On rap singers: “Lookit these rap singers. I mean…”
He stops now. “I see so much wrong, and they ain’t nothin’ I can do about it. We can talk about it, but that’s as far as we can go with it.” He sighs. “Yeah, I don’t know, this world looks like it’s sinkin’ fast…”
How do you avoid cynicism, then, Mr. Brown?
“Well, for one thing, I stay around my house, mostly!”
He’s laughing again.
If Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown the observer sees a lot of trouble in the world, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown the performer figures crying in his beer won’t fix anything. Back to Bogalusa is easy on the soul. Hoyt Garrick wrote the leadoff track, “Folks Back Home,” a poignant piece in which a man wanders past “empty cars in the railroad yard/where fast freight used to roll.” (“Folks Back Home” is one of five tracks on Back to Bogalusa—the others being “Breaux Bridge Rag,” “Louisian’,” “Bogalusa Boogie Man,” and “Dixie Chicken”—that are new versions of tunes previously recorded in the mid-’70s for the Europe-only releases by the Barclay label.)
As Hoyt’s lyrics unfold, a picture emerges of a lonely, fallible character, facing life alone. But when Gatemouth sings “Movin’ in the right direction/With his head up high/Sometimes it’s hard to keep the beat/No matter how hard you try,” his vocals convey a combination of weariness and warmth that can only be described as equanimity.
The term “equanimity” sounds like faint praise, but it is not. Equanimity is the only thing that will save you from this world, and it doesn’t come easy. Or cheap. And you can’t fake it for long. Even when the songs strike a note of warning (Bobby Charles’s “It All Comes Back”) or express disappointment in one’s fellow humans (Charles’s “Why Are People Like That” and “Lie No Better” by Delbert McClinton and Gary Nicholson), they are not vindictive. Gate’s voice—no longer as brash as it once was, but still supple and rich—suggests that there is no false hope in his world, but neither is there absolute despair. Don’t expect much, but don’t give up.
Accordingly, when it comes to picking songs, Gatemouth chooses his words carefully. “I’ll pick the song that’s positive, I’ll pick the song that’s funny,” he says. “I listen to the lyrics.”
If he favors a songwriter, it is usually for lyrics. “Bobby [Charles, who wrote “See You Later Alligator” in the 1950s] is a very positive person. He’s writing about himself, but he’s also writing about other things in life. I always pick some of his. And another fellow that’s really great, a dear friend of mine, John Loudermilk out of Nashville. I love his writing, because he’s very positive about what he writes. Percy Mayfield, he was a good writer. And Delbert McClinton is pretty good.
“These people I’m mentioning are great writers, but it’s hard for them to sell their own stuff today. So I’m the one that can take it out there and sell it. I think I was the chosen one to sell their stuff, and they know that.
“Anyway, if I like a song, and I take it, I’ll do something with it. In my own way. When I put myself into it, that makes it not a copy, that makes it almost an original. I don’t listen to the music. I listen to the lyrics, because I’m going to put my own music on it on average.”
Meaning his fiddle is full and strong on “Louisian’” and “Breaux Bridge Rag.” Meaning his guitar thinks it is part of the brass section on “Lie No Better.” On “It All Comes Back,” Gate’s guitar commiserates with the singer throughout, the Greek chorus to his vocals. On the instrumentals “Grape Jelly” and “Slap It,” the brass and keyboards get their generous turns, but when Gate’s guitar comes in, there is no question who is in charge. And yet he does it without histrionics. There is an ease to this album that makes it a joy to hear.
There are lighter moments. Brown wrote “Dangerous Critter” for the gator that lives beneath his porch. And he struts a little in “Bogalusa Boogie Man.” But it never gets silly. Clarence thinks there is no shame in acting your age. He feels no need to contort himself to get your attention.
“Some of these guitar players from the past, old guys still out there slidin’ across the floor and all that…there’s a difference between a clown and an artist. If you’re going to get up there and cut cartwheels and tear up your face and look stupid, you’re not a musician, you’re a clown! I sit on my stool, and I stand a little bit, and I sit on my stool, but my music’s doin’ all the talkin’.
