Billy played the first of two sets till midnight, with Jenner relaying information from the wings as he picked it up from his radio – just trickles at this stage, but nonetheless one or two encouraging fourteen per cent swings in Labour’s favour. For the second set, the Fiddler patched live TV pictures through to a huge screen at the back of the stage. No sound, just images. The audience cheered every time a result went up in Labour’s favour – which was often – and Billy would be forced to turn around and have a look. It might not have made for the smoothest of performances, but the backdrop was unbeatable.
A cheer went up when Enoch Powell’s old seat in Wolverhampton fell to Labour’s Jenny Jones. Another went up when the Basildon result came in, poetically enough, during ‘Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards’. ‘This is a great moment for Essex!’ Billy declared, and he and Wiggy raced through ‘A13 Trunk Road To The Sea’.
Billy made a speech when the first Labour victory for 23 years became incontestable, to the effect of ‘It’s over’. The sense of relief was even greater than the sense of elation. As a final gesture, he sang ‘Jerusalem’ a cappella, with the whole audience on backing vocals. As divine Blakean intervention would have it, behind Billy as he sang, the count from Sedgefield came in, and there was the new Prime Minister, his head as big as the bloke on stage. He was grinning the grin.
The Bragg entourage and punters alike stayed at the Mean Fiddler almost all night, crying tears of joy into their beer this time as the Tory walls came tumbling down: Ilford, Redbridge, Hornchurch, Romford – even the much-maligned Essex Man had seen sense. ‘It was then that it started to dawn on me that we weren’t just going to win,’ Billy recalls. ‘We were gonna blow them out of the fucking water!’
Billy and Juliet made their way home at 5 a.m. Too wired to go to bed, they went out and bought every single newspaper, and watched breakfast news. In this, they were not alone.
At a safe distance from the euphoria, Billy concludes of that glorious night: ‘It brought a certain amount of closure.’
As Andy McSmith notes in Faces Of Labour, ‘Just when the British Labour Party had become really good at being in opposition, it was swept into office.’ Not one of the Labour cabinet had been in office before, and many of them had been at primary school when Labour were last in power.
No government could ever match the euphoria of 1 May, and New Labour’s first year was fraught with disappointment and controversy as they attempted to do an impossible job with what little the Tories had left in the kitty, and with a promise hanging round their neck not to raise income tax. During the recording of his next album in Dublin in January 1998, Billy reflected on the new government’s progress:
‘I’m not sure what I think. I feel positive about the fact that a new government will break the log-jam over Northern Ireland. Gerry Adams has been to Downing Street. They are trying.’ (And succeeding, it later turned out.)
On a ‘pros’ list, Billy includes devolution for Scotland and Wales (referendums for both happened within Labour’s first nine months, as pledged) and Britain’s improved relationship with Europe (never the Conservatives’ strong suit). On the ‘cons’ list, he cites the cutting of disability and lone parent benefit, trade unions not getting their rights back, and the emblematic Millennium Dome (‘a sore on all our backs’). Perhaps more surprisingly, Billy is critical of Labour’s new intake of young MPs: ‘I don’t ask for a revolution from them, just the ability to support Labour when they can and criticise them when they have to, that’s all I ask.’
Blair’s love affair with Britpop had soured by 1998, the young electorate disenchanted with Labour’s policies on student grants, drugs and benefit. The NME went political for one week only in March and a motley collection of musicians rose as one in their condemnation of the Blair government. A disarmingly erudite editorial notwithstanding, the thrust of the paper’s pull-out anti-Blair supplement seemed to be that rock bands need to sit around on the dole smoking legalised cannabis in order to find their genius.
Perhaps they do, but it was difficult not to think back just ten years: to the energetic, multi-coloured, broad-issue activism of Red Wedge, the benign willingness of Neil Kinnock, the card-carrying conviction of the NME, and the community spirit whipped up by Billy Bragg.
It was a pity they lost in 1987. If Kinnock had got in, he says that Billy Bragg would have been among the first invited to any post-Election bash at 10, Downing Street – ‘Especially if he’d brought his guitar. I must say that I like the idea of a Bragg recital in the drawing room … dream on.’
