BILLY BRAGG: MERMAID AVENUE (w. Wilco) (1998)
1) Walt Whitman's Niece; 2)
California Stars; 3) Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key; 4) Birds And Ships; 5)
Hoodoo Voodoo; 6) She Came Along To Me; 7) At My Window Sad And Lonely; 8)
Ingrid Bergman; 9) Christ For President; 10) I Guess I Planted; 11) One By
One; 12) Eisler On The Go; 13) Hesitating Beauty; 14) Another Man's Done Gone;
15) The Unwelcome Guest.
It is, perhaps, ironic that when Nora Guthrie
was deciding on the artist to whom she could entrust her father's trove of
unused lyrics, she ended up with an Englishman. Was there really nobody in the
United States in the mid-Nineties who could be considered the current
reincarnation of Woody Guthrie? Come on now! Not anyone? Not even Eddie Vedder?..
Even Billy himself was a bit scared of the
honor, and agreed to set Guthrie's lyrics to music only in collaboration with
somebody more authentic. Eventually, his eye fell on Wilco, and since Jeff
Tweedy was born in Illinois, which is at least somewhat closer to Woody's
Oklahoma than Billy's East London could ever hope to be, and also because the
Uncle Tupelo/early Wilco lineage was the closest to a raggedy, authentic, but
still modern-sounding rootsy sound that you could get at the moment, a musical friendship
was struck — and the result was Mermaid
Avenue, an album of 15 modern roots-rock tunes set to hitherto unknown
lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
First things first — these hitherto unknown
lyrics, practically all of them, have
such a contemporary feel and are so
remote from Woody Guthrie, «the Dust Bowl hero», that I would not be at all
surprised to learn that the whole thing was a big scam, or that at least the
lyrics were seriously doctored by Bragg and Tweedy before reaching our ears. If
it is not a scam, though — and who of us would want to seriously accuse the daughter
of mystifications in the name of the father? — then the «non-public» Guthrie
was simply a very different figure from the «public» Guthrie: far more
intimate, romantic, and complicated than his officially released
man-of-the-people stuff would suggest him to be. Pending proper linguistic
expertise, let us assume that this is the case (in fact, I am only writing
about this concern due to surprise that nobody anywhere has expressed the
smallest shadow of doubt), and anyway, it does not matter that much because we are mostly concerned with Billy Bragg here,
Wilco coming second and the Guthries only third.
Whatever be, it's a fun, engaging, and catchy
record that utilizes Billy's and Jeff's talents to the fullest — the capacity
for introspection, the sense of humor, the versatility in arranging and diversifying
the material, it's all there. The music is roughly divided in half between
Bragg and Wilco (represented by either Tweedy alone or the Tweedy/Bennett duo),
and, as you could expect, the Bragg half is usually more sparse and closer to
the classic folk idiom, whereas the Wilco songs often sound like outtakes from Being There, and this is good, since
the shuffling principle allows to keep the proceedings diverse and mildly
surprising until the end.
Accordingly, Bragg usually chooses the more
repetitive, singalong tunes to set to music — such as the opening comical piece
ʽWalt Whitman's Nieceʼ, imagined by him as a rowdy chunk of pub rock with the
lads presenting an anti-thesis to each line ("last night or the night
before that — I won't say which night", etc., and was that in the original
lyrics, too, I wonder?), or the sorrowful acoustic ballad ʽEisler On The Goʼ —
a counting-rhyme song about communist leader Gerhart Eisler's tribulations in a
post-WWII Western world (I reckon) that was probably not intended by the original writer to sound so mournful, but then
Eisler probably wasn't dead when Woody wrote it, and now he's been dead for 30
years; sufficient cause for sorrow.
On two songs, Billy invites old friend Natalie
Merchant: she backs him up on the playful (if still a bit sad) ʽWay Over Yonder
In The Minor Keyʼ and takes over lead vocals on ʽBirds And Shipsʼ, which is
probably the worst decision on the record — unlike Bragg and Tweedy, Merchant
is not endowed with a sense of humor (or, if she is, she puts it under lock and
key when starting off for the recording studio), and her predictably
broken-hearted delivery, perfect for the expectoration of 10,000 Maniacs-style liberal
guilt, feels seriously out of place on this record. Still, a friend is a
friend, I guess, and she did choose a
song for which those plaintive intonations would seem natural outside of the
general context of Mermaid Avenue.
Not to slight Billy, though, Wilco in general
and Tweedy in particular steal the spotlight more often, starting with the very
first number — ʽCalifornia Starsʼ is made into an immediate Wilco classic, what
with that tricky way that Tweedy places the repetitive song title «outside» the
main melody, creating the impression of one-breath continuity for his
intellectual romanticism. ʽHoodoo Voodooʼ is transformed into a ʽSubterranean
Homesick Bluesʼ-type rap number (the lyrics, coming in punctuated bursts of
half-folk, half-proto-beatnik imagery, do suggest that kind of treatment); ʽAt
My Window Sad And Lonelyʼ is made into an epic ballad that stops just short of
becoming a «power» ballad by disallowing the presence of electric guitars; and
ʽChrist For Presidentʼ is a delightful country stomp that Jeff delivers in an
intentionally cracked, hoarse voice, but the real hero there is Jay Bennett,
laying on layers of pianos and banjos, each of which sounds drunker than the
other. Verily and truly, could a sober
man ask for ʽChrist For Presidentʼ?
Mermaid
Avenue is not a «great»
record. Both for Bragg and for Wilco, this was a side project, and regardless
of whether all the lyrics here are authentic original Guthrie or if some of
them were edited, there is too little of the real Woody here to make the music
(rather than the texts) of any importance to the Guthrie legacy. But it is at
least as good as, say, a Traveling Wilburys record — pleasant, intelligent
rootsy entertainment that strikes an impressive balance between tradition and
modernism, and throws in the intriguing novel aspect of bringing together a
British electro-busker, an American revolutionizer of the folk-rock idiom, and
the Dust Bowl musical pioneer who, if this is to be believed, was secretly in
love with Ingrid Bergman even after
she dumped her husband for Roberto Rossellini. Then again, what sort of respect
for the solemnity of family values do
you expect from someone who had eight kids from three wives? Thumbs up
for this shameless violation of the rules of decency.
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