“I may never be what they consider a superstar—whatever that’s supposed to be. But my music will tell what I don’t have to talk about. Such as being positive about life, not vulgar about life, not talkin’ about hate and all that sort of stuff. I just don’t like that stuff, man.
“The music will hold its own if it’s good. If it’s bad, it will flop. We know that.” He considers for a moment. “Unless it’s got a lot of bucks behind it to make it what it’s not. And that’s happening. There’s a lot of music being put up on the top shelf, if they let it fly itself, it wouldn’t go on the bottom shelf.
“You call these people ninety-day wonders.”
You could call Clarence Brown a seven-decade wonder. Closing in on eighty, and here he is with an album that is vibrant and engaged. But you think you should get beyond the music and ask him how to live, ask him for some of that cantankerous wisdom. What he says is, “Pay attention! To what’s around you, what was behind you, and what’s in front of you. Pay attention, and you can avoid a lot of mistakes. I mean, you can’t avoid ’em all, but the worst ones you can.”
There is no question that generations of musicians have learned important lessons from observing Brown’s career. Albert Collins, Frank Zappa, Lonnie Brooks and Eric Clapton include themselves in that number. You wonder how many people have learned important lessons from observing Brown’s life. He’s ready for that one, with a chuckle. “Well, some of ’em say they’ve learned, but I’m waitin’ to see when.”
Brown says a bunch of bluegrass players, Ricky Skaggs among them, have asked him to do an album. “I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says. “Sometimes I think on it, sometimes I don’t even worry about it. What will be, will be. And someone wants me to do an acoustic album. I don’t know, man. I’ll wait to the last minute, and I’ll say, well, I’m gonna do this kind of album. And that’s what I’ll do.
“You can worry yourself to death. I’ve got a good friend, he rehearses four and five hours. I say, ‘What you doin’ it for?’ You’re not going to learn a bit more pushin’ yourself into something that you can’t handle. Rehearsing four or five hours, what for? It don’t make you a better musician in the first place. It really don’t. It makes you find yourself meetin’ yourself on every turn.”
My generation is sorting out the events of September 11, not sure yet what they mean for ourselves or our country. We have nothing against which we may measure such a thing. In such times, it helps to put ourselves in the presence of our elders. The wise among them draw on experience preceding and paralleling our own and compose important lessons.
If we will listen.
Sometimes the lessons arrive in direct quotes, sometimes they are oblique. Back to Bogalusa is a work of hope, dignity, and humor, delivered without pretension by an artist who is no longer surprised by the foolishness and evil men do, and yet is unwilling to yield the stage to bitterness or despair.
He’s back out there touring, supporting the latest installation in a discography that stretches back to the late 1940s. Between gigs, he sits on a porch in Louisiana with his pipe. The porch is built over water, and he can fish from his chair. He knows the gator is down there just beneath him, but it’s OK.
“We’ve got an agreement,” says Gate. “You don’t eat me, I won’t eat you.”
Equanimity, you see.
2001
P.S. Gatemouth was a treat. The older I get, the more I treasure outspoken elders who exercise the freedom to say what they mean. I was thrilled when he said “Pay attention!” as this echoed the first and last lines of a three-line poem wr
itten by one of my mentors, the poet Bruce Taylor. The middle line: This is everything. You can save yourself a lot of trouble with a poem like that.
In reviewing pieces for this collection, I noticed I tend to invoke the idea of equanimity on a regular basis. It’s a worthy topic, but a fellow gets nervous about the repetition. People who write and speak in public tend to repeat themselves in conversation, in part because they are working out their material, floating it out there to see how it goes over. Bits and concepts tend to improve in the retelling. And some repetition (grafting portions of an essay into a book-length work, for instance) is simply functional. But at some point, you want to avoid the same old mantras. There is the danger that you will go from living the examined life to ending each day on your intellectual porch, yelling, “You kids get off my yard!”
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
To ask Ramblin’ Jack Elliott a question is to tug at a snag in a sweater, only to see the yarn unpurl of its own volition, dropping in aimless loops, curling and snaking itself into a variegated fable. Every answer is a folk-tale. Conversation is an exercise in free association, switchbacks, good-humored evasion, meanders, and box canyons. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott does his talking without aid of a compass.
