Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  Dave Alvin once told me that records sell when all wheels are moving—reviews, radio slots, gigs, label attention, etc.

  I feel a full record of well-written songs is a revolutionary act in these days. That sort of collection will stand out in the era of single song downloading. We also tour all over the world and have a good profile in England, and much of the best music press and radio now comes out of the U.K. You’re talking magazines like Mojo, UNCUT, and the programs on the BBC. If the whole package is together and you can perform well, then you can sell records in Oslo or hell or the Galapagos Islands.

  Does your cult of audience propel that success, those wheels, or luck?

  I always look beyond any idea of an audience. I’m glad I have one, but I’d always like to reach out to new folks. I think people are desperate to hear a good song. Well sung. I think hard work is more important than luck. If you keep the shows fresh and try to reach new frontiers in your writing, your audience will grow.

  Your eye for sociology has never dimmed, like examining the maverick actor Sterling Hayden. You seem to measure people’s worth on a different scale than most, with a tenderness for the outsiders and outcasts. Why?

  Because I’ve always felt on the outside. Looking in. I never felt comfortable in a group. Maybe that’s why I got a degree in criminology, to find out why I felt so weird in this society. So, I might be drawn to stories about people way out beyond the margins. I think societies are changed by outsider artists like Van Gogh and Bob Dylan. When Dylan got up in front of a bunch of old liberal people in 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, and said there was something about Lee Harvey Oswald he identified with, well the square liberals freaked. I know what Dylan meant. He identified strongly with the feeling of someone who was so hung up and outside he didn’t know what to do about it. I’m not saying (and I’m sure Dylan wasn’t) that you have to assassinate anyone. It’s just a feeling of not fitting in. There are a lot of outsiders on my newest record, especially Hollywood people and cartel soldiers in Juarez.

  David Letterman has been a strong supporter of singer-songwriters like you, Warren Zevon, and Nanci Griffith. Do you think his audience, still 15 million, turns out for your shows, buys your music—do those limelight moments hold sway even in the current fragmented media world?

  David has certainly been supportive. I’m sure those appearances have sold me a lot more records. I’ve sang a few radical songs on that show, like “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?” about the Mexican border wall. Always get a reaction and a strong shot of sales on Amazon. On the other hand, I don’t think it brings a huge amount of people out to the shows. Some people don’t get up off the couch for live music. We were on the show last time right after he had revealed some guy was blackmailing him. So, the audience was even bigger than usual.

  Borderlands and Mexico are a constant theme in your work, like in “Goodnight, Juarez” and “And God Created Border Towns,” but savoring the culture has turned to dismay now too, since the “children disappear or hide underground” and the bullring is torn down as meth and men in masks roam. As you’ve witnessed the shift, what grieves you the most, and what seems to persevere there, despite the tumult?

  The border is eternal. I grew up with it in L.A., and I live on it now near Juarez. It bothers me that I can’t walk over that bridge now and hang out and hear the mariachis. What prevails is that deep history which influences our culture, particularly the culture of the American West, from the Spanish conquistadores back to the Moors. The music also endures and carries with it the folklore and myth but also the current news carried in the drug corridos.

  The Yard Dog Gallery in Austin, which also handles folks from the Silos and the Mekons, shows your paintings. You describe them as “primitive,” since you are a “colorist” and “fast painter.” How has painting shaded or shaped, if at all, your sense of songwriting recently?

  I’ve always said there’s a deep affinity between songwriting and painting. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but a song is similar to a painting. You can visit the artwork or the song again and again and get something new out of it. The act of painting is a lot like songwriting. Some days you’re doing hackwork, and the next day you hit the ball out of the park. If you keep at the process, it leads somewhere. There’s a book of my art coming this fall on Bangtail Press, Blue Horse/Red Desert: The Art of Tom Russell. I have a long essay on art in there that I’m proud of.

  Your longtime love of John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Dave Alvin, etc. is well noted, but you are not a huge fan of young songwriters. What does Leonard Cohen, who kept you spellbound for hours during his comeback, have that the younger folks seem to lack?

  Deep character and passionate, heartfelt songs that resonate. I think younger writers are writing soundscapes these days, more than songs. That’s cool. I listened to a lot of new music before I made the last record, and the band Calexico really stood out. They play on my current record as well. But I have a hard time finding new writers that knock me out. I’m sure they’re out there. It’s easy to become an old fart and criticize new writing . . . like your parents saying the Beatles sucked and Sinatra would last forever. Both sides turned out to be right. I just want to hear a song that makes me pull my truck over to the side of the road and listen, and then shiver. I’m ready. I need a list.

  A bit of sentimental love pervades on tracks like “Heart within a Heart” and “Love Abides” (a narrative with your daughter), replete with falling stars, morning frost, and Rio Grande souls. Are such tender sentiments important as you tackle topical fare? Even Bob Dylan wore his heart on his sleeve.

  I think each of my albums has to have a song or two about love and hope. A turning point before you head back into the dark stories. “Heart within a Heart” is sort of a Gnostic Gospel trip of digging deeper into your soul when times get bad. Regina McCrary, who sang gospel songs with Dylan for many years, sings on it. “Love Abides” ends the record. Just me and the guitar. A resolution of sorts. We all have to cross our burning deserts, but love will get us through. Carry water, though. And a pocketknife.

  Your sense of history, especially on tracks like “Mesabi,” includes a vital recognition of American diversity and interwovenness: polkas, Ritchie Valens, and Howlin’ Wolf. Do you feel the twenty-first century offers the same hybridity, the same sense of connection?

  Not as much. But with the Internet and our own imagination, and a healthy thirst for digging down into the roots of music and culture, we can still discover new art. I’ve gone back and rediscovered some odd corners of jazz and flamenco, like the singing of the great Camaron de la Isla. His singing is as deep as it might get. I need to hear music like this when I paint. But the one problem with younger writers now might be they don’t have the firsthand knowledge of our musical folk and blues and jazz heritage that people like Dylan had. The guy must have known five thousand songs before he hit New York. And then you draw on that and build your own catalog.

  How much of you is still that football-playing, Catholic, troubadour-to-be in Hollywood Park, the nephew of Uncle George, who played “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the Martin Luther King rally?

  That’s still me. You never get rid of that stuff. I grew up playing football in Catholic school and hanging out on the back side of Hollywood Park Racetrack, where my old man played poker every morning with Hopalong Cassidy. And I could sit and listen to my Uncle George Malloy play piano for hours. He was the real deal. We have a new documentary coming out called Don’t Look Down that has some great footage of my Uncle George playing piano behind the jazz harmonica player Larry Adler. Very cool.

  Peter Case: The Man with the Fragmented Guitar

  Portions originally printed in Left of the Dial and Thirsty Ear, 2001 and 2005, and Popmatters, 2011.

  One of the first interviews I held with Peter Case concerned his work on the Grammy-nominated compilation Avalon Blues, a tribute to Mississippi John Hurt. Tribute records often fall flat simply because they lack direction and
wall-to-wall vigor. Even though the sincerity of the efforts is evident, when too many bands contend for cool digs on old favorites like Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, the albums end up juggling disparate styles until it all comes apart like unbound pages.

  Luckily, Case honed in on something beyond flash-in-the-pan nostalgia and picked artists that deftly reinterpreted Mississippi John Hurt’s poignant songs of labor, spirit, and fortitude without losing a sense of his hard-pickin’ soulfulness. Hurt was the stuff of legend, made pure by his sacrifice and good humor. During the late 1920s, he made his mark recording in New York, but after the stock market fell, he disappeared back deep into the edge of the Mississippi Delta, where he played for two dollars a night until he was brought back to the Big Apple in 1963 by a couple of white blues musicians. Within three years, he recorded Today, The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt, and Last Sessions, gems remastered and re-released by Vanguard, which serve as a prelude to this tribute.

  To me, Peter Case is the great inheritor, able to capture Hurt’s dexterous melodic phrasing and the push and pull of his picking, but Case also hones in on fecund American blues textures. His music is not a patchwork of overworked riffs and roots music clichés; it’s a wide-open descent into the heart of America’s still unreconciled black and white history, where artists like Hurt and Peter Case meet in the Mississippi heart of things.

  Is it important that you have a shared community with writers like Tom Russell, Dave Alvin, Alejandro Escovedo, and others?

  Yes, it’s a nice thing. It’s a lot better than in 1975, when you felt very isolated. Apparently Russell was up there at the same time playing the same folk clubs in 1973–74, but I didn’t know him then. I’m inspired by those guys, but I’m also inspired by a lot of things.

  Your live songs are so different from their recorded versions, as if the songs have jumped out their skins.

  I wonder if that’s been a problem for people; it might be confusing. I was trying to go out with a band this year, the same people I went out with in 1989, but we couldn’t do it because of this, that, or another problem. Most of them were economic or touring problems. The same reasons why Woody Guthrie probably didn’t take a band with him. Also, clubs are just as happy to see you play solo as with a band. Once you’ve been niched like that, like I have, clubs don’t want to pay any more for a full band. They’ll put you on a Saturday anyway, so you ended up playing with a band for artistic reasons.

  And the money is spread five ways instead of one?

  There’s no money in the first place.

  On “Paradise Etc.,” from Flying Saucer Blues, you say that you’ve been on this road from the age of two. Are we to take this literally?

  When I was around four or five, right as my sister was listening to rock ’n’ roll, I just really loved it. I don’t remember so well, but my parents do. I had a ukulele and was trying to play it, so I’d run around and bang it all the time. I was just home talking to my family about it, and they tell me these things, so apparently I had a calling for it then. Now when I say that in the song, I’m not necessarily talking about music, but the whole general road I’ve been on. It was more of a general, all-encompassing remark that I started the album and song with.

  Your sister had Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry records, but was she the person who also turned you on to the blues?

  I kind of got into that on my own. Buffalo, where I grew up, has a big local blues thing going on there, which I was part of. It was like Detroit and Chicago. A lot of people came up from Mississippi to work in the factories. It was a real northern city with a large black population that was relocated from the South. It was an integrated blues scene. There were people like Elmore Witherspoon that played local blues, who would come over from his shift at the Ford plant. The Band knew all those guys in Buffalo, and that whole style of music was passed down to younger players. I came up in the scene playing piano when I was fourteen or fifteen.

