In a perfect world, you really ought to hear a legendary performer at a legendary venue. Such was the case on December 5th, when Americana icon Tom Russell performed to a packed house at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.
Russell is typically credited with co-founding (along with Dave Alvin) the Americana/roots music movement that’s been resurgent these past couple of decades. His songs are heavily informed by country music and folk lyricism, but his interests can be all over the map. For this concert, he chose to showcase almost all of the songs from his fine new CD, Blood and Candle Smoke, which contain compositions ranging from calypso to Mexican to African (“A little palm wine music for your listening pleasure,” he informed the audience at one point).
Russell is at his best when he’s storytelling, both with his music and his onstage patter, and this evening he was really on his game. It’s pertinent to remember that his eclectic background includes him being a novelist, a painter of some renown, and (as one of his new songs declares) “a master in the art of criminology.” He has an eye for detail, a talent for mythologizing his own past adventures, and an empathy for the downtrodden, and he spins those qualities into the pure poety of his lyrics. Like him or not, he writes songs like no else in America. During this show, he veered from autobiography (“East of Woodstock, West of Viet Nam”) to tribute (“Nina Simone”) to social commentary (“Mississippi River Runnin’ Backwards,” “The Most Dangerous Woman in America”) to character study (“Darkness Visible”) to travelogues (“American Rivers”). It takes a rare artist to insist on playing his new, largely-unfamiliar material to an audience hungry for “the old songs,” but Russell carried it off admirably.
It helps that he is an expert raconteur with a sardonic sense of humor who tells stories between his story-songs. Here again, you won’t find another songwriter who, in the course of one evening, can tell tales that make off-hand references to Dory Previn, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, Dave Van Ronk, Mother Jones, Pablo Picasso, and the Beat poets. The man expects his audience to be plugged-in and literate, and leavens his more serious meditations with moments of caustic humor, often directed at himself. Before one song, he tried re-tuning his guitar for several long moments, then laughed and gave up. “Who the hell do I think I am, Ry Cooder?” he grumbled good-naturedly. During another interlude, he spoke about his new marriage (“Finding You” is a very uncharacteristic Russell love song) and about how he never crosses the bridge from El Paso (where he currently lives) to Juarez any more because (in a mealy-mouthed, henpecked-husband voice), “My wife won’t let me.” Of course, he also regaled the audience half-a-dozen times with his trademark snarl of, “Bastards.” The crowd seemed to love it.
(Here I’d like to add that Russell can be an acquired taste. Although he’s been featured several times on Dave Letterman’s show and has fans like author Annie Proulx and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, widespread popularity has eluded him. “Bruce Springsteen did one of my songs in a sound check once,” he says wistfully. I attended the show with my wife and a good friend. The friend liked the show, but my wife remained unimpressed. “I just don’t find his stories that interesting,” she says. “And he’s not the best-looking guy in the world to look at, either.” Okay, well, some things are out of the artist’s control, you know?).
Russell is a serviceable guitarist, so it’s good that he always seems to tour with an accomplished musician who can augment his oftentimes spare melodies. This time around, it was Thad Beckman who provided the six-string mastery. Beckman is a solo artist in his own right who is primarily blues-influenced, but proved to be fully capable of following Russell wherever he led. Russell yielded the stage to Beckman for a series of chameleonic guitar samplings that included Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson, and Gatemouth Brown. Beckman also performed Brownie McGhee’s “Sportin’ Life Blues,” revealing a finely-honed bluesy voice to go along with his finger picking talents.
In that same spirit of sharing-the-stage generosity, Russell briefly turned the microphone over to under-the-radar songwriting legend Steve Young, who was in attendance for the show. Russell praised Young’s many contributions to the Americana genre, then balanced that sentiment by saying, “Go ahead and do a song. It’ll give me a chance to use the bathroom.” Young obliged and played a stripped-down version of “Seven Bridges Road,” much to the audience’s delight.
Besides playing the new CD in its near-entirety, Russell also reached back into his vast catalogue to resurrect crowd favorites like the classic “Blue Wing,” “Stealing Electricity,” and the award-winning and controversial “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?” This last song, about the plans to erect a wall on the U.S./Mexico border, is about as political as Russell ever gets. But again, he declawed some of its seriousness by recalling a time when he miscalculated and played it “in front of a group of Minutemen down in southern Arizona.” Needless to say, the lyrics went over better with the Southern California crowd:
Who’s gonna build your wall, boys
Who’s gonna mow your lawn
Who’s gonna cook your Mexican food
When your Mexican maid is gone
(And) if Uncle Sam sends the illegals home
Who’s gonna build the wall
McCabe’s Guitar Shop has been around now for more than fifty years, and as the concert came to a close and my party walked out of the room and down the corridor crowded with all kinds of guitars, fiddles, banjos, dulcimers, mandolins, and you-name-it stringed instruments, I couldn’t help thinking that there was no better place to have seen one of the true giants of Americana music. And I think the sold-out audience agreed.
McCabe’s Guitar Shop is located at 31010 Pico Blvd., Santa Monica. Phone number is (310) 828-4497, website is www.mccabes.com.
Review Written by Rod Williams – LMA Street Team Member