15. LIFE BEGINS AT WOODY
Another bit of history, 1998
Baby don’t you marry no farming man,
He’ll put a rake and shovel right in your hand
Oh, don’t you marry a railroad man,
When you want him, he won’t be on hand
Don’t you marry no singer man,
He’s the brokest fella in the band
Woody Guthrie, ‘Don’t You Marry’
FOR BILLY BRAGG, his eighth album began on 12 July 1992 in New York’s Central Park, although he didn’t know it at the time. He was asked to play at legendary Oklahoma protest singer Woody Guthrie’s posthumous 80th birthday. Also appearing were Pete Seeger, Jesse Jackson, the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie.
At that stage Billy was so unfamiliar with Woody’s work that between the soundcheck and the gig he nipped into Tower Records on 72nd Street and Broadway to buy a compilation cassette with which to check the words. (He’d first flirted with Woody at Barking Record Library after reading about him in Anthony Scadudo’s Dylan biography, but the scratchy recordings didn’t do much for him, which proves you should never trust first impressions.)
At the gig, Billy met Woody’s then-43-year-old daughter Nora, curator of her father’s archive, who was taken with the fact that Billy’s song ‘You Woke Up My Neighbourhood’ had been named after a Woody drawing he’d seen at Washington’s Smithsonian Institute in 1990. She subsequently sent Billy a Xerox of that very picture in a frame and broached the subject of a unique project she was hatching.
Woody Guthrie is said to have written a thousand songs in his lifetime – cut short in 1954 when he was hospitalised with Huntington’s chorea, an incurable wasting disease. After years of articulating the struggle of working people through his songs (the most famous of which was ‘This Land Is Your Land’, adopted as America’s unofficial second National Anthem), Woody Guthrie was soon unable to hold a guitar and, later, even a pen. He eventually died in 1967, ironically, just as a folk revival had launched Bob Dylan to superstardom (without Woody, there may never have been a Dylan, a debt he has never been shy about).
Before it became impossible for him – around 1957 – Woody continued to write, sometimes dictating to his devoted wife Marjorie. Nora had unearthed whole piles of these lyrics – in their own way little pieces of history – and her dream was to have them brought alive by setting them to music. Having decided that the usual suspects (Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Arlo himself) were too close to give the words an original interpretation, she asked Billy to take the job. ‘Honoured’ doesn’t do justice to the way he felt.
It wasn’t until 1996, when William Bloke was in the can, that Billy finally got the project off the ground. He met Nora again in Cleveland on 29 September at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame during a week-long celebration marking the opening of the archive, where Woody’s songs were played by Springsteen, Seeger, Arlo and Ani DiFranco. The proposed album, later christened Mermaid Avenue after Woody’s address in Coney Island, was a done deal. Billy had even found his band.
That summer, he saw Chicago country-rockers Wilco play in London. He’d been a huge fan of their second album, the magnificent Being There, and, in a bid to sidestep the mire of recruiting a ‘supergroup’, he asked Wilco if they were interested in collaborating on the Woody songs (he’d been impressed with the group’s songwriter Jeff Tweedy since his days in cult tw
angsters Uncle Tupelo, and wanted someone ‘who was going to take it and run with it’). It was all a matter of schedules.
Wilco met Nora at the New York Fleadh concert in the summer of ’97, and they all shook hands on it.
Woody Guthrie – in Billy’s eyes ‘the first singer-songwriter’ – would soon be alive and well.
If William Bloke had been precisely where Billy Bragg was at in 1996, how would an album of ancient Woody Guthrie songs fit in to the story? Well, never mind the honour of being asked to carry the torch, Mermaid Avenue would arguably be Billy’s most important record since Life’s A Riot.
First of all, it tested his collaborative mettle. The Wilco boys – songwriter Tweedy, guitar-pianist Jay Bennett, bassist John Stirratt and drummer Ken Coomer – were easygoing enough to work with, but the experience during sessions in Chicago and recording in Dublin gave Billy a new perspective on the craft he knew so well. He also picked up some slide guitar tips. In the end, he and Tweedy split the songwriting duties fifty-fifty, and the agreement was, they’d mix their own tracks. Grant Showbiz oversaw the project, and acted as Billy’s confidant.
‘Making records is usually a very solitary experience for me,’ Billy explained at Dublin’s Windmill Lane studios during the mix. ‘I’m usually leading from the front, and also pushing from the back. This record has been more fun: watching Jeff work, seeing where he’s going, then it’s my turn, I’ve got the Wilco guys and I can bring them my way.’
The creative buzz over the road at Totally Wired studios, where the new tracks were recorded, was sometimes overwhelming (Billy spoke of ‘the ease with which we’ve been able to do it, the power of the music, it’s very, very generous’). The process was epitomised one night when Nora flew in with some new lyrics: at 3 a.m. during some guitar overdubs, a couple of little chords came to Billy; he ‘fucked around for half an hour’ and formed a tune. Having played it to Nora, Jay Bennett found the chord between E minor and A seventh on the piano, at which point Tweedy woke up from behind a curtain, and sang the words to ‘Another Man’s Done Gone’ into the piano mic. They recorded five versions in fifteen minutes, and it was done.
To add to the cocktail, a Chicago blues prodigy called Corey Harris, aged 28, joined them for a couple of numbers, and, at a later date in America, Natalie Merchant added her voice. The result would be a rich gumbo indeed (they ended up recording two albums’ worth of Woody songs, although just the one was pencilled in for a summer 1998 release on Elektra, to whom Billy was still signed in the States).
‘He needed to come up with something a bit special for this next album,’ said Pete Jenner on the eve of release, and with one eye on the marketplace. ‘Hopefully it will put him into the mainstream of America. He’s seen as being very English and very political over there. This ought to make us part of American culture.’
Woody Guthrie occupies a near-mythical status in American culture (indeed, some assume he never really existed). Because he left scant recorded material behind him, and most of that was primitively captured in the 1940s, his legacy is romantic rather than institutionalised. In folk circles, his name is revered and his songs are widely sung, and, through modern missionaries like Dylan and Springsteen, his work had attained a certain currency – but Mermaid Avenue provided a significant stepping stone between forelock-tugging respect and toe-tapping enjoyment.
As such, it was far more than just Billy Bragg’s next album. For him, it was a personal connection with a great tradition. In researching Woody Guthrie (and he took care not to read Joe Klein’s definitive biography until he’d written the songs), Billy entered a new sphere of Anglo-American understanding. In the same way that he’ll always have a job as a local tour guide in Barking, Billy could now make a living on the lecture circuit speaking on The Importance Of Woody Guthrie In Twentieth-Century Culture.
‘He’s a very underestimated figure in twentieth-century American literature,’ Billy raves. (Woody’s semi-autobiographical novel Bound For Glory, manuscript handwritten à la James Joyce, is much-overlooked, best known for the slightly ropey 1977 movie adaptation.) ‘He’s a very powerful, evocative writer. As a songwriter, he’s more of a lyrical poet, he’s not got a great ear for a tune. He’s quite capable of writing twenty verses, because he came from the ballad tradition that goes back to Elizabethan England.
‘If you want to find an American lyrical poet as powerful as Woody Guthrie, someone to compare him to, you’ve got to start looking at Walt Whitman. Allen Ginsberg doesn’t come near it. Bob Dylan? Forget it, he didn’t write Bound For Glory. He just made some great records. If you’re looking for someone who can evoke a certain kind of American childhood, you’ve got to go back to Mark Twain. You can’t compare him to Hemingway, goofing off in Spain with his rolled-up money. He’s not Scott Fitzgerald, he’s nothing like that. Woody Guthrie is a literary giant, as far as I’m concerned.
‘He lit the imagination of that whole generation of post-war Americans who finally had the ability to buy a cheap car and drive across America. Woody Guthrie wrote the manual for that. He didn’t go out to find America, he was America.’
Billy’s evangelistic zeal for the subject is infectious, the album itself likewise. The Tweedy songs may be instantly recognisable to Wilco fans, Billy’s less so, even to long-term aficionados. He occasionally sings in an American accent for a start, out of respect for the source material, and the effect is oddly moving. While there are pointers to Braggiosity, the experience of making Mermaid Avenue clearly restrung his bow.
