So many of the great English rock bands boast Irish heritage, with the Pogues being perhaps the most notable. Morrissey best encapsulated the Anglo-Irish dynamic with the song “Irish Blood, English Heart.” John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was certainly London Irish, and John Lennon famously embraced his Irish roots later in his career. All of the original members of Oasis had Irish roots, making them the last in a long line of great rock bands molded in the Anglo-Irish tradition.

Noel has said the brash, defiant swagger of Definitely Maybe stems from the Irish rebel songs the brothers were weaned on, for it is there where the edgy, pump-your-fist-in-air element of the music originates. Up to a week before the show rumors swirled that the Wolfe Tones, a group the Gallagher brothers saw as kids when the Irish folkies would stop in to play Manchester, might open the Dublin shows, with the Tones writing recently to Liam on X:  “Well lad, hope you’re excited for Croker this weekend, any idea what time our sound check is at?”

But it was no dice, and one laments missing the chance to hear the Tones deliver the rousing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a song written by Behan’s brother Dominic, delivered to the fiery hordes at Croker.

As “The Auld Triangle” drew to an end at 8:15 and the band came onstage to “F***in’ in the Bushes,” with the words “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” flashing in red letters on an 80-plus-meter screen, one could not help think of the ghost of Brendan Behan sipping champagne and sherry from somewhere in the catacombs, or glugging whiskey on a stool at The Gravediggers, and smiling. 

Illustration: Study from life of Brendan Behan by Reginald Gray, 1953. Public domain.

Cormac McCarthy and American Music

The No Country for Old Men author, who died last month at 89, lit a fire in the belly of some of the greatest American songwriters

Rolling Stone. July 3, 2023.

For a writer who spent most of his career outside the limelight, the outpouring of public admiration in the wake of Cormac McCarthy’s death on June 13 at 89 testified to the power of his work. An obscure figure with a cultish following for much of his writing life, McCarthy had long been esteemed by members of the literati. The late literary scholar Harold Bloom placed him on his very short list of American authors in the 20th century who had in their writing achieved the sublime, naming him alone as “the true heir to Melville and Faulkner.”  

Nearly three decades into his career, McCarthy found mainstream success with the publication in 1992 of his Western epic All the Pretty Horses. Later, he would achieve greater renown when the Coen Brothers’ film adaptation of No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2008. But it was his 2005 parable about a father and son navigating a post-apocalyptic world, The Road, that first catapulted him to household-name status, winning him a Pulitzer and landing him on Oprah’s Book Club list. More recently, in 2022, McCarthy released two companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, a suite of stirring swan songs that stand as a fitting coda to his challenging and brilliant body of work. On the day of McCarthy’s death, Stephen King said that he was “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time.”  

But for all the merits of his art, it was the “American language,” as historian Shelby Foote once put it, that was perhaps the true star of his novels. McCarthy wrote in cadences that many likened to the King James Bible (though much of his late work was marked by a more stripped-down prose style approaching that of Beckett). McCarthy’s imagery is strikingly visual and the rhythm of his prose has a sonority to it that, when read aloud, flows like music and puts most capital P poets to shame.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that among the hosannas following the news of his death, something interesting began to emerge: The prose-poet of Homeric proportions had left his mark on songwriters and musicians too. Social media was dotted with tributes from those in the music world who felt compelled to acknowledge McCarthy’s influence. Songwriter Jason Isbell, who’s talked before about his reverence for the Tennessee-bred author, might have said it best: “How many of us did he influence? Immeasurable. I could go onstage and say ‘this next one was influenced by Cormac McCarthy’ and literally sing any song I’ve ever written.”

Bruce Springsteen has checked McCarthy among his favorite writers, telling the New York Times in 2014 that Blood Meridianwas a “watermark” in his reading. The Road, he added, was the last book to make him cry. And McCarthy is also a darling of Tom Waits, who apparently was hipped to the writer long before the author’s mainstream arrival. Nick Cave, who helped compose the score for the 2009 film adaptation of The Road, also counts himself as an admirer. “It’s clever, that book,” Cave told Radical Reads in 2018, “because the environment that they’re living in is so unremittingly pessimistic that he’s able to weave this extraordinarily sentimental story about the love between father and son and completely get away with it.”

Hataałii, a 20-year-old Navajo singer-songwriter from Window Rock, Arizona, whose new album Singing into the Darkness came out last month on Dangerbird Records, tells Rolling Stone that his worldview had been shaped by the novelist.

“Because of McCarthy I figured out that the desert was more than just a void, but rather it was filled with spirit and that the people who truly live in the desert see things differently,” Hataałii says. “There was a sudden appreciation and immense respect that I now held for the history of the area and even the landscape formations, which saw me and every other generation that came before me, and that I was simply in line with my ancestry and that me and my ancestry were the same thing.”

Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen is something of a Cormac super-fan and collects first editions of his novels. He once had designs on purchasing McCarthy’s Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which the novelist had used to write all his novels, when it went up for auction at Christie’s in 2009. Keen was prepared to spend $50,000 but bowed out after the bidding hit that figure in no time. “It shot through 50 like butter, man, like boom!” Keen tells Rolling Stone. It ended up going for nearly a quarter-million to “some guy in a blue raincoat, like in the Leonard Cohen song,” he says with a laugh.

McCarthy’s influence found its way directly into Keen’s songwriting. His 1998 album Walking Distance contains a five-song concept piece that loosely tracks the trails of The Kid in Blood Meridian, from the eastern United States into Texas and then down into Mexico. He wrote the songs in the first-person and set them in the present day, as opposed to the mid-nineteenth century when the novel takes place.

It’s the imagery in McCarthy’s prose, Keen says, that’s inspired him most. He mentions McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), as an example. “He’ll talk about some steps going up to the porch, and how the moss is a certain color and it’s still sort of moist and it gives you that feeling that you’re really back there in the shadows in eastern Tennessee, and how cold it is and wet it is, at the same time without ever really saying it’s cold and wet — he’s just talking about the moss. He taught me that it’s about the importance of the imagery within a piece of writing, or even a song, and does the imagery mean anything in and of itself, no matter if it seems off-track.”