I have him on the phone. “We’re gettin’ ready to go to Oregon in the Mercedes,” he says. He’s at his home in rural California. The Mercedes is a ’75. He bought it very used and has had trouble with it. “…and I left the window open overnight on my side, because I was bein’ the passenger, and I was kind of tired of the rain, and it stopped rainin’, and I was enjoyin’ the fresh air, while Jan was drivin’ us home from our town, and so the sheepskin seat cover got totally soaked. So now I got the electric heater out of my motor home, with an extension cord from the house that runs into one of the back windows on the lee side of the car, it’s open about two inches to let the wire come in, and I’ve got this heater on the floor on an upside-down aluminum pot so as to prevent any heat from gettin’ in the carpet and settin’ fire to the car, and it’s aimed up at the seat, from about oh, a foot away from it, from underneath the dashboard on the passenger side, ’cause I couldn’t get the damned sheepskin off, it’s locked on by the [he adopts a Colonel Klink accent, and begins to yell] Mercedes-Benz headrest, vitch iss heldt in place by two vertical chrome-plated, nine millimeter shtalks!”
I haven’t asked him a question yet. Already the yarn is coming loose. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, CliffsNotes version: Bob Dylan is Jack Elliott is Woody Guthrie. “He sounds more like me than I do,” goes the Woody Guthrie quote. They busked around the country. When Woody’s rambles ended in a decade-long terminal hospital stop, Jack took Woody’s walk, talk and music back to the road. Returning to Woody’s hospital room one day, Jack met a boy named Bob Dylan bedside. Taught him some things. Soon, Dylan was getting more gigs. Sometimes the marquee read “Son of Jack Elliott.” Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Who’s Who version: Jack Kerouac, James Dean, Johnny Cash, Waylon and Willie, Sam Shepard, Jack Nicholson, Rod Stewart, Townes Van Zandt, Kris Kristofferson, Jackson Browne, Greg Brown, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Ian Tyson, Robert Duvall, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Doc Watson. All listed as fans or registered acolytes. Mick Jagger left a Ramblin’ Jack show in England and bought his first guitar.
But I’m setting him up like a historical figure. He is very much alive. Very much contemporary. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, recent history version: South Coast, Grammy, 1995, Best Traditional Folk Album; Kerouac’s Last Dream, reissued 1997. And now, Friends of Mine, partnering Jack with a telling array: Arlo Guthrie, Peter Rowan, Rosalie Sorrels, Tom Waits, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Bob Weir. On songs written by Joe Ely, Gene Autry, Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Garcia, Merle Travis. And Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.
I’m supposed to find out what Jack’s got to say about Friends of Mine. It’s not going to be easy.
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, calling from a hotel in Minneapolis. His voice is tired, all stooped over. He’s in the midst of a racking cold. It’s late autumn, chill and raining. He wants some fresh air. “But there’s this musician-proof window, a suicide-proof window,” he grieves. “If you want air you push a button. They charge you for air.”
He’s in his sixties now. A good age, I suppose, for a folk singer. He’s been through the ’60s before, hitchhiking, singing, riding around Woodstock on motorcycles with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. But tonight he feels old. His hip is acting up. His guitar didn’t make the trip. His companion, Jan, had to stay behind. Tonight he’ll play the Cedar Cultural Center.
I mention Peterbilts. He brightens.
Later, he crosses the wooden floor of the Cedar Cultural Center with a slanted amble that bespeaks old injuries, helping himself along with a subtle hike of the elbows. When he stands backstage, it’s usually with his hat in hand, his hips hitched, his wiry legs planted in a stance amenable to forking a bronc or straddling the roll of a ship’s deck.
At fifteen, Elliott Charles Adnopoz took the subway out of Brooklyn and joined the rodeo. Tonight, in a ribbed and bibbed shirt, his neck nestled in a bandana you could nap under, he looks every inch the seasoned hand. Young Master Adnopoz is lost to legend. In his place, a troubadour.
The word is too grand, too affected, to suit the man, but the definition is spot-on. From Brooklyn to Britain, from Woody to Waylon, by horse, by ship, by truck, from the ’50s to the millennium, he has never stopped covering ground. Singing and moving.
And so now there he is, on the stage of the Cedar Cultural Center, sound-checking a borrowed guitar, playing to the folding chairs on a wet night in the state where Bob Dylan was born.