  How did you even become aware it? By venturing downtown into those areas?

  I left school when I was fifteen, before it was even legal, and was hanging out in bars. I’d be the youngest member of the bands; everybody in the band would be like thirty. They really didn’t have songwriters there to lead the charge, but they had the most incredible piano players and guitarists. Van Morrison would come through and pick up people. It was pretty well known, because at one point John Lennon was even coming over and looking at the bands because of Ronnie Hawkins. I had the good fortune of coming up through that. Back then it was not a unique form of expression; you played blues piano the way you were supposed to play in bands. There was a job for every instrument in the band. There was a whole way of playing it.

  So what made you decide to hit the road for California?

  I never felt like the scene was all that welcoming. It was pretty rugged. It was a thing I loved to do and I was playing it, but like most guys in the scene I wanted to take off. I had a thing calling me. All the people in that scene would blast off. The road was calling and I wanted to go to California. I had a lot of problems getting along, and it just wasn’t my scene anymore. So I was eighteen in 1973 and went to San Francisco.

  You got burned out on the bar rock scene?

  I was too young and wanted to go out and explode onto the road.

  You consciously knew that you wanted a musical change, too, hence hit the road with an acoustic guitar?

  When I was like fifteen or sixteen, I used to hit the road with an acoustic guitar. I just ran into a guy at my father’s funeral not too long ago who said he met me when I was fourteen walking down the street in Hamburg, New York, and asked me what I had been doing, and I told him I had been doing some hard traveling. [laughs]

  Stuffing America under your belt?

  I used to try to get twenty bucks in my pocket and go out and hitchhike, catch a ride to wherever it was going. I’d see how far I could go.

  What music were you playing on acoustic guitar? Say, Kingston Trio? [laughs]

  They were happening when I was five. I made my mother buy me every record. That was before the Beatles. They were fantastic. They sang songs about death, and being a sailor, and calypso songs. But the things that put me on the path I’m on now were the records of Mississippi John Hurt. In 1968, I heard his record Today on Vanguard.

  What about Lightning Hopkins?

  I was a huge fan of his. I actually took off from home and saw him in Boston. I was on the road and spent my last three bucks to see him sit down and play guitar, and he was just awesome. It must have been 1969 or ’70. With country music, I listened to Hank Williams, which really penetrated up to where I was. Then you’d go around the corner to Eden, New York, the farm towns, and go to the bars up there, and people were playing the country music of the day, which was also fantastic, like George Jones. The Byrds came out with their country stuff, and I was into that.

  What about rock stuff like Jefferson Airplane and the MC5?

  I was never an MC5 fan, though they were great.

  Did you ever run into the black Beat poet Bob Kaufman, who in the early seventies came out of his ten-year vow of silence?

  Sure, I used to hang out in bars and talk with him. He was at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco a lot. He was great.

  Did you see Joe Ely at that time?

  Matt Groening actually turned me on to him in 1977. He was working at a record store across from the Whisky a Go Go, and I brought in some Nerves records to sell, and he turned me on to Joe Ely and Butch Hancock and gave me Life in Hell, the #1 issue. It was a cultural trade-off.

  Ely’s 1981 live record won him so much attention.

  I don’t understand how culture works. People talk a lot about that and his time with the Clash, but I don’t ever think of him in those terms. I remember the records like Honky Tonk Masquerade, but then the Clash took him on tour and kind of validated him in terms of youth culture. We’re a lot alike because we can both do rock and the acoustic thing. He’s a great acoustic solo performer.<
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  When you hit the streets again after the Plimsouls broke up and played coffee houses up and down the coast, you practically self-started the unplugged movement.

  When I did it, they had no idea. It was before Tracy Chapman had a hit. But John Hiatt was playing acoustic gigs, and X had the Knitters. I had a band called the Incredibly Strung Out Band at the same time with Victoria Williams around 1984.

  What kind of vibe was it?

  It was a string band, with Gurf Morlix, Victoria Williams, and me, with Warren “Tornado” Klein from the Fraternity of Man. We were the world’s foremost interpreters of Blaze Foley songs.

  But your first record didn’t come out until 1986, with T. Bone Burnett and Mitchell Froom producing. How did you know them?

  T. Bone came to me and asked me who produced “Million Miles Away” and used my producer on one of his records. The road ran both ways with me and T. Bone. He helped me out a lot. I went to him after my confusion with the Plimsouls to help me sort things out.

  How much did they shape your sound?

  I think those guys are powerful producers, perhaps too powerful. T. Bone’s a great producer. I came to him with this whole vision of the songs I was doing, and we talked about it and came up with the idea of tribal folk, meaning using acoustic guitars with a huge groove in the back, which only made it to the record on songs like “Three Days Straight.” Froom is a great technician and musician and knew some people to call. The fact is that I was deemed by the record company, and by Froom and T. Bone, as being too primitive to even play on my own record.