As a devoted reader of McCarthy, Keen is also in awe of his “narrative [gifts] and that ability he has to make a story that doesn’t have a real obvious trajectory,” he says. “And the stories never really wrap up. Time just sort of continues … I have to say he’s really spoiled me as a reader, so I just keep re-reading his books. Other than Henry Miller or even Emerson maybe, I never found writing like his that really grabs me and makes sense to me.”

McCarthy’s most pronounced influence on the American songbook comes in the form of The Last Pale Light in the West, a 2009 album inspired by Blood Meridian that was written and recorded by Ben Nichols, best known as the frontman for Memphis rock band Lucero. The album features seven story-songs based on different characters from the novel (“The Kid”, “Toadvine”, “Chambers,” et al.), set to acoustic guitar, pedal steel, accordion, and piano. 

“If I had set down to write a concept album about a Cormac McCarthy novel, well, that just sounds terrifying,” Nichols tells Rolling Stone when asked about the chutzpah it must have taken to translate a novel like Blood Meridian into song form. “Just doing it piece by piece by accident, just for the love of the words [is how it happened] … I wanted my dad to hear it. He’s a big Western fan. And so I put together these little short stories to songs, taking snippets out of the book and putting them to music. It just started as a little project to amuse myself. If I had known what I was actually pursuing, I might not have done it.”

Read the rest of the essay at Rolling Stone.

“Florida-Bama Line”

I saw her standing on the Florida/Bama line
Drinking salmonella, singing to the old end times
(And I just wanted a view but you know what night can do)

She wore those Daisy Dukes just like the young girls did
Way back in high school when I took her to Karate Kid
(Miyagi do, Miyagi don’t, girl just tell me what you want)

She’s a cougar on the highway straight hell
Plays the young boys just like she was ringing a bell
On the Florida/Bama line

I hadn’t seen her in almost 30 years
Under the bridge was 30,000 beers
(And she could still knock em back, I nearly had a heart attack)

We took her grandkids down to the go-cart track
Burning rubber shе poked her finger in my back
(Said Granny’s got you in hеr sights, you ain’t gonna be all right)

She’s a cougar on the highway straight to hell
Plays the young boys just like she was ringing a bell
On the Florida/Bama line

Go granny go
Go granny go
You ain’t from Pasadena …

Review of Shane MacGowan Biography, “A Furious Devotion” (Rolling Stone)

Writing the biography of the man best known for marrying traditional Irish music with British punk — a sound once described by concertina player Noel Hill of the band Planxty as a “terrible abortion” of Irish music — was never going to be easy. To further complicate the matter, Shane MacGowan’s hatred of interviews is almost as notorious as his long and sophisticated affair with drugs and alcohol. Such is punk.

When it comes to the story of MacGowan’s life, it has never been about “just the facts.” However, an attempt has now been made. A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan by British journalist Richard Balls serves up the most thorough account of the man — and myth — to date. In a nearly 400-page biography, out Nov. 18 in the U.S., Balls has attempted through extensive interviews and research to do what has proved so difficult through the years — to parse where the facts end and the myth begins. “Some of these never get resolved and probably never will be, but I am determined not to give up in my quest to sort the myths from the truths and better understand this shy and complex man,” Balls writes.

The son of Irish émigré parents, MacGowan was born and raised in England and spent childhood summers and holidays in rural County Tipperary, Ireland, with his mother’s extended family of staunch Irish republicans. Now residing in Dublin, he still speaks with an English accent, but maintains that he is Irish, for it was those experiences in Ireland that MacGowan says formed his musical and spiritual core. Some of the first traditionalists to hear the Pogues amalgamations might have been shocked, even appalled, but other icons of traditional Irish music such as the Dubliners and Christy Moore understood the power of MacGowan’s writing early on.

Read more at Rolling Stone.

Cold War

We were spies in a foreign land
I was a fugitive, running just as fast as I can
You were a bird on a bludgeoned wing, busted flat in Dallas
Dancing for a diamond ring

You asked me if I’d been here before
As I regaled you with memories of my melancholy whores
You crossed your legs and lit a cigarette
Talked about your mama, and said as your eyes got wet

I’m tired of fighting in this cold war
Nobody wins that’s just daddy’s drunken folklore
I’m leaving this town tomorrow you can come if you want

In the armpit of Arkansas
Where the river split and sang neath the stillborn stars
You started bitching we were out of beer
As we danced real close and came upon a midnight clear

In the morning with the mountain dew
And the sun’s cruel eye, the day after Waterloo
Lou Reed and that summer in Siam, you took a walk on the wild side
Oliver Stone in Vietnam

I’m tired of fighting in this cold war
Don’t want to die for a country I don’t know no more

Randy Owen, Quincy’s Steakhouse, and the Shirt That Got Away

Fort Payne, Alabama, the “Sock Capital Of The World,” is also the home of the country music group Alabama. Randy Owen, Jeff Cook and Ted Gentry, the band’s founders, all grew up in and around this little mountain town in northeastern Alabama, in the years following World War II.

After many a wild sock-hop, Randy and the boys enjoyed nights of ecstasy with their lovers while parked in cars, down in the holler under the glow of the mountain moonlight.

Indeed, these were days of plenty in Fort Payne, and the boys had a little jingle in their pocket. The Buster Brown Mill No. 2 was running strong and the town was reaping the benefits of having invented the Argyle Sock – a weave that legions of Southern grandmothers still give as gifts every Yuletide season.

Not content to spend their days working forty-hour weeks in the sock mills, Randy and the boys started a country band, notching their first hit in 1980 with “My Home’s In Alabama.” The rest is history, as they say. The boys went on to become one of the most successful recording groups of all time, selling more than 75 million records.

