STONE COUNTRY
Call me a fool, but I missed Joe West's CD release party a few weeks ago. Granted, I was in California, but still, I felt an adrenaline twinge of remorse that I was missing out. It might be silly to think that, out in LA, where there's plenty of music, where the very week I was there Sonic Youth, Kanye West and any other number of big-name musical folk were performing, I would even be thinking about some little ol' show out here in the desert, featuring some little ol' local act, much less feeling pretty bummed to be missing it.
But Joe West isn't just some random fellow who provides background music for your rum-and-Coke. We're living in strange and sadly non-mystical times, where some bizarro falsity of "America" is not so much celebrated but forced down our throats, while the musical genre of "Americana"-perhaps what Lucinda Williams means by "stone country"-is relegated to small venues and critics' annual "best" lists. Both Williams and West belong, if one can be so bold as to categorize, under the term "Americana," a genre as difficult to describe as any other but which surely owes its legacy to Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan.
One thing that binds Dylan and Johnson and Guthrie and Hank Williams together is their narrative strength; almost every one of their songs tells a story that is eminently compelling, singular in its details but often broad in scope. More important, even though they come from different times and places, the tales of each of these songwriters blend together, creating a family of stories, or one giant story, an American story. Lucinda Williams' references-manifested in her statements, her affectations and her music-to that legacy of stories were even more noticeable live at her Lensic show last week than they are on record. This is a woman saturated in history, knee-deep in story-be it an evocative turn of phrase, like when she raspily sings "too cool to be forgotten / junebug versus hurricane," or in three-part mountain music harmony. She is a student: "I have watched you and listened to your lyrics and have been struggling to get as good as you are for about the last 40 years," she says to Dylan in her 2004 New York Times piece, less an essay than an open letter to America's favorite bard (by the way, check out the Martin Scorsese-directed Dylan doc
No Direction Home
Saturday and Sunday at 9 pm on KNME). "I sure don't pretend to be no intellectual," she continues, to which I say
bullshit
. As twangy and raw as she may be, Williams can analyze the nature of Southern life-of American life-in a three-minute roof-rattler with the best of them. And she knows how important it is to our national psyche, in a day and age of psuedo-patriotism, that the best way to access our true identity is to play up the backwoods poet that she is. Junebug versus hurricane…
Which brings us to our very own Joe West. West's oeuvre is stunning because he picks up on Williams' type of persona and embodies it with an easy grace; despite her sincerity and genius, Williams' ambition is clearly evident, while West seems to move through the world naturally, like a child prodigy. He's a local yokel in the sense that that's the part he plays, clad in shabby cowboy chic and Colonel Sander's ties, but also in his ability to understate his own sophistication. His new album,
The Human Cannonball
, may stray from the serious a touch-especially with songs like "Straight Man in a Gay World"-but in terms of lasering in on compelling imagery, West's as good as anyone.
There's as much heartache here as in Lucinda's
World Without Tears
, it' just of a different ilk; but more importantly, there's as much story. Even the names of the songs constitute an immediate imagery: "The Combines are a Comin'," "Oklahoma Bound," "$300 Car." And then there's "Trotsky's Blues," at once Santa Fe-specific and universal: "I saw Trotsky at Bert's Burger Bowl," West sings over a dark, almost Beatles-y uptempo guitar lick. "He was trying to buy back a little piece of his soul…We all know what it's like to walk around in such pain / To lose the one that we love / walkin' around with our head in shame / down by the railway in the pouring rain…" Well, of course.
Like Williams (both Lucinda and Hank), Dylan and the rest of them, West maintains a peculiar charm, an intelligence manifested in a refusal to stick to any "country" rules. He sings "Trotsky's Blues," for instance, in a weird half-British accent. He experiments (eg, his
Intergalactic Honky Tonk Machine
); he fiddles with the crowd (like when he stripped down into feather boa drag at the Cowgirl one night). And, like the Williamses, Dylan and the rest of them, he lives in the crossroads, the nexus of poetry, songwriting and plain ol' storytelling. And that, my friends, is Americana.
MITOTE
Ray Charles Ives, that modernist funky loop-driven psychedelic dance duo we love so much, has garnered some national attention, much deserved in my book. CD Baby, a website that specializes in independent music, has chosen RCI as a highlighted item, listed first on the CD Baby home page. This is a giant deal, folks, as thousands of bands compete for such a primo spot on the site. "It's hard to believe that this Santa Fe duo rocks out with so much sound and imagination," the site's authors say. Well, hell, we knew all along. Check it out at
.