An assignment landed me on country singer Marty Stuart’s tour bus in Petaluma, California, last year. Someone knocked on the door with a note. Ramblin’ Jack is here, wonders if he can come back. Name meant nothing to me. I got up to leave. “Oh man, no,” said Marty Stuart. “You don’t know who Ramblin’ Jack is? You’ve got to talk to him. He was Woody’s cat!”
Ramblin’ Jack boarded the bus, hat in hand. “Man, I got something to show you!” said Marty. He disappeared into the back of the bus. In a little bit, he returned with a videotape. An old dub of The Johnny Cash Show. He popped it in, and there was Ramblin’ Jack, twenty-some years younger, different glasses, different hat. Elliott scoffed at the hat, but you could see he was delighted with the footage.
Back when Stuart was playing in Cash’s band, Elliott joined them for a brief California tour. In addition to singing and playing, he traded off at the wheel of a Peterbilt with a curly haired guy he remembers only as Wirehead. They were hauling Cash’s sound equipment. “We got on I-5 after our coffee, and I started drivin’. And he says to me as I was goin’ through the gears, ‘Hey, Jack, you ever get one of these long-wheelbase trucks off the road?’ And I said, ‘Why gee, no, I haven’t. How come you say that? Are they kind of squirrely?’ And he said, ‘Just keep it on the road,’ and he went in the sleeper.”
Marty has to leave for meet-and-greets. He introduces me to Jack first. Talk to this man, he says. For the next two hours, I am educated by way of parable and digression. Kindly and attentively, as though he were the one lucky to be there, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott talked of thirteen-speed split shifts, good horses, the trim of a schooner, and the feel of a stiff guitar pick. He told me about “Muleskinner Blues,” and later he joined Marty onstage and sang it. “What key do you do it in?” asked Marty, back on the bus, prior. “A or E, I can’t remember,” said Jack. “Don’t worry, we’ll find ya,” says Marty. Then Jack says he called Guy Clark to say hello late last year, and Townes Van Zandt was on the phone. Townes is dead six months now, and at the mention of his name, the talk turns softer. The road manager checks in, asks about Jack sitting in for two songs. “We ain’t fer sure of the key yet,” says Jack. “Don’t worry,” says Marty. “You pick one. We’ll blunder in behind ya. Always wanted to be in your band.”
Anyway, country rocker Marty Stuart and old folki
e Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: You’ve heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? With Ramblin’ Jack, two degrees is rara avis.
Back on the phone to California. Still not getting to the point, but having a good time avoiding it. Jack reins in a story, tries to do the proper interview thing.
“Y’ wanna talk about guitar chords? Or picks? Tricks? Cases? Airlines?” You see how it goes.
Jan, in the background. Saying something that ends with “…new album!”
“Album!” Jack snickers like a kid hiding from his mother on his night to do dishes.
I take a shot. “Here’s the trouble: My editor and your producer will at some point probably expect that we mention the new album, huh?”
“What magazine is this for?”
“No Depression magazine.”
“Oh, right, No Depression magazine…that’s cute.”
I press on, none too eloquently. “Which actually, before I ask you about the album stuff, I think, that magazine is, y’-know, it’s a young audience, it’s kinda alternative country is what it is. How d’you…” Jack pulls in without signaling, cuts me off with a whopping non sequitur.
“Yeah, I was surprised, because I always got depressed when I was in Seattle, even when I was truckin’. Oh, I like the boats, I love the water up there. I had a wonderful adventure rowin’ around in a rubber raft on Lake Union one day, and got picked up by a kid in a lifeboat who was sailing with a homemade sail rig, made out of a transparent piece of Visqueen plastic sheet, a two-by-four for a mast, and some clothesline for riggin’, and he was steerin’ with an oar, he didn’t even have a rudder, but it was a real old, tiny little ship’s lifeboat off of some ferryboat, and he lived with his parents on some forty-five-foot yawl that was moored over the yacht anchorage at the opposite side of the bay—the upwind end of this Lake Union, which is full of all kinds of interesting ships. There’s a big four-masted lumber schooner that lives there called the Wawona, there’s the Center for Wooden Boats….”
Off Main Street Page 12