Rowland S. Howard 1959-2009

In memory of the late, great The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls guitarist. who passed away on Dec.30 after a long struggle with liver cancer. A musical innovator and gifted songwriter, Howard roared out of Australia with fellow madman Nick Cave in the early 80’s, leading the charge in the post punk revolution with a style that combined mind bending noise with lyrical melancholy and a fine ear for twisted jazz and country and western, influences that deepened and matured as he moved into his solo career in the mid 80’s. On hearing of his passing, Cave remarked “This is very sad news. Rowland was Australia’s most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist. He was also a good friend. He will be missed by many.”

Vic Chesnutt 1964-2009

It’s somehow fitting that Vic Chesnutt finally succeeded in removing himself from this world on Christmas Day. With a handful of muscle relaxants, the 45-year-old Athens, Georgia musician brought an end to a life that had, in turn, battered and crushed his body, ignored and rebuffed his singular talents. In doing so, he also closed the door on the small but close-knit fringe of dedicated fans that recognized in his songs a beacon of humanity and courage that only gained in power as the surrounding world moved ever farther into bland commercialism and irreverence.

Like far too many of America’s finest artists, he died all but penniless. A paraplegic for the majority of his adult life, he was plagued ceaselessly by the specters’ of insurmountable medical debts; surgeries he could never afford; lawsuits he could never hope to settle.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of his passing is that, as an artist, he was just beginning to hit his stride. His last three albums, “North Star Deserter,” “Skitter on Take Off,” and his final release, 2009’s “At the Cut,” were Chesnutt’s crowning achievements. Featuring the most sympathetic musical collaborations of his career, both “North Star” and “At the Cut” featured friends Guy Picciotto of Fugazi, Thee Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, among others. The music they wrapped around Chesnutt’s scarred, searching vocals verges on the operatic while remaining somehow supremely intimate and unpretentious.

Not that Chesnutt’s compositions needed gift wrapping or big production tinsel to leave listeners speechless: “Skitter on Take Off,” is a stripped down, acoustic affair sans overdubs that cuts as hard and true as any of the full band albums. It’s a testament to the man’s craft and honesty that the moments in these songs that hang in the air like still, blue bursts of memory work as well through pale whispers as throttled roars.

America was never a land to let talent and strangeness go unpunished. He should have known this was no place for a cripple with a whiney voice singing about such things as Chinaberry Trees, intravenous Demerol and the small daily horrors of everyday existence. A true Son of the South/Original Man, he was seen by some as a kind of freak show savant, picking at his guitar with a claw-like hand, frail frame all but swallowed by the iron wheels and chassis that had been his home since the wreck in ’83. So be it. If the world he perceived was by necessity constricted, then he would report from that world with all the power and mutant insight his mind could call forth. Like the photographers William Eggelston and Robert Frank, he would do battle with the prosaic until it offered up its grainy or brilliantly saturated delights. He would sing about his own backyard and he would do it transcendentally.

The songs, stretching over 13 albums, contain moments that are as structurally elegant, as theatrically perfect as anything in the cannon of George Gershwin or Rodgers and Hart. The love of language stretches back to Johnny Mercer and on to Dylan, with whom he shared a certain free form approach to syntax. Forget the Great American Songbook, art of the power contained in “Glossolalia,” “Supernatural,” or “Flirted With You All My Life,” belongs in the Library of Congress, beside seminal recordings by Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie and whoever else you care to name. Behind the black humor and humble persona Chesnutt surely knew he possessed more than common talent, that he deserved something more than Michael Stipe’s word of mouth and free drinks from the college hipsters eager to prove how they didn’t even notice the shrunken legs and twisted fingers.

But of course, there was always, always, the wheelchair, and the bills, and the lawsuits and…well, it doesn’t really matter now. Maybe all those things added something to his art, maybe not. But they were always there, even on the best, drunken stupor nights with friends and family and music and all the love any one man could ever hope for. “I am a man, I am self aware,” he stated in the opening lines of “Flirting With You All My Life.” “Oh, Death,” he moans, and somewhere on the dark road of America, Ralph Stanley smiles and nods his head.

In early December, discussing his health, Chesnutt told the Los Angeles Times, “I was making payments, but I can’t anymore and I really have no idea what I’m going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can’t afford. I could die any day now, but I don’t want to pay them another nickel.”

Amen. Like Hunter Thompson, another Original Man of the South, Chesnutt surveyed his life, didn’t like what he saw and decided to move on. To put it simply, he was ready, and that will have to do for all of us.

Ten Classic Holiday Songs, From the Sublime to the Utterly Ridicolous

1. O Holy Night-Irma Thomas: Forget about Christmas songs, this is one the most soul-stirring performances I’ve ever heard. Period. Spine-tingling, reality-warping gospel from a hard to find album of holiday classics, “A Creole Christmas.” Produced by the late, great New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint, it’s all killer, no filler.

2. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) -Darlene Love: From what’s arguably the finest Christmas album ever released, Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift for You,” this track realizes every promise ever made by the elf-like producer and his avante-operatic Wall of Sound: A perfect fit for Christmas-themed music, sleigh bells chime, drums thunder, and the brilliant Mrs. Love soars above it all. As cinematic as it is musical, you can damn near taste the hot coco and smell the pine needles.

3. Fairy Tale of New York-The Pogues: Ah, the joys of Christmas Eve in the drunk tank. A strangely beautiful love song for the Bowery bum in all of us.

4. Santa Baby-Eartha Kitt: A filthy ode to materialism, greed and sexual coercion. Don’t do it Santa!

5. Run Run Rudolph-Keith Richards: A dirt-raw, hagged-out version of Chuck Berry’s attempt at a Christmas tune, Keith makes Christmas Eve sound like just another in a long line of all-night throw downs. Perfect.

6.You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch-Thurl Ravenscroft: This song is so well-known, its truly insidious lyrics have lost much of their impact. I mean really, “You’re as cuddly as a cactus, You’re as charming as an eel.” or  “Your heart is full of unwashed socks, You’re soul is full of gunk.” aren’t exactly you’re typical yuletide sentiments. By the way, the singer was also the voice of the greatest cereal mascot ever, Tony the Tiger.

7. Santa Clause, Will You Please Come Tonight-Doug Lewis: Poor little Doug doesn’t seem to have much faith in the jolly old elf, judging by this sad little tune. The poor kid’s practically in tears, begging “on my knees” in a strange monotone spoken word rap for a visit from the big guy. “I tried so hard to be a good boy you see, for it means the whole, whole world to me.”

8. Little Drummer Boy (Surfer Version)-Unknown: I have no idea who recorded this, but by God the thing rocks like mad. The traditional melody we all know is buried somewhere deep in the bowels of the track’s shimmering noise, surfacing for a few seconds here and there like an expectant child creeping from his room on Christmas morning. Sure to raise a ruckus with the more conservatively-minded holiday revelers.

9. I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas-Gayla Peevey: Just plain weird. Performed by what sounds like a world-weary 10-year-old, the hippo-loving narrator makes a convincing case for zoo animals as holiday gifts: Convenient for Santa, safe (hippo’s are vegetarians), and fits easily in a two car garage. What’s not to like.

10. Blue Christmas-Porky Pig: A stuttering atrocity of the most charming variety, the verbally challenged porker turns a hallowed peon to holiday loneliness into a politically incorrect farce. Makes me smile every time.

Song Reviews: “Play it All Night Long” and “TVA” from Drive-by Truckers album “The Fine Print.”

On their recent album of cover songs, alternate takes and unreleased gems, rock and roll lifers Drive-by Truckers offer a glimpse into the vault of quality tracks that inevitably amass when your band boasts three top notch writers. Among the highlights are two songs which offer very different takes, both musically and thematically, on the art of incisive Southern song craft.
“Play it All Night Long,” the Truckers version of a Warren Zevon concert staple, can be seen as a near spoof of the genre, a systematic tour of the very worst Southern stereotypes – imbecility, incest, alcoholism — inflated to almost comic levels; a sort of musical counterpart to the carefully orchestrated, gothic portraits of Appalachian hill people by the much-reviled photographer Shelby Lee Adams.

Grandpa’ pissed his pants again
He don’t give a damn
Uncle John’s been acting strange
He ain’t been right since Vietnam.

A queasy mix of humor, homage and horror married to a churning, down-cast riff that can hold its own with the work of the godfathers of the very musical style Zevon was taking the piss out of, the Truckers version glefully magnifies these qualities, elevating it into a full-on hard rock stomp musically while lead singer Patterson Hood drags the lyrics through the slow creeping drawl of his unreconstructed vocals, replacing the morally-neutral spectator of the original with a red-eyed, gleeful participant. The way he slurs and drags out the last line of the chorus, “Play it alll nighhhhtt loooong” conveys more menace and half-crazed desperation than any lyrics could hope to. In concert, the Truckers join voices to shout out the songs summation of country life essentials – Sweat, Piss, Jizz, Blood. It’s a cry of defiance as much as anger, all the contradictions of rural southern culture boiling to the surface and carrying the song beyond any notion of parody or high brow condescension.

Sweet Home Alabama
Play that dead man’s song
Turn the speakers up full blast
Play it all night long

That dead man’s song. When it was first recorded in 1980, Ronnie Van Zandt had been in the grave 3 years. The band he fronted, Lynyrd Skynyrd, was in shambles, recovering from both the physical and mental wounds of the 1977 plane crash that also took the lives of guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister, back-up singer Cassie Gaines, as well as their assistant road manager and the planes two pilots. The band would eventually reform in the mid-80’s, but during the dark years in between, the members plunged into a limbo of drug abuse, drinking and grief-fueled self destruction. The south had lost their finest band; the surviving members had lost years of hard work, their dearest friends and seemingly, their very sanity.
If Zevon considered any of this when he penned the song, it doesn’t show in the lyrics: They’re merciless, sardonic, as cold as winter rain on a grey tin roof.
In the Truckers hands, however, the song becomes something more, both a celebration of long lost heroes and embattled communities, and a condemnation of the willful stupidity and impoverishment that refuses to question the regions heroes, the old attitudes and avenues of existence. By confronting the very flesh and gristle of the boogeyman trapped in the South’s closet, the Truckers have aimed the rear view mirror of history and tradition not only at their fans, but at themselves as well. As tangled as Brer Rabbit’s briar patch, as dark and filled with creaking doors, distorted shadows and drunken laughter as a backwoods funhouse, in the end the song simply rocks too damn hard and weird to ignore.
Jason Isbell was the youngest member of the Truckers when he joined the group just prior to their “Southern Rock Opera” tour, but he quickly established himself as more than a match for Hood and fellow songwriter Mike Cooley, blossoming over three albums into an artist of often staggering emotional nuance, displaying the depth and rare soul of someone well beyond his early-20’s. All of these gifts are on display in “TVA,” Isbell’s tribute to the saving graces of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depresion-era, government-funded project that brought jobs and electricity to a large swath of the South through the building of dams along the Tennessee River.
Isbell turns what could easily have been a stale history lesson into a meditation on family and how they’re shaped by the history of the land they call home. The song opens with a son recounting a childhood spent fishing along Wilson Dam with his father, a man whose past is inextricably linked to the river and the Tennessee Valley. Isbell’s rough-hewn, loam-rich voice immediately erases any distance between artist and listener, storyteller and protagonist. The way he evokes the distance that grows between father and son as the one moves into adolescence and the other towards old age, as the fishing trips become fewer and farther between – “When I got a little older I wouldn’t and now daddy can’t.” – is as simply stated and moving as any musical moment could ever aspire to.
The song’s true nature becomes clear towards the end of the first chorus, with an image of near mythic power.

So I thank God for the TVA
Thank God for the TVA
Where me and my daddy would bow to the river and pray
Thank God for the TVA.

As the ancient Egyptians once worshipped and offered sacrifice to the Nile, father and son fall to their knees in the dam’s shadow, before the roiling embodiment of life and prosperity. It’s a scene as fraught with meaning as those found in any Sunday morning hymn; in fact I would argue this song represents that rarest of finds …the secular gospel.
The song moves from the narrator’s childhood to his teenage years, as the dam morphs from a place to fish with his old man to a conveniently secluded make out spot; the young man and his girlfriend drawn to the banks of the river to explore each others bodies and simply soak in the joys of a lazy summer afternoon. Seen through his eyes, even the wildlife seems possessed of some harmonious magic, as raccoons and terrapins dance on the rocks for him and his girl.
Following those nearly whimsical verses, Isbell leads us farther into the past, into the life of the boy’s grandfather and his father before him, a down on his luck sharecropper struggling against hope and nature to provide for his growing family. That opportunity is provided by the federal government, in the form of a job building the very dam beneath which, decades later, his grandson and great grandson would fish, pray and grow into men with families of their own.

Where Roosevelt let us all work for an honest days pay
Thank God…

It’s impossible to hear this song now, in this era of partisanship rife with charges of socialism and far worse, and not feel some measure of nostalgia for a time when the government was actually seen as a force for positive change. It’s a measure of how far we’ve come as a nation and a people, that it’s nearly impossible now to imagine federal initiatives being put into action to lift a region from the blight of near third world levels of poverty, as existed in the Tennessee Valley prior to the TVA act of 1933. There is, of course another side to the story – witness Cooley’s “Uncle Frank” or Elia Kazan’s classic movie “Wild River” – but for a brief time this countries noblest ideals seem to have gained life through bold, decisive action, the likes of which are now simply stories shrouded in the dust of memory.
The mythology of the South is large enough to encompass both Isbell’s and Zevon’s vision: The hardworking family man passing on the history of the land and its people, and the leering drunk cranking up the misunderstood anthem of his fallen hero. Turn them speakers up full blast, but don’t forget the blood and sacrifice that runs like a river behind you. And for God’s sake, don’t forget a prayer for the future.

The Chaos Theory of Rock and Roll

Discord, anarchy, bedlam…I sing thy praises.
Give me the detuned, the sweat stained and warped. Give me the broken and off-kilter. Give me Chaos. In other words give me Rock and Roll like it’s god damn meant to be played.
Open a window on the night, stick your head out, and what do you hear? Chaos, children, the world over: Horns and sirens, jackhammers and garbage trucks, the soft mutterings of the insane and the rabid squeals of the young; cicadas in ecstasy and bullfrogs in heat, lifting their scaled eyelids from ditches filled with the boiling detritus of summer. Do you remember that sound, from the womb perhaps, or from the approaching grave? Some of us do. We long for it in our very cells like a remembrance of the morning our fathers brought us before the pale and ceaseless ocean for the first time; a great unknowable chasm that flowed and roared through the very chambers of our flesh.
But enough of memory. I speak of the present and the needs of the living. Surely this music that today calls itself Rock, in whatever fractured or mutated state, is not of the same gene pool which gave rise to the great warlord-freaks and poet-savages which once stalked our land. Surely these automated Stepford Crooners house not the flame of those who trod the awesome Buckets of Blood and infamous Night Stomps that ravaged the minds and spirits of this nation’s freedom-fighting musical alchemists. Oh, great snivelers, pale whiney rodents: Was it you I saw whimpering before the great Golden Calf wrapped in your Bugs Bunny blankey?  Surely, it was no other I spied shivering beneath your mother’s skirt when Joshua blew his great horn of death and triumph.
Let it be written: The stiff and the overly measured have no place in the dank underworld of rock. The calculated and soulless, the dull breath of complacency and tepid pulse of reason, each be damned to your individual ice-encased limbos. The world has had its fill of your soft-coma trilling.
Great devouring Shiva, is it any wonder the youth are no longer passionate about this music? Where are the killers; the manic, red-eyed dream catchers and animal skin aficionados? Where are the artists?
I dream a simple dream: A band that can wobble to the precipice, peek over the edge into the abyss with one leg dangling over, then turn on its platform heels laughing like a banshee and slowly ease its way back and…well, how the hell else do you tell what a band’s capable of, whether its member’s hearts, guts and balls are all mixed up in the sound and glory of the thing?
I’m not talking about sloppiness; I’m talking about momentum, friction, courage — musicians who have such trust in one another that they don’t panic when someone goes careening off-script or falls flat on their face; who understand it’s not about perfect pitch or choreographed dance moves or auto-tuned vocals and it sounds something like this: Oozing black loam, grease and razor wire and then all at once a wounded panther trapped in a cave at midnight as the fog rolls across the river and carries its screams into the valley amongst the little ones nestled safe in their mother’s bosoms. Listen. Listen.
It comes down to this: Who’s brave enough to risk it all, to not just flirt with danger but openly court disaster? I speak of the glory of (in no particular order) — Exile-era Stones, Drive–by Truckers, a psychotic slice of 60’s garage rock by the One Way Streets called “Jack the Ripper” (a cover of the Screaming Lord Sutch classic), Jerry Lee Lewis’ Sun Records recordings, “Wine, Wine, Wine” by James Luther Dickinson; The Replacements; Howling Wolf and the great Chess session band; Sly and the Family Stone; Neil Young and Crazy Horse circa “Tonight’s the Night;” Hound Dog Taylor; the immortal R.L. Burnside blowing the joint out with his “adopted son,” redneck guitarist Kenny Brown, backing him up, pushing and pulling the rhythm like taffy through a fun house of rib-thumping bass and jailhouse slide guitar that somehow manages to work itself into one big ass-shaking scream while its individual components lurch and dawdle off in directions not found on any modern-day compass.
Lest I forget the early Kinks sides; Otis Redding with Booker T. and the MG’s at the Monterey Pop Festival; Bob Dylan’s first electric shows with The Hawks; “Fulsome Prison Blues;” “Search and Destroy;” The Mercy Seat RocksOffWaitingfortheManTheWandererTuttiFruttiIFYOUWANT BLOODYOUGOTITWHODOYOULOVE?PILLSBURNINGHELLGOINGOUTWEST, LEESCRATCHPERRY NICKCAVEANDTHEBADSEEDS X THE GERMS GANGOFFOUR GENEVINCENTANDTHEBLUECAPSJAILHOUSEROCKUPYOURARSE…Damn, it can be done. Wild and wonderful shards of barely- coherent racket can be brought back kicking and screaming from the Great Void. Racket…that’s a fine word:  It’s what your momma told you to stop doing when you were a youngen and broke into the kitchen cabinets to beat hell out of a steel frying pan with a butter knife or maybe a grease-smeared wrench. You craved a little chaos, a little tempest to undo all that control and shiny, shiny, shiny. You wanted to fling a little shit on the walls and crawl through the neighbor’s drainage pipes, didn’t ya?  Don’t lie to me, dammit.
But here’s the thing some of these so-called avante garde noise birds don’t seem to fathom: There’s more to the art of Chaos than mere noise. You have to hold hands with her and caress her neck, right there, in the sweet spot so she’ll close her blue-velvet eyes and smile and her fangs will start to show, just a little.
As anyone acquainted with the latest physics theorems and equations understands, Chaos, though seemingly random, always has a hidden design, a barely discernible pattern weaving its way amongst the shattered glass, flames and tsunamis. Ask any scientist worth his salt and he’ll tell you: There’s all kind of beauty hidden down there in the dark and out there amongst the colliding, shimmering mass of stars and impossible vortexes of creation. That’s why it takes skilled musicians of exquisitely sensitive dispositions to handle this music, to ride its razor-edged crests and navigate the black forests of its hidden grottos. It’s a job for the criminally inclined and the terminally obsessed – you have to be in love and insane. You gotta swing that bitch. You have to listen.
Speaking of which, lend your ears to some of rocks most inspired moments and what you’ll hear is musicians barely in control of the great, all-engulfing YAWP they’ve somehow managed to conjure into being: Is that really our shy, retiring hippie hero, Neil Young, leading his drug-addled compadres in Crazy Horse through the crazed, shambling lurch of “Come on Baby, Let’s Go Downtown,” from the aforementioned “Tonight’s the Night?” Is that horrid little squirt Johnny Rotten actually espousing far-right, anti-abortion sentiments in the vengeful, swarming junk-rock of “Bodies?” How the hell is Keith Richards even remaining vertical long enough to grind and grate his way through the tortured euphoria of “Happy,” located at the pivotal mid-point of “Exile on Main St.” Knock back a few shots, run naked through the dancing pines — I promise it will all make sense. Contradiction is central to this grandiosely simple, majestically complex symphony. It can’t help itself:  It bleeds and pleads; promises and rebukes. It spits in your eye and kisses your ass and you love it, at least some of us do.
Give me the inspired mistake, the idiot savant, the dark-blue gallop of hooves on human bone. There: Watch as the hyena lifts its throat and serenades the world’s decay; as children pounce on one another and roll entangled in the soft fields of autumn. Listen: The sound of that midnight train must have scared the living shit out of the natives when it first drifted across their mud huts and dismal cabins; but they learned to love the thing — that billowing sorrow redolent of freedom and power that sank into their very being and found a second life amongst the blood and viscera and dreams. They made love to that sound; raised children in its midst and their whelps grew with a hunger for slow death and lunging sex; struck out amongst the cities and filth and made their own music of rust and rat droppings. So what?
The fact is, fellow travelers, in order to unlock the treasure you’ve got to dig in the dirt; daub mud under your eyes and run with the cannibals. You’ve got to stare into the eyes of the great gray ape.
He’ll tell you: The god’s favor the mad.  And Chaos is their favorite son.

Malcolm Holcombe, Plymouth NC, June 27, 2009

Random Concert Pics — 2004-2009

Drive-by Truckers, The National, Richmond, Va, Aug.22, 2009

Les Paul/Jim Dickinson…RIP.

I suppose tears are called for, but somehow it just doesn’t seem appropriate.

Les Paul and Jim Dickinson, two very different but equally unique and talented musicians, producers and inventors passed away within days of each other this week – Paul on the thirteenth and Dickinson on the fifteenth. One was venerated the world over for his contributions to the arts of music and technology, helping shape the sound of rock, country and just about anyone who’s picked up a guitar since the 1950’s; the other is known mainly for his work on one song, the Rolling Stones “Wild Horses” and his association with eccentric Memphis cult act Big Star. And yet they each, in their own unique fashion, played an important, often indefinable role in nurturing the very essence of what makes American music such a vital force of innovation and joy.

In my own universe, at least, they loom equally large.

Through his invention of the electric guitar and multi-track recording techniques, Les Paul stands as one of the major architects of the sound world we all inhabit in the 21st century: Hendrix, Jamaican dub, Sergeant Peppers, the whole 60’s psychedelic head rush — none of these would be imaginable without innovations such as overdubbing, tape delay, phasing effects, etc., all of them dreamed up and worked into the fabric of modern day recording techniques by Les Paul.

But most of all the man was a musician, a lifer, who continued to perfect his craft and lose himself in the same river of sound he dreamed of and conjured into being as a young high school dropout coaxing small torrents of notes from the first crude, electric guitar prototype, called simply “The Log,” which he duck taped together during his days on the Wisconsin barroom circuit. With a bit of reworking, “The Log” would eventually become better known as the Gibson Les Paul, one of the world’s most venerated guitars, beloved of everyone from Eric Clapton and Keith Richards to B.B. King and Chet Atkins.

He may have looked like an accountant, but his music told a different story: The man flat out rocked. Compare his playing to any of the early rockabilly guitarists like Scotty Moore or Cliff Gallup and the influence is obvious. Compare his playing to more recent guitarists and you’re confronted with the degree to which the influence of jazz, that all pervasive swing which always permeated his playing, has been leached out of not just rock, but modern music in general.

Some of Paul’s early, multi-tracked recordings with his wife, Mary Ford, sound like they come not just from another time but another planet. He created orchestral pop music years before Phil Spector and, I would argue, bent the world of sound into a nearly psychedelic prism of harmony and rhythm decades ahead of the likes of Brian Wilson or Pink Floyd. He wasn’t just ahead of his time; he was damn near inventing the future every time he went into the studio.

Les Paul

For anyone who can’t get past the trappings of 1940’s fashion or lyrical content, I would urge you to simply turn out the lights, turn up the music and pretend you’re listening to a record that came out last week. What you’ll hear is a man determined to do it his way, fools and consequences be damned; a scientist exploring the outer realms of sound as surely as Timothy Leary and B.F.Skinner would later explore the inner realms of consciousness; a musician of the highest order reeling and picking out songs of joy and wonder at volumes that lifted those songs into spheres undreamt of by the staid conservatives dominating the music of the day.

Still not convinced of the man’s conviction and dedication? Consider this: After living through a near-fatal car crash in 1948, doctor’s informed Paul that there was no way for them to rebuild his shattered elbow in a way that would allow him to regain movement, that in fact his arm would be permanently locked in whatever position they placed it in. Most people would have immediately thought about the everyday necessities of eating or bathing. Not Les Paul. Without blinking an eye, he told the doctors to set his arm at an angle, so he could cradle and pick his customized instrument with the least amount of trouble.

By contrast, Jim Dickinson was the hero of a much smaller universe, namely the storied musical community that grew up around a handful of record labels in Memphis, Tennessee during the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Barely out of his teens, Dickinson began doing session work at one of the emerging enclaves of southern soul, Chip Moman’s American Sound Studio. Shortly thereafter he added his honky-tonk piano and vocals to one the last singles for Sun Records, “Cadillac Man.”  In the Late 60’s Dickinson teemed up with fellow Memphis musicians to form “The Dixie Flyers” one of the all-time great session groups, providing backup for musicians ranging from Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave to Jerry Jeff Walker and Albert Collins. Dickinson and his band, which included legendary guitarist, dope fiend, raconteur Charlie Freeman, could do it all and then some: smooth jazz, funky R&B, and some uncategorizable blend that sounds a lot like punk rock played by members of a hard core country band on acid.

When the Rolling Stones dropped by Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama during their 69 tour of the states, Dickinson just happened to be in town. The Stones put the Memphis native to work, adding his elegant, understated piano to their finest ballad, “Wild Horses.” The infamous Stones documentary “Gimme Shelter” offers a brief glimpse of Dickinson, kicked back on a couch in the studio with Keith Richards, eyes closed, lost in the music as they listen to a playback of one of the song’s early mixes. In 71, Dickinson lent his talents to another masterpiece, of sorts, the Flamin Groovies’ proto-punk classic, “Teenage Head.”

Jim Dickinson

By the early 70’s Dickinson was working mainly as a producer, nurturing local Memphis odd balls and outcasts to mid-wife such alternative touchstones as Big Star’s “Third” and Alex Chilton’s “Like Flies on Sherbert” as well as a classic set for reggae legend Toots Hebert, “Toots in Memphis.” In the eighties, he would befriend a new generation drawn to his outlaw image, producing the Replacements, Mojo Nixon and Seattle home-town heroes, Mudhoney.

As much as I love the man’s guest musician and production work, I’m convinced Dickinson’s greatest contribution is his 72 solo album, “Dixie Fried,” which I have no qualms singling out as one of the most important musical documents of the 20th century. Occupying a musical Twilight Zone somewhere between the Stone’s “Exile on Mainstreet,” “The Soft Parade” by the Doors and Tom Waits more off-beat efforts, the record offers the title track’s gospel rockabilly take on Carl Perkins’  classic tale of redneck madness; a Jim Morrisonesque spoken word version of Dylan’s “John Brown,” and the hillbilly funk of the obscure vaudeville piece “O How She Dances.” Both avant garde and ancient, filled with more soul, grit and mind-numbing weirdness than any 10 records you care to name, it stands as both a summation of everything that makes southern music special and a grand, rollicking party for all the dead bluesmen, war vets and old west gunslingers who move through its songs like guideposts to the end-of-days decades to come.

Like Les Paul, Dickinson never stopped doing what he loved most. He continued to record solo albums, including several with his sons, Luther and Cody, of the North Mississippi Allstars. In the last several years he both played on and produced projects with the young singer-songwriter Amy Lavere, who’s own mix of blues, jazz and country-noir can be seen as a direct descendent of Dickinson’s early work.

As I said at the beginning, the loss of two creative freedom fighters in one week would seem to be cause for sorrow, but honestly, these two lived far too fully, too far off the beaten path on their own yellow brick roads, to mourn or feel any sense of loss. They had the courage to do what they were put on this earth to do, despite criticism, scorn, and the prejudices of their eras.

My world, for one, has been a far richer place for their having passed this way.

The best band in America?

 

Drive-by Truckers

Rolling Stone magazine recently graced the public with one of their annual “best of” music roundup issues, highlighting their choices for the hottest, hippest, most noteworthy music currently available. Everything from Best Live Act to Best Indie Hip Hop Artist was highlighted in detailed, authoritative prose by writers for, supposedly, the end-all and be-all of up-to-date music journalism.

Nowhere in this once distinguished tome, however, was there any mention of what, to this writers ears, may just be the single most important American band currently working. The Drive-By Truckers are a five-piece rock outfit whose members hail mainly from the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama. Although sometimes held up as the leading lights of the so-called “alternative country” or “Southern rock” movements, the breadth of the groups work argues for a band whose importance lies far beyond the shackles of labels or genres.

Over the course of seven studio albums the Truckers have grown from a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, punk-influenced country act, into a band who can rock as ferociously as AC/DC or choose just the right bent note to break your heart on a soulful, folk influenced number.

But where this band truly excels is in their gift for storytelling. Founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, who’ve been writing and performing together for over two decades, have developed into two of rock’s premier yarn spinners. Whether they’re chronicling the whistling-past-the-grave yard courage of a musician dying from AIDS (The Living Bubba) or the devastation wrought by the suicide of a close friend (When the Pin Hits the Shell), the duo have laid claim to a lineage that stretches from the wry, furious humor of Mark Twain to the gothic horrors of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy.

Their lyrics are littered with small, descriptive details more than worthy of their literary predecessors. Whether they’re singing about the plastic flowers on the highway marking the spot where an accident victim died; a small scar on a man’s head where the hair never grew back from a beating he received long ago; or a woman sitting in a silent house after her husband’s left for work, trying hard not to think about the loaded shotgun in the closet, the band is without peer in using rural imagery to investigate what it means to be not only southern, but economically and spiritually depressed, desperate and scared to the point of hopelessness. The protagonists of these songs inhabit a land of myth that works to both nourish their sense of identity and trap them in a vicious cycle of poverty and self-destruction.

As impressive as their lyrics may be however, they would have little impact without the superb music the band surrounds them with. Loose-limbed and even at its darkest conveying a sense of the sheer joy of shared experience and creativity, their music has grown in scope and complexity while maintaining its earthy, gnarled rawness.

While much has been made of their superficial similarities to groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers Band, the Truckers are actually closer in spirit to a gang of gothic troubadours spinning a modern version of 18th-century protest songs and murder ballads. Besides, calling a band “Southern rock” is simply redundant: All rock, whether intentionally so or not, has a common, southern ancestor.

One area where this band does call to mind classic acts of the past is their dedication to the concert stage. Having seen the Truckers twice, I can attest to the fact that their reputation as one of the best live acts on the planet is well deserved. Running nearly three hours in length, the band’s concerts somehow manage to maintain an intensity and connection with the crowd that would make many young punk-rock bands green with envy.

And if the music’s not enough, it’s well worth attending one of their shows just to take in the eclectic mix of the fans. Somehow cow-punks, goths, rednecks, emo kids and hippies have found a common thread that ties them to this music.

One could go on at term paper length about the Truckers artistic and cultural merits, but frankly, to over-intellectualize their work is to miss the point entirely. Their talent is there for anyone with a pair of ears and a little patience to appreciate.

Like all great artists, it’s easy to take what they do for granted because they make it seem so effortless. The mix of chemistry, intelligence, confidence and god-only-knows what other ingredients that go into the makeup of a successful band is a strange witches brew that even the keenest scientist could probably never unravel.

In the end, what makes the Drive-By Truckers work so beautifully is simply a mystery, just like the South itself.

Apparently, it’s a mystery the editors of Rolling Stone Magazine have yet to unravel.