There are more parallels than you might imagine between these two men separated by 50 years, one generation and an ocean. Both are singer-songwriters (and politically motivated ones at that), both sing of love, sex and the struggle in equal measures but are stereotyped by the latter, both have had their prose and opinions published by newspapers, both attempt to convey the dignity of labour in songs you can whistle, and both travelled West – Woody from the Texas dustbowls to the promised land of California, Billy from the Essex wetlands to leafy Chiswick and on the south coast. You might say that Billy was born to do this.
On the political side, Woody Guthrie’s songs are incredibly powerful, underpinned by I-was-there authenticity. There’s no misreading ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’, or the shaken fist of ‘I’m Out To Get’ (‘I’m out to get your greenback dollar/You kept me down on my knees too long’). The titles alone of his Dustbowl Songs speak for themselves: ‘Dust Pneumonia Blues’, ‘Black Wind Blowing’, ‘Dust Can’t Kill Me’. And, in ‘Union Prayer’, written in 1949, Woody seems to be challenging God on the working man’s behalf:
Will prayer change shacks to decent homes?
Will prayer change sickness into health?
Will prayer change hate to words of love?
Will prayer give me my right to vote?
Like Billy’s, his love songs are poetic and unpretentious: ‘Ten hundred books could I write you about her now,’ he says of his wife Marjorie in one of the new lyrics of ‘She Came Along To Me’. Sex frequently rears its ugly head, much to Billy’s delight (‘I didn’t want to make a PC album’), personified by what he calls Woody’s ‘trouser snake songs’, like the merrily metaphorical ‘Tea Bag Blues’, or the unabashed infidelity episode ‘Walt Whitman’s Niece’ (‘And as she read, I lay my head – and I can’t tell which head/Down in her lap – and I can mention which lap’).
Although a worldlier figure than his hillbilly image suggests (Los Angeles, Coney Island, Queens, Greenwich Village), Woody’s rural roots never stopped informing his songwriterly vision. Five years before he was born, Oklahoma wasn’t even a state, it was still Indian territory, that’s how far away he was from the action. ‘Oklahoma’s not in the South, it’s not in the West, it’s not even in the Mid-West,’ says Billy, ‘it’s the equivalent of Lincolnshire or Northamptonshire.’
It is perhaps no surprise that there are no statues of this notorious Commie in his strait-laced, redneck hometown of Okemah, where negative feeling still
lingers. Some years ago, a sign was erected by a local shopkeeper that read ‘OKEMAH: HOME OF WOODY GUTHRIE’. It was illiterately vandalised with the addendum ‘COMMIST [sic] DRAFT DODGER AND RED’, so they took it down again. Things are turning round gradually, with an official Woody Guthrie Day in the town, designated for 14 July, and a late entry into the Oklahoma Music Hall Of Fame (‘Some of it was obligatory and not quite heartfelt,’ Nora accepted. ‘But it still represented a big change of heart’).
With Mermaid Avenue, Billy intended to spread the news. All those fascists were bound to lose.
As the first edition of this book went to press, the album was ready for release and a Bragg/Wilco tour was planned for the summer (doomed, as we shall see in Chapter 16). It was, whatever the press releases said, ostensibly a Billy Bragg project, but one that had been immeasurably illuminated by Wilco. The idea of Woody Guthrie walking the earth in Billy’s green airtex shirt and fag-ash grey neo-flat-top was certainly an alluring one. Mermaid Avenue provided a neat link between the Okie whose guitar bore the legend ‘THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS’ in the 1940s, and the Essex boy who, in tribute, wrote ‘THIS GUITAR SAYS SORRY’ on his in the 1970s.
‘We’ve had similar influences,’ said Billy of the musical ley line that joins the two singer-songwriters. ‘But the political angle really binds me to Woody. I’m writing songs about unions too, and there’s not many of us about.
‘I feel it’s Woody’s time right now. People are looking for something real and solid that hasn’t been done to death in the media. So much of the culture we’re part of doesn’t go back any further than Elvis.’
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