Thirsty Ear Festival provides its annual aural soak.
Roots music is like obscenity: difficult if not impossible to define, but we know it when we see, or, uh, hear it. It's Ralph Stanley, or gospel, or blues, or bluegrass, or folk, or country, or rockabilly in its particulars. Brash and heartfelt, tender, sometimes self-referentially twangy, sometimes ornamented with blazing finger-picking technique, sometimes stubbornly gutsy and untutored and as primal as the "roots" from which it emerges. Like all rubrics, "roots music" is a narrow ledge-like groove for some, a circus tent umbrella for others. Southwest Roots Music, the sponsor of the annual Thirsty Ear Festival, takes a tasteful
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yet broadside-of-the-barn approach. For example, this year's festival lineup includes Patty Griffin, Greg Brown, Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men, the Be Good Tanyas, zydeco, gospel, blues, Latin and more.
Eaves Movie Ranch, off Turquoise Trail near Lone Butte, is where it all goes down. It's a simultaneously evocative and hilarious setting, conjuring the Old West as a backdrop for music that often resonates like the soundtrack to a John Ford film; yet it's a movie set, where one sometimes expects Captain Kirk and Spock to emerge from behind swinging bar doors, phasers set on stun, searching for Wyatt Earp. The
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outdoor stage is flanked by ersatz barber shops, saloons, boarding houses. If there's a downpour, the mud along the "streets" seems authentic enough, but the vendor selling pad Thai may cause at least a blip of cognitive dissonance.
Somehow (perhaps for some, after several trips to the beer tent) it all coalesces into a vibrant festival scene. Last year's only flaw was the presence of a select few (courtesy of trips to the beer tent again?) who insisted on congregating near the stage, yet yammered away at full conversational bore during, for example, Rickie Lee Jones' unforgettable performance. Most of the casual attendees, however, stay in the background, hovering like gnats around the airport-concessions-priced cookies, ice cream and barbecue.
The shows especially worthy of NO TALKING this time around (or, hey, if you want to pay $25 and stand around flappin' yer gums, why not go back to the beer tent where there's a chance someone may actually find you interesting?) should prove to be
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Dave Alvin, Greg Brown and Patty Griffin.
Alvin, you may remember, fronts the Blasters, a band that has been crafting edgy country-rock-grime albums for two and a half decades, long before there was much cultural cachet in the genre. Alvin's voice manages to be gritty yet clarion at the same time, always proclaiming something that resonates about life in this twisted country of ours.
His most recent solo recording, 2004's
Ashgrove
(YepRoc Records), features Alvin's sometimes forlorn songwriting, quixotically in search of the mythical
American West, spinning yarns of bad luck, sin and hard times. A sample lyric from "Out in California": "Well I'm sittin' here drinkin' / In the last bar on earth / Yeah, sittin' here drinkin' / In the last bar on earth / She's out in California / Takin' off her tight red skirt." Of particular interest is that somehow Alvin's work gets tamed and somewhat flattened in the studio, but his live shows are legendary for their incendiary energies.
Greg Brown shows folksier roots with less rock. For years his work was not particularly well known except within roots music circles, where he was much sought after as a songwriter. The turn
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of the millennium has seen him gain more exposure, perhaps at least partly due to the 2003 tribute album,
Going Driftless: An Artist's Tribute to Greg Brown
(Red House), featuring Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Shawn Colvin and
Brown's wife, Iris DeMent. Here's roots cred: Brown was born in gritty Iowa coal country, Ottumwa to be exact, and now lives on his parents' farm in Hacklebarny. Brown's old-school voice conjures Merle Haggard, Hank Williams
and Roger Miller, that same gravelly timbred tenor. Known for both his sense of humor and playful songwriting as well as his way with a ballad, Brown should deliver the perfect complement to a cool September night in the shadow of Lone Butte.
Then there's Patty Griffin. Launch her Web site (
) and her plaintive pipes croon Henry Mancini's "Moon River," followed by a variety of her other songs, both folk-inflected and hard-rocking. Her voice is sharp as a knife, folded in a
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paradoxical vulnerability. Definitely both dream maker and heart breaker, Griffin has been at work on a new CD, recording in Austin. She cites Rickie Lee Jones and Bruce
Springsteen as influences, but in a musical landscape strewn with singer-songwriters and chanteuses, Griffin gains fanatical, almost rabid adoration.
Excitement is in the air as well for the return of Po' Girl, who delivered a couple of buzz-worthy Thirsty Ear benefit concerts earlier this year at Bruce Dunlap's GiG Performance Space. Po' Girl's brew is roots stew: "Take the bellow of the blues, the wail of a gypsy fiddle, punk-rock street poetry, a Cajun love song, and depression-era
jazz, mix it all up and add some old R&B. This music is rich
with musical influences, sweetness, grit and soul," so they describe themselves on their Web site. A quartet
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consisting of virtuoso fiddler Diona Davies and multi-instrumentalist Awna Teixeira as well as co-founders Allison Russell and Trish Klein (also with festival performers The Be Good Tanyas),
Po' Girl charts a unique course by reaching backward and finds inspiration in music otherwise long-forgotten.
Other festival highlights include T Broussard and the Zydeco Steppers, Eddie "Devil Boy" Turner's blues guitar wizardry, Honeyboy Edwards, Richard Johnston, Taos favorites Chipper Thompson and the Feast, as well as local heroes Alex Maryol, Ken Valdez and La Familia Vigil. Those are just the musical highlights. Don't forget the cookies, pad Thai and beer tent. And no talking.