I first met Randy in the spring of 1993. It was during my school’s 8th Grade Alabama History Trip. When the bus pulled off the interstate in Fort Payne, the teachers gave the students the option of eating at McDonald’s, Hardees, or Quincy’s, the former home of the “big, fat yeast roll.” I chose Quincy’s, along with a few other eccentrics. We met Randy in the buffet line. He graciously signed our napkins and posed for a picture, which ended up in the school yearbook.

Five years and a galaxy of pimples later, I found myself standing in that very same parking lot. I was working as a camp counselor on Lookout Mountain and had been granted leave that evening, so I drove into nearby Fort Payne for a quick bite. After finishing my meal, I went outside and started walking toward the Dairy Queen when I noticed a large flyer that had been stapled haphazardly to a telephone pole. The flyer featured the picture of Alabama you see above. Below it was written: FOR SALE! SHIRT WORN BY RANDY OWEN ON BACK OF FEELS SO RIGHT ALBUM COVER. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY!

I never made that call, friends, and I’ve regretted it to this very day. Live and learn.

How Steve Earle Gave Voice to Forgotten Miners on Ghosts of West Virginia — Rolling Stone

Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff

Beneath the veneer of his country-rock stylings, the early work of Steve Earle is shot through with moving descriptions of working-class life. His stirring debut album from 1986, Guitar Town, is haunted by characters hopelessly mired in small-town and rural America, barely scraping by in landscapes that are as bleak spiritually as they are impoverished. On the title track, Earle writes about his own life, with a deft nod to Hank Williams: “Nothin’ ever happened ‘round my hometown/And I ain’t the kind to just hang around/But I heard somethin’ callin’ my name one day/And I followed that voice down a lost highway.” It’s a nod, of course, to Williams’ classic “Lost Highway,” a song written by Leon Payne.

This image of small-town life and the urgency to leave it behind is as blue-collar as it is timeless Americana. But Earle’s characters are not so much conquered by fate as embattled by the forces of culture and economics — and he returns to these subjects for his latest project, Ghosts of West Virginia, out Friday. In these early works, there is the distance between aspiration and reality, and it is here where the struggle to survive with some semblance of meaning intact is maintained. On the song “Someday,” a Springsteen-esque anthem from Guitar Town, Earle relates the tale of a young man who pumps gas by the interstate yet yearns to know “what’s over that rainbow.” In “No. 29,” a tune from Earle’s sophomore album Exit O, a middle-aged man is sustained by little more than his glory days on the gridiron, which he relives every Friday night when he watches the town’s star tailback, wearing the narrator’s old jersey number, play at the local high school. Early Steve Earle was country music, all right: songs about the frustrated working man and the tender mercies that keep him going through hard times. But in Earle’s case, it is country music written by someone who knows the city just as well.

Read the full essay on Rolling Stone.

On The Road: A Tribute to John Hartford

I wrote a brief bio of John Hartford for the new Hartford tribute, On The Road, a benefit album for MusiCares.

John Hartford is one of those unique American creations whose life could have been born from the pen of Mark Twain. Like Twain, Hartford grew up along the banks of the Mississippi River, where in his youth he worked on a steamboat, a passion that would have become a career, he said, had the imprint of the roustabout minstrel within been any less strong.

Like the great American river, Hartford’s music traverses vast terrain: he was a masterly country-folk songwriter, a brilliant interpreter of old-time and early bluegrass, a progenitor of newgrass, and a dynamic live performer whose sense of exuberance and whimsy influenced scores of musicians across generations. Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon recalls Hartford’s onstage power, saying, “I’ve never seen a performer so absolutely capture a crowd. He was the complete package…and there will never be another like him.”

Hartford’s late-’60s, country-folk-pop masterpiece, “Gentle On My Mind,” made popular by his friend and frequent collaborator Glen Campbell, is regarded as a standard in the Great American Songbook. In 1971, Hartford pioneered a new sound with the album Aereo-plane, a solo project that found the musical visionary connecting the hippies with the hillbillies and stretching the boundaries of traditional folk and bluegrass into more “herb-friendly” zones. “Without the album Aereo-plane, there would be no newgrass music,” says Sam Bush, the revered mandolinist who popularized the genre with his band New Grass Revival.

LoHi Records will honor Hartford’s legacy this summer with On The Road: A Tribute To John Hartford. All proceeds from the project will benefit MusiCares, an outfit run by The Grammy Foundation that offers critical assistance to musicians in times of crisis and need. Their work is crucial, for the economic realities of being a musician have never been more dire. All of the artists on this album understand the pressures of not only surviving but creating art in a deteriorating financial landscape. Sadly, the past year witnessed several well-known musicians succumbing to deaths of despair and this album serves as a rallying cry in the face of those tragedies. Resources do exist and it is hoped that this album can shine more light on those that can help. Now with the arrival of Covid- 19 erasing all live performance, a further reduction in artists’ incomes is inevitable and resources like MusiCares have become even more essential. “This is going to call on our better angels to come out during this time,” says Vince Herman. “I hope we all are feeling that we’re all in the same boat, and we either sink or swim together.”

The music of Hartford, who died in 2001 after a long battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, courses through myriad styles of American music, so it’s fitting the album features 14 reworkings of Hartford originals from some of the preeminent artists in the worlds of Americana, folk, country traditional bluegrass and jamgrass. “This album is an homage to all these hardworking musicians who are out on the road making their living,” says Chad Staehly, one of LoHi’s founders, who is also keyboard player for Great American Taxi and Hard Working Americans.

The album opens with Sam Bush’s rendition of title track “On The Road,” a song Bush performed live with Hartford as far back as 1977. As a kid growing up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Bush first heard Hartford on CBS’s Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and later on The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and he’d record some of those television performances straight from the tube into a cassette player, he says. On trips to Nashville with his dad, Bush would gobble up copies of Hartford albums at Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop. Years later, he would go on to collaborate with Hartford on numerous occasions. He looks back fondly on picking parties at Hartford’s residence in Nashville that, he says, would last four or five days at a time. “I never met anyone who liked to jam as much as John,” Bush says. And coming from the mouth of Sam Bush, that’s saying something.

On The Road was recorded in studios across the country, and yet, it sounds amazingly cohesive. Hartford’s music had a deep spiritual center, to be sure, and it’s that core that shines through in each of the album’s cuts. And while no tribute album could explore every nook and cranny of Hartford’s extensive catalog, this album hits some of the high points of a career that spans more than three decades. Railroad Earth offers an affecting version of “Delta Queen Waltz,” one of several paeans to the steamboat life written by Hartford in his lifetime. John Carter Cash and Jerry Douglas perform one of his better known and well-covered tunes, “In Tall Buildings,” a song about bidding adieu to the pastoral life and going to work for the man. The Infamous Stringdusters contribute a soulful reading of “Gentle On My Mind,” while Americana folkie Todd Snider serves up a stripped-down version of “I Wish We Had Our Time Again.” Keller Williams, the pan-genre wunderkind, teams up with the Travelin’ McCourys for the zany “Granny Woncha Smoke Some Marijuana,” a cut from Hartford’s mid-’70s pushing-the-envelope period when he was recording on an independent label. Williams, a wild and chameleonic performer in his own right, is certainly an heir to Hartford’s solo performance tradition. Longtime Hartford enthusiasts Leftover Salmon funk it up with “The Category Stomp,” one of Hartford’s earlier songs from the late ’60s, and one whose lyrics speak to the man’s musical manifesto (“It’s a folk-country-disco-tech-soft-rock-contemporary-abstract- expressionism-word-movie-flower-power-hard-ragging-neo-bluegrass-stoned-billy-dirty- boogie-freak-down-coming-on-jellybean-psychedelic stomp”). “I just love that stuff,” says Vince Herman. “It’s old-timey rap, I guess, and the chance to put a kind of funky thing on it seemed like a good idea. I think John would approve of the direction we took on it.”

The lyrics to “On The Road” encapsulate what the album is about. “Every day it’s your turn, another verse to be earned/ it’s a road, no big turn/ won’t get home much this year.” The album closes with an additional version of the title track, this one by banjo whiz Danny Barnes in solo guise. It’s a full-circle moment that captures the spirit of Hartford’s life and music, and in a very real sense, all of American music, that great unbroken circle that connects one and all forever. Long live John Hartford.

More info here.

New Skin for the Old Ceremony

The night before the release of The Unraveling, the new album from Drive-By Truckers that dropped January 31, Patterson Hood posted a picture to Instagram of the New York City skyline at night. He captioned the photo: “Thirty-one years ago, Lou Reed’s New York album was one of my two favorite albums of the year. Neil Young’s Freedom was the other one. Both of those album politically pointed to this current moment in time … Within a week there will be Brexit, the Iowa 2020 caucus and most likely Trump’s acquittal. The soul of America has been sold out (to paraphrase Marianne Faithful) ‘for such a low bid.’”

Lou Reed’s New York, generally regarded as one of his stronger solo efforts, documents the dark underbelly of Gotham in the late ’80s, turning its lens on the city’s street denizens and working-class hustlers, the folks struggling to pay rent to a landlord “who’s laughing till he wets his pants.” The album could’ve been written yesterday. As Reed sings on “Dirty Boulevard”: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor, I’ll piss on ‘em/ that’s what the Statue of Bigotry says/ Your poor huddled masses, let’s club ‘em to death/ and get it over with and just dump ‘em on the boulevard.”

Young’s Freedom, the more well-known of the two, opens and closes with acoustic and electric versions of “Rockin’ In The Free World,” respectively. It’s a song the Truckers uncork regularly in concert these days and it works as a sort of thematic centerpiece to the live show.

The Unraveling — the title of which recalls liberal economist Paul Krugram’s 2003 book The Great Unraveling — is very much in the spirit of the Young and Reed efforts. It’s also a suitemate of sorts to the band’s 2016 release American Band, the group’s most pointedly political album up to that point and one that attempted to grapple with hot-button issues of the republic like gun control and Black Lives Matter.

The Unraveling was recorded in a mere six days at Sun Studios in Memphis, and the immediacy shines through. The album is mostly a Hood affair, with co-principal songwriter Mike Cooley contributing just two songs. The opening track “Rosemary With A Bible And A Gun,” a Southern Gothic travelogue that recalls Springsteen’s Nebraska and namechecks Memphis photographer William Eggleston, is a bit of an outlier on the record. Cinematic in its scope, it’s a cryptic story that sets the tone for what’s to follow. The next song, “Armageddon’s Back In Town,” is a dirty rocker about the return of Reagan-era, Cold War paranoia, with Hood lamenting that “you can’t tell the rabbit from the hat” in his trademark Southern rasp. “Thoughts and Prayers,” the album’s first single, deals with the failure of the political establishment to take action on societal horrors like mass gun violence, while “21st Century USA” chronicles the dry rot of small-town life, painting Anytown, America as a place of Wells Fargos, KFCs, payday loan centers, and shitty bars, populated by folks working for shrinking pay while awaiting the return of the Savior. “Heroin Again” laments an acquaintance’s relapse on a drug that is finding its ways into new corners of American society as painkiller addictions rage and scripts get harder to come by.  “Babies In Cages,” a title that could be the authoritarian state writ large, is a plaintive cry of the heart, with Hood singing, “This ain’t the country our grandads fought for us to be.”

The Truckers, now 12 albums deep in a career full of twists and turns, have never been shrinking violets when it comes to politics, which is something of a rarity for rock bands from the American south. The group’s breakthrough double-album Southern Rock Opera was a deeply political affair, one could argue, exploring what Hood called “the duality of the Southern thing.” Hood was born in the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama in 1964, the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, a watershed piece of legislation that tilted much of the white, working-class south in the direction of the Republican party. Southern Rock Opera explored the nuances of race and politics throughout Alabama history, referencing everyone from Lynyrd Skynyrd to George Wallace, a politician now regarded as a forerunner to Trump. As The Unraveling drops, three Alabama politicians are vying for the Republican nomination for Senate, all of them desperately trying to out-Trump one another, with former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville suggesting Trump was chosen by God to be president, House Rep. Bradley Byrne running a series of blatantly racist ads that go well beyond dog-whistling, and former Attorney General Jeff Sessions championing the record of a president who kicked him to the curb like a mangy dog. Clearly, not much has changed in the neighborhood.

“This is no time for circumlocution, this is no time for learned speech,” Lou Reed sings on New York. The Truckers would seem to agree. The Unraveling is as hard-boiled and direct as anything they’ve written, and there are no words minced. Politics and art have always been tricky bedfellows, and some artists come up short in their efforts, with the music amounting to nothing more than cheap dogma and rhetoric. And while this isn’t the best Truckers’ album by a long shot, it is a pretty good one, and one that achieves its objective of holding the mirror up to a country that’s bargained so much of its soul.

In a recent interview with Forbes magazine, Hood said he wanted his kids to know which side of history he stood on when the smoke eventually clears. This album makes it abundantly clear.

Tip Of The Iceberg

From May/June 2019 Editor’s Note of American Songwriter.

“When I listen to other songwriters, I’ve never found anything more powerful than when you don’t have to use every little word in the English language. It has to be sparse.”

That’s Justin Townes Earle, the subject of this issue’s cover story, talking to American Songwriter back in 2014, shortly before the release of the album Single Mothers. Later this month, Earle returns to the mix with his eighth full-length studio effort The Saint Of Lost Causes, which is being released on New West Records. For this collection, the 37-year-old Nashville native continues to employ considerable economy in his lyrical approach. Thematically, the album finds Earle working with big-picture, topical subject matter, turning his eye on America’s social challenges à la one of his songwriting heroes, Woody Guthrie. 

This pivot toward the macro marks something of a shift for Earle, whose subject matter has typically favored a more first-person, autobiographical approach. Yet Earle insists the new album is “social” and not “political” in nature. The songs address complicated subjects that are beyond any one person’s power to affect, but have an impact upon all of us individually — issues of gentrification, the opioid epidemic, among others, but make no mistake, nothing in this work drifts toward coffeehouse folk. Like many of the works in his catalog, these songs are dressed up in various elements of southern roots music: boogie-woogie blues, noirish country, Memphis rock and roll.

One of the album’s more affecting numbers, “Over Alameda,” comes about halfway through the album. It’s a ballad set in South Central Los Angeles that tells a story of generational poverty, de facto segregation, and deindustrialization that culminates with a subtle suggestion of the causes of gang life. A country folk-sounding number with ghostly pedal steel, the lyrics are sparse, and decades of American history and economics are detailed with a handful of simple verses about a family.

Mama would tell me of her hopes
What she hoped to leave behind
What she thought she would find out in California
She’d talk about Mississippi
Still don’t know how it is
Any place can be worse than this
It’s hard to believe

The song takes its place in the long line of “going-to-California” folk songs. The song’s speaker is a 19-year-old boy living in the Jordan Downs Housing Project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. We understand that his mother had moved from the Mississippi Delta to Los Angeles in the mid-’60s and his parents bought a home after his father landed a job at the Firestone factory in south Los Angeles. But the story takes a turn when the factory closes down, and that Promised Land remains ever elusive, even in the California of our collective imagination.

Then the jobs moved out
Then daddy died and we lost the house
Moved into the Jordan Downs
And been here ever since

Once they’ve settled in Jordan Downs, the mother dreams of life “Over Alameda,” the street that borders the housing project to the east, beyond which “the green grass grows” and the “white folks live.” But the young protagonist has only known life in Jordan Downs, and he says “all I have discovered/ There is nothing for a boy of color but to fight.” Jordan Downs was ground zero for the Grape Street Watts Crips, a notorious gang that was the subject of the early ’90s film Menace II Society, and while the narrator does not explicitly say he is a Crip, all he knows is that very neighborhood and the reality of an endless fight to escape to something better, “over Alameda.” The listener can fill in the gaps how they see fit.

Ernest Hemingway explained the importance of omission in writing in his treatise on bullfighting, Death In The Afternoon, arguing that he attempted to show only the tip of the iceberg in his work. “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about,” Hemingway said, “he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”

In the same spirit, Earle does not spell out the historical and geographical minutiae of the story. Such details are not necessary for one to fully apprehend the overtures of meaning offered by the song. “Over Alameda” is really just a song about the hope for something better, and it allows the emotion of the music to convey that hope as much as anything else. The listener must rely on their own creative capacity to fill in the details of the story, which in turn helps deepen their connection to the song. As a result, instead of creating distance between the listener and his work through his economy, Earle is closing it.  

Hemingway’s iceberg analogy is indeed an interesting theory of writing, certainly not the only one, but one Justin Townes Earle seems to have used remarkably well.

Steve Earle on the Making of “Terraplane,” And Then Some …

Steve Earle’s old friend has always been the blues, but never has the prolific and mercurial songwriter released a quote unquote blues album. But that will change on February 17 with the arrival of Terraplane Blues, an album that takes its name from the Robert Johnson song about fast cars and even faster women.

Earle, who currently resides in New York City, cut the record this fall in Nashville at House of Blues studios over a 6-day stretch with his band the Dukes. It’s a bit of a breakup album, he says, what with it coming on the heels of his recent split with singer-songwriter Allison Moorer. Terraplane is a raw and dirty affair sonically, and moves from acoustic East Texas blues numbers to boogie-rock to early Stones-type ballads, with one spoken-word piece in iambic pentameter thrown in for good measure. The record was produced by R.S. Field and is being released by New West Records.

We hung out with Earle in the studio  and chatted about the album, and a host of other topics, including the Shakespeare authorship controversy, where Elvis really learned how to “shake it,” and why Earle’s writing songs for ABC’s Nashville.

So how long have you been thinking about making a blues album?
For a while.

I’d thought about doing it at some point as long as seven or eight years ago. I basically had a couple of things going. I wrote some songs that aren’t on this record, and they were sort of headed in one direction, and then the blues songs started to come along. And I don’t know why, but I decided that I’d make a blues record and then I’d make a country record, so that’s what I’m going to do. The country record’s like half-written. And some of the stuff [on the country record] I wrote for Nashville, just because T-Bone [Burnett] asked me to.

The TV show?

Yeah.

Now when I think of Steve Earle making a blues album, I think of the Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins kind of stuff.

That’s there, but I decided on the Mance thing – there’s a Mance thing and a Lightnin’ thing. You know, Lightnin’ played with a band whenever he could. Mance didn’t, but I don’t think it was a choice. What Mance really did was he played dance music on one guitar when he first started out. So we did a thing that’s very much Mance, but we did it with a band. It’s all acoustic. You know, I’m playing guitar and Chris [Masterson] was playing a baritone resonator. I think that’s what he’s playing. We’ll get drums on it, and upright bass. It’s very much the kind of thing Mance did, the sort of in-between blues and ragtime. I mean, there’s no such thing as between blues and ragtime. There are people that, most of them wearing bowling shirts, will probably listen to this record and say that some of it’s not the blues. But they would be mistaken.
And “Tipitina” is the blues. It’s the 16-bar blues. And pre-war “St. James Infirmary” is the blues. So that stuff’s included. There’s a boogie. I chose Canned Heat rather than ZZ Top for that path. But there’s one song that’s based on the fact that I very much believe, for me, where I come from, the first two ZZ Top records are blues records. And that one track that rocks pretty hard is kind of from that.

So is “Terraplane Blues” your favorite Robert Johnson tune?

No, my favorite Robert Johnson tune is probably “From Four Until Late.” “Terraplane” just seemed like a good title. It’s a car. It’s a fast car. I’ve never wanted to learn how to play “Terraplane,” and I don’t know for sure if I will do it. I’m trying to figure if I can do it. It’s a hard song to sing, so I gotta find some version of it that works for me. [If I do record it], it’ll be an extra track. You have to have an extra track or two.

I know you’re a big patron of Matt Umanov’s guitars in Greenwich Village. 
I’m a big patron of guitar shops in general.

I understand you’re friends with Zeke Schein who works there. He’s a big Robert Johnson guy. 

Zeke knows more about this stuff than anybody that I know. I spent hours talking to him about this record. He knows what tuning all the songs are in. Zeke’s a really good player. He plays all that shit.

Do you think the general perception of blues these days is that it was just a form of folk music and that the dance element and the popular element of what blues used to be in the ‘30s and ‘40s has gotten lost?

Yeah, I mean that’s one thing – this record’s got a song that’s sort of based on “Smoke Stack Lightning.” And “Smoke Stack” – all those Chess records were jukebox records. They were made for people to dance to. They weren’t long and there wasn’t a lot of improvisation on them. They were improvising, but there wasn’t a shitload of long solos because they wrote two minute and 30 second records. And that’s represented here. But it very much sounds like this band. It’s the best band I’ve ever had. The existence of the band was part of the inspiration for making the record. Finally doing it had as much to do with Chris being in the band as anything else because I never had the guitar player to do it.

Did your time in New Orleans working on HBO’s Treme inform this album? 

Absolutely.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It” was actually taught to Hank Williams by that blues musician who’s from New Orleans.

“Tee Tot” [Rufus Payne] is the story … I don’t know how much there is [to all that] … there’s all those stories about how black music and white music … I don’t know. The legend says that Elvis got all those moves from watching black gospel groups and watching bands on Beale Street. I know where he got everything he got. It was from Wally Fowler. Wally Fowler was the founder of the Oak Ridge Boys. He was the first white gospel singer to perform the way that black gospel groups did. You know, to not just stand there. He was the first real showman in white gospel music and he founded the Oak Ridge Boys. And there’s been an Oak Ridge Boys ever since.

When Guitar Town was written I was writing for Sunberry/Dunbar, which belonged to the Oak Ridge Boys and was run by my publisher, Noel Fox, who was the last bass singer in a non-secular version of the Oak Ridge Boys. Oak Ridge Boys are a gospel group. And [Richard] Sterban took over. Sterban came from J.D. Sumner, who replaced Noel because Noel quit. Noel went out and worked for Olan Mills or something, you know, selling people pictures of themselves for years. When the Oaks got big they brought Noel back to run their publishing company. He was a great song man. He’s gone now, but there would be no Guitar Town without Noel. He told me to write an album and not worry whether or not it would get you a record deal, and I had just lost my first record deal after being here for 12 or 13 years. I was pretty discouraged, and didn’t have much faith in myself as a writer anymore. And I wrote the songs that became Guitar Town in about 11 months.

But I heard all the war stories from him and from the Oaks and from those guys during that period, and they set me straight on where Elvis got that shit, and I believe it’s true. It just makes more sense. I went back and found a couple of films of Wally Fowler performing and [I was like] “ohhh …”

But it took a while to get poor white people and poor black people at each other’s throats, and it didn’t always take. There was already someone who was interested, like upper middle class kids like Sam Phillips slummin’ just because they loved the music. He ended up starting Sun Records, that kind of stuff. So you know, it couldn’t stay contained forever, the two things. And Sam knew, and that’s not a legend. He looked for years and [said], “If I can find a white kid, a good looking white kid who can sing this stuff, then I’m going to get rich.” He didn’t get as rich as he should have, but he got rich.

You’ve got a history of borrowing from the blues lexicon in your own tunes. And you taught that course at the Old Town School of Folk Music years ago, I think it was titled “The Cool Shit To Steal.” How do you walk that line between borrowing from traditional material and coming up with original stuff? You know, so much of the folk tradition is obviously about borrowing. 

It is, but in the blues it’s really tricky because it’s a limited genre. Some of this stuff is definitely post-Bob Dylan blues. Dylan started making blues records on purpose a long time ago. It begins on Bringing It All Back Home and it’s fully realized on Highway 61. Everything is in a blues form from that point on for a while, until probably Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding maybe. And I thought that it would be sort of fun to do something where I didn’t necessarily have to come up with a lot of melodies, that I would find at least the components for the melodies in this toolbox that’s called the blues.

Some of it’s more original that I thought it would be, melodically. The lyrics I pushed as hard as I’ve ever pushed. Some of the best lyrics I’ve ever written are on this record. I wrote a spoken word piece in iambic pentameter again. That’s me making up for my lack of education. I didn’t get a chance to write in iambic pentameter in high school because I only got halfway through the 9th grade.

So are you still a big Shakespeare buff?

Yeah. I don’t think that the glovemaker’s son wrote those plays, but yeah. I think Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote them. So does the greatest Shakespearean actor of our time, so did Mark Twain, so does Meryl Streep.

I don’t know if I believe that. Is there evidence?

There’s tons of evidence. There’s evidence both ways. You should read all the books and make up your own mind about it. There’s no way it was a bunch of people. It was one person, in my mind, and it pisses Billy Bragg off because he thinks I’m being elitist, and I’m far from an elitist.

There’s no way [it was] someone who’d never been to Italy, was illiterate, or in other words couldn’t form words, and that’s probably true of Shakespeare and most actors of his time. He could read but he couldn’t write, because that was a much harder thing to learn to do then. He had no intimate knowledge of life at court, and didn’t have political protection to keep him from getting his fucking head chopped off with some of the things he was parodying and some of the things he was writing about when he was writing them.

So the theory about de Vere is that he was either Elizabeth’s son or Elizabeth’s lover. Some people even think both. My guess is that he was her son, or somehow related to her, anyway. And so he got away with it. But it’s one person, it’s a singular genius voice. There’s no way it was more than one person, no way there was more than one person that brilliant in Elizabethan England, when there were only a 100,000 people in London and the whole area. It just doesn’t make sense.

Like with Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their voices were so different from the Shakespeare plays, there’s just no way …

Yeah, and Ben Jonson is where a lot of the clues that it may have been de Vere come from. Ben Jonson wrote the preface to the First Folio, he’s the one who called him “The Soul Of The Age” and all that stuff. And they all were writing really great stuff, but nobody was writing anything like that. And nobody really emulated him in his time. Shortly after he died people did. And he became a big deal – Shakespeare’s plays were being staged and they were hits in London. And at that moment Elizabeth was patronizing theater. She didn’t go out to the theater, she couldn’t do that, but plays were brought in and performed at court. And she was the very first monarch in Europe that did that, which is another clue.

But there are a lot of books about it, and there’s a lot of evidence, and people are horrified of it. There’s a film called Anonymous that’s about the authorship and it’s just a shoot-em-up. Every theory is about Edward de Vere being the actual William Shakespeare, and who the real William Shakespeare was, and why he got set up. I think it’s really simple. I think he had to have a front because he was the Earl of Oxford and he couldn’t be a playwright, so I think he just set up a guy and paid him, because Shakespeare retired and went back to his hometown and set himself up in a wool business and fucking sold wool for the rest of his life after becoming the greatest playwright and actor of his age. It just doesn’t make sense.

He was a hoarder too; he hoarded grain during the plague, which was a bad thing to do.

Yeah, he was a businessman. That’s what he was. He was a Republican. But yeah, I believe that.

(American Songwriter, April 2015)

Rising Son

Jay Farrar has always been known as a songwriter’s songwriter. Even during his salad days with the seminal alt-country group Uncle Tupelo , the Belleville, Ill. native was writing world-weary, poetic songs that belied his young age.
Farrar formed Son Volt shortly after Uncle Tupelo called it quits in 1994 (with Tupelo band mate Jeff Tweedy starting Wilco). The group’s first album, Trace , was a mostly acoustic affair that now ranks as one of the musical high-water marks of the ’90s. The band released two more albums before going on hiatus in ’99.

After two experimental solo projects, Farrar resurrected Son Volt in 2005. But this time around, the band had a new lineup. Their first comeback album, Okemah and the Melody of Riot , found the group moving away from its signature traditional sound into more rock-oriented territory.

With their latest effort, The Search , Son Volt continues to plow new ground musically. With frequent looping, horns and the occasional sitar, it sounds far more like The Beatles circa 1968 than any neo-traditional band you’ve ever heard.

But despite the new sound, Farrar’s lyricism remains the band’s hallmark. His surrealistic evocations of the American road on The Search affirm that he is, first and foremost, a songwriter. Richmond.com recently spoke with the Son Volt frontman, who comes to Richmond this Thursday with his band “Groovin’ in the Garden.”

Since your first solo album Sebastopol , you’ve been a lot more experimental with the instrumentation and the arrangements. Was that a natural evolution for you, or more of a conscious decision to break free from the alt-country pigeonhole?

It felt natural. So I guess it was evolution. Coming off a period where the instrumentation was fairly static but it remained the same, I think the solo records just sort of represented a challenge to see where things could go.

Are you listening to completely different stuff than you were listening to, say, 10 years ago?

Probably. You change over the time. I think there was maybe a song on the first solo recordat that period, I was even listening to jazz. That was something that I definitely wasn’t listening to [in the past], and trying out some jazz time signatures and things like that. I try to keep an open mind and learn from whatever I’m listening to.

Other than yourself, the current Son Volt lineup features none of the members that were on the first three albums. Why did you keep the name?

I felt like there was unfinished business. I felt like Son Volt had more to offer, so I stuck with it.

Your lyrics have always been more impressionistic than narrative-driven. I’ve always heard a strong Townes Van Zandt influence. Who are some of your guiding lights, in terms of songwriting?

Townes Van Zandt would be one of them. I didn’t actually hear Townes Van Zandt until ’94 or something like that. I’d been doing a fair amount of writing before I came across him. He definitely left an impression. Maybe even certain writers have even as much of an influence, whether it was Jack Kerouac, who had more of a stream-of-consciousness style that I could really relate to and learn from, I think, as far as the idea of just getting your thoughts down on paper and not editing them along the way. I could relate to that and I’ve done a lot of that. I feel like that’s a good way to create.

A lot of the songs on the last two albums decry conservative, Middle America politics. Yet you still live in the Midwest. Can you explain that?

In the Midwest, I guess you can keep your finger on the pulse really. I prefer to live in a place where, in like St. Louis especially, it’s primarily a more working-class city. There’s more realism there than there is, sometimes, on the coasts. Anyway, that’s my take. I never really considered living anywhere else, except maybe during the period of making the Okemah and the Melody of Riot record, and that only lasted a couple of days.

In the press release you say the Beatles were the first band you were really into, though you suppressed the influence for a while. Any other influences you’ve consciously suppressed, like ABBA?

Reggae was probably one that I consciously suppressed for a long time. In our live shows we sort of adapted an Uncle Tupelo song, “Life Worth Living,” that has some reggae overtones now. I think it just took me a long time to be able to actually appreciate reggae in a certain way. I think a lot of it is as a result of finding out more of the history of it.

Many of the songs on The Search draw inspiration from the road. Is the American road still romantic, in the sense that it was for artists like Kerouac and Woody Guthrie?

I think there’s still a lot of Jack Kerouac and Edward Hopper out there. Especially in the west, in the middle and the south. I shouldn’t leave out the north. It’s out there, especially late night. You find it in the truck stops, the diners. They’re still there.

You’re often labeled as the godfather of alt-country. Is that a title you’re comfortable with, or do you find it ridiculous?

I see it as more of a continuum where you’re inspired by people that came before you. You give some, you take some, and that seems to be the way that it all works. I don’t see that anything’s starting at any one discernible point. I guess that’s looking at it from more of a historical perspective. It’s hard to really say that anybody really started anything.

What can we expect next from Jay Farrar more Son Volt albums?

I guess we’ll see. That’s the focus for now. We’ll be touring through the fall anyway. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’ve been in contact with Anders Parker some, and we’ve done some demo work towards another Gob Iron record. It could be Gob Iron. I’ll just have to wait and see.

(Richmond.com, June 2007)

A Blessing after the Curse

Before the Drive-By Truckers took the stage Thursday night at Plan 9’s Carytown location, Jay Leavitt , who manages the store, told the crowd of 200 or so that he had checked the concert listings for all of the great rock ‘n’ roll cities in the world that night. And he said, in all earnestness, that there was no better place for any music fan to be than at 3012 W. Cary St.

“This is the center of the music universe tonight,” said an emotional Leavitt, who has known DBT’s Patterson Hood since their boyhood days in Florence, Ala. “Blender [magazine] called them America’s greatest rock band. I call them the world’s greatest rock band.”

Judging by the intensity of Thursday night’s crowd — Mike Cooley also called them the best in the world towards the end of the show — it’s safe to assume that most of the fans in the store that night would agree with Leavitt’s remarks.

And the show was special for other reasons. For one, it marked the 25th anniversary of Plan 9, the independent music retailer that started in Carytown and has expanded throughout the state. But most importantly, it was a benefit for the Bryan and Kathryn Harvey Memorial Endowment Fund.

During the middle of the show, Leavitt, also a close friend of the Harveys, said that every cent of the proceeds would go towards the fund. He then thanked the Truckers, whose compensation included a case of beer and a fifth of Jack Daniels, for playing the show. Leavitt spoke touchingly about the Harveys, and told DBT how much their song “World of Hurt” had meant to him this past year. “That song is a song of hope for me,” said Leavitt, who concluded his remarks by saying, “It’s great to be alive.”

And it wasn’t just another show for the band, which has a long, loving history with the River City, dating back to the days of the Capital City Barn Dance. After taking the stage for the encore, Hood said, “From the bottom of my heart, this is the most important show, for me, our band will play this year.”

It was also one of the more impassioned shows they’ve played. Recently, DBT has been opening for The Black Crowes, which means they have to play 40-minute sets. As an opening act, Hood said their audience usually entails a sober crowd that is just walking through the door. So, for this show, they were like a beast that had just been let out of its cage. “We’ve been looking forward to Richmond where we can turn it up and play what we want,” Hood said.

And turn it up they did. Some of the highpoints of the night included “My Sweet Annette,” a countrified sh–about cheating on your old lady with her best friend. “This song’s about our first tour,” Hood said in his raspy north Alabama drawl. “Some of the names have changed, but the facts are the same.”

Another highlight was Jason Isbell’s rendition of “Moonlight Mile,” the closing track on the The Rolling Stones’s “Sticky Fingers” album, which, to these ears, strongly influenced DBT’s latest, “A Blessing and A Curse.”

To close out their first set, the band played “Let There Be Rock,” from their album, “Southern Rock Opera.” “This song’s about how rock ‘n’ roll saved my life as a teenager,” Hood proclaimed over that crunchy opening guitar riff and solitary drum-kick. And then the beautiful scene of the whole crowd pumping their fists in unison, singing along to these words:

Dropped acid at a Blue Oyster Cult concert, 14 years old

And I thought them lasers were a spider chasing me


On my way home got pulled over, in Rogersville, Alabama


With a half-ounce of weed, and a case of Sterling BigMouth


My buddy Jim was driving, he’d just barely turned 16.

All in all, a magical night.