Prepare your Thirsty Ear for a musical hangover.
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Santa Fe, we don't need to tell you, is an odd little place, a place where weird juxtapositions and surreal goings-on are accepted with casual blasé: Anasazi pot shards in your back yard, right next to the hot tub? Just don't step on 'em, please. A 40-foot burning puppet every September? Sure, why not. Hanging out for three days, drinking beer in a fake Old West town, listening to some of the best roots music around? OK, sounds good.
Every year, for 6 years now, the denizens of Santa Fe and her outer boroughs have made the pilgrimage to said fake Old West town-the Eaves Movie Ranch out near Madrid-for the Thirsty Ear Festival. First-timers to the ranch usually notice the music second and the atmosphere first-the wide, dusty (or muddy, depending on how late the monsoons are) streets, the
Deadwood
building façades, the
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dead-man's-hand poker tables. It feels awkward and funny to literally barrel through swinging saloon doors and sashay up to the bar to get a beer or a
Coke (it's virtually impossible not to slap the bar with a dusty hand and holler "Make mine a sasparilly!").
But the novelty fades, and soon the music takes over your consciousness.
This year's festival promises to continue the tradition of unique environs and fine music, incredibly fine music, actually; the likes of locals Hundred Year Flood, Alex Maryol and Joe West representing the 505 and national headlining acts like Rickie Lee Jones, James McMurtry and Cajun greats Beausoleil.
And then there's Otis Taylor, taking the place of Odetta, who cancelled her set due to injury. Main headliner Rickie Lee may be the best known artist of the group, but it's this radically spooky bluesman who's the sleeper. It's difficult to describe Taylor's genius: Though it's most often characterized as "trance blues," Taylor's songs are more than
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that-he twists the genre with a unique and frankly eerie creativity. Taylor's first album, the awesomely titled
When Negroes Walked the Earth
, is a downright
ethereal, minor-keyed work, with doubled vocals that make it sound like Taylor's ghost is joining him before he's even dead yet, combined with almost psychedelic guitar work and echo-y background static. The lyrics of all his albums display a simultaneous Southern street-wise blasé and deep, if simple, emotion, evoking the same feel as, of all things, the recent pimp/hip-hop film
Hustle & Flow
. "I used to have my way with you," Taylor says in the song "Hookers in the Street," "Now you're dead and gone"-it's a sentiment simultaneously cynical and sad. As he's evolved, Taylor has also proven he's fearless when it comes to fiddling with the blues genre, dropping in mournful Spanish horns, inventive arrangements and non-traditional tunes. Think if the Flaming Lips were bluesman, or if
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Bo Diddley were prone to dropping acid.
Rickie Lee Jones should stand quite in contrast to Taylor. Best known, of course, for her quirky '70s hit "Chuck E's in Love," Jones has quietly continued her career,
careening from jazz to folk to, well, pretty much anything. Of late, Jones just released a career-spanning, three-disc anthology,
Duchess of Coolville
. As a listen to
Coolville
shows, Jones' lifetime of work has faded in and out of the national consciousness, shifting with her own personal winds from whimsy to cloying working-class odes to true greatness. But her voice-that strange, piqued jazz-pixie voice-has always charmed and hypnotized. Word has it it's currently in great form, and to hear it echoing off the façade of a fake 1800's brothel should be the rarest of treats.
Jones may be the star, Taylor may
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be the sleeper, but the double-secret extra sleeper is Nels Andrews and the El Paso Eyepatch. Hailing from Albuquerque, Andrews' mid-tempo alt.country grooves and slow ballads tell tales while avoiding cliché, and his deft turns of phrase-both musical and lyrical-suck you into a rarefied world of heartache and soft melodies. Don't miss his set (1:30 pm, Sunday)-Andrews is the type of Americana artist who reminds us why we live out here in this crazy desert-its landscape arbitrarily pock-marked with things like, I dunno, movie ranches-in the first place.
