Tough Company: Tom Russell hails the rough and tumble genius of ‘outsider America.’

One Real Gone Cat

Tom Russell’s postcard to bohemia

By Greg Cahill

“Hold back the edges of your gowns, ladies,” William Carlos Williams once said of Allen Ginsberg’s epic Beat rant Howl. “We are going through hell.”

That same sense of intellectual danger permeates singer and songwriter Tom Russell’s latest album, Hotwalker: Charles Bukowski and a Ballad for Gone America (Hightone), a rough guide to such modern bohemians as Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Edward Abbey, Harry Partch, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Little Jack Horton and other Beat mavens of a place that Russell wryly calls “outsider America.”

It’s the latest in a string of tightly crafted concept albums from a master storyteller. Born and raised not far from Bukowski’s stomping grounds in and around L.A.’s Skid Row, Russell grew up immersed in the lore of the American West and has shown a real knack for penning insightful songs that evoke the broken dreams heard in the best cowboy music. Johnny Cash recorded some of Russell’s songs, as have k.d. lang, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and a host of others.

Hotwalker, a cinematic collage of music, spoken-word performances and calliope sounds, is an exhilarating excursion through the dark night of Beat culture as told by some of those outsiders themselves. Russell, who used to collect clips of Bukowski’s L.A. underground newspaper column (“Notes from a Dirty Old Man”), later interviewed Bukowski for the European literary journal Beat. Those letters serve as the core of Hotwalker (at one point, plans were being laid for a more lavish tribute album with big-name Hollywood stars conducting the readings) and can be found in Russell’s upcoming book, Tough Company.

The book is unavailable for review, but the CD is rife with dreamy pedal-steel interludes and colorful tales about not only Bukowski, but also folk singer and guitarist extraordinaire Van Ronk (one of the album’s best tracks), environmental writer Edward Abbey (the spiritual father of the Earth First! movement) and others.

One of the real discoveries, though, is the little-known Little Jack Horton, a former circus midget and animal trainer (a so-called hotwalker) now living in retirement in Florida.

“Little Jack Horton was the king of the carnival, the voice of the great American midway, a voice that sounds like Ukulele Ike on laughing gas, the real thing,” Russell intones on the track “Old America.” “He’s been shot out of canons, he did the pass of death on a Shetland pony, he rode the Four Walls of Eternity on a motorcycle. He appeared in movies like The Terror of Tiny Town and One-Eyed Jacks with Marlon Brando. And he wrote poetry. This is a true American voice from the sawdust back lots of the Old World.” And such a voice.

Russell gave Horton a handful of cassettes and a cheap tape recorder, and asked him to read some of Bukowski’s letters and to reminisce about his own experiences with the legendary barfly and Beat poet.

“Real low-fidelity Americana,” Russell says, “the way it used to be.”On the title track, Horton recalls drinking with Bukowski down at the L.A. stockyards. At the time, Bukowski was a postal clerk and Horton an animal wrangler and clown for Ringling Brothers circus. Buoyed by booze and bravado, Horton one night bet Bukowski that he could drive a diesel locomotive, so the pair stole one from the nearby rail yard and took it for a wild joyride before crashing it and bar-hopping their way back to town.

It’s a slice of Americana you won’t see on those sanitized documentaries on PBS.”I guess that I am interested in the changing nature of America,” Russell told me a couple of years ago during an interview for the Bohemian. “I mean, I grew up right after World War II, and America went through a tremendous period of change at that time. Also, I was trained a bit as a sociologist, and of course as a fiction writer I am interested in telling people’s stories. And loss is a very dramatic theme. But I don’t want to bullshit you; I don’t think in terms of the big picture.

“I really am simply drawn to the story of individuals and what they’ve gone through in their life.”

Next up: Hearts on the Line, the DVD release of a film by Eric Temple, that utilizes concert footage of Russell and Andrew Hardin on a songwriter train ride across Canada with Fats Kaplin, Kristi Rose, the Hot Club of Cowtown, Dave Alvin and Eliza Gilkyson. Two more trains are scheduled to ride across Canada this week with Russell, Ramblin’ Jack (a Bolinas resident), cowboy artist Don Edwards, Nanci Griffith, Mary Gauthier, Gretchen Peters and others.

No doubt there’ll be plenty of tales to tell about that excursion.

From the March 23-29, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Kiltered: Aesop Rock generally rhymes as though there’s a long hook attached to the side of his mouth.

Lyrics Born

Aesop Rock speaks the speech trippingly on the tongue

By Gabe Meline

Usually when I overhear people complain about hip-hop, it makes me want to puke. But the old-timer I met the other day had an interesting point to make. “To me, that’s not music,” he said. “It’s more like giving a speech with a drum.”

I thought it was a great explanation–you know, a speech. A speech has respect, dignity or, at the very least, validity.

Yet unlike a proposal by a senate majority leader, for example, there is very rarely a transcript available for hip-hop songs. Only a small percentage of hip-hop albums contain printed lyrics, and it’s easy to understand why: a libretto would be an unnecessary exercise in reiterating the blatant. When a car pulls up playing a hip-hop track, it’s probable that you’ll be able to make out every crystalline word.

Unless, that is, the car is blaring Aesop Rock, in which case you should (1) consider yourself lucky and (2) listen hard.

Aesop Rock springs from a teeming well of highly individual hip-hop artists, and in the past five years that well has been overflowing from coast to coast. Its pioneers are alternