I’ve
been away for some months, arguing with folks on my local internet tubes
about Mexicans and taxes and the rest of the stuff local folks are arguing
about these days. As you’ve noticed if you’re reading this here,
this argument is like the tide. You can go away for a while and when
you get back, them damn waves are still floppin’ in, to quote Ben Johnson
the horseman and actor.
For Xmas Libby got an XM radio, which we listen to a lot, particularly channel 12, called X-country, which plays all sorts of great country-side singer/songwriters and bands. You might hear Lucinda on there, or Hank III, or Dale Watson, or Waylon’s brother (who’s made some very bizarro records, lemme tell you). You won’t hear Sandy Denny or the yankee folkies. (XM’s got another channel for that.) There’s a twang meter in other words.
Anyways, the other day here comes one hell of a song about General Black Jack Pershing, and Pancho Villa, and how we’ll steal the warden’s car and leave our false teeth in a jar, and before it was over I looked on the read out and it was some guy I’d never heard of named Tom Russell. Way cool song. Captured a lot of the things that are always in my mind, which might be balled up into The Wild Bunch in a way, that moment when the machine gun came of age, which it seems like nobody who has any power has come to grips with, or gives a shit about, so the epigram of the ‘60s generation turns out to be William Holden with a cigar in his teeth saying, “If they move, kill ‘em.” Scorpions, fire ants, gasoline—modern times.
Well of course it turns out that I’m the last person in the world to have not heard of Tom Russell. Indeed, he’d crossed my path—everyone’s path-- with “Outbound Plane,” but I didn’t know that, it was just a name on the read out. So I wrote my friend Coach Rus in Las Cruces, because the internets told me Russell had settled in El Paso, and Rus said, ‘Hell, we’ve opened for him,” and sent me his email. So I wrote Mr. Russell a fan letter, thinking he was this incredible unknown songwriter, and wanting to clap him on the back and say well, I definitely get where you’re coming from. And Tom—Mr. Russell—wrote me back saying he’d send me some CDs. I kept thinking this was some unknown writer, laboring in obscurity, so I said, “well, I’ll send you some stuff back in trade,” and wrote him some more inane stuff about The Wild Bunch. Then the CDs arrived and I began to realize I’d done something sorta like writing Jack Kerouac or Merle Haggard. Like I told Mr. Russell, I live in the woods out here.
Anyways. It might be that you don’t know Mr. Russell beyond that fine song “Outbound Plane,” or maybe “St. Olav’s Gate,” or maybe, just maybe, a more recent one, “Stealing Electricity,” which is about as good as it gets if you like facing real stuff and not just watching American Idol and believing that those nice kids are really what singing is about. If you don’t know him, then go get some of his work. You can look up a lot of the lyrics on the internets, and he’s got a website or two. I can’t even say what his “best album” is, but “Love and Fear” is just incredible, song after song so true it hurts—to quote Bob Dylan: (and why is this, that Bob has said these things so long before the rest of us even catch up), “…Every one of his words rang true, and fell like burnin’ coals, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul…”
See, Mr. Russell is one of those folks who happens to have something to say to us. It’s been that way for some time, and we’ve heard him through the voices of other singers from time to time, and he’s been frustrated some perhaps, and probably walked away and come back now and then, but he never gave up and never lost his confidence, hitting 60 or so, stronger than ever. Because by 60 you ought to begin to get this life stuff, huh.
Another of his recent CDs is called “Hot Walker.” As he said to me, “it’s a short movie, put it in sometime when you’re driving about an hour.” Which is quite true, but I sat down and listened to it straight through yesterday when I got home from laying up stone in a wall. It’s a movie all right. American Fellini I’d call it. Narrated by a famous “little person,” Little Jack Horton, who appeared in “One Eyed Jacks” and stole a diesel locomotive with Charles Bukowski one drunken night long ago. You might need to be of a certain age to truly appreciate “Hot Walker”—sos you remember Jack Kerouac, and Dave Van Ronk, and some of the details of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, before our lives were all laid out like they are now, before Reagan and the slow smothering that has taken place and continues. It’s grounded in Tom’s road life I think, which in a singer/songwriter tends to be extensive. He discusses nights on Dave Van Ronk’s couch some, and the notion of searching down in the cushions for a stray Dylan lyric. I slept on the floor of a hole on East 3rd Street between B and C for a couple of weeks in 1964. I recognize the territory.
| Tom Russell at the Bottom
Line, NYC, 1981 [insert,
CD “The Long Way Around”] |
 |
And like Jim Rome is always saying, write your local “monkey” and try to get Tom Russell some air play. If there were a God that hasn’t given the hell up on all of us living here in the belly of the beast, maybe we’d get Rush Fucking Limbaugh off the radio long enough that people might wake up and see the truth again. The epigram of “Boarderland” is, “Nobody cared if I died or went to El Paso,” which was written long ago by Raymond Chandler. This is as good as when you put the last rock on the pallet in the last spot in the wall, and sweep up the rock dust, and set the pallet on fire in the twilight, with a very cold one in your hand.
--Bill Hicks, June 2007
 |
|
The Original Red Clay Ramblers Home Site designed and maintained by RCR_fan@hotmail.com June 7, 2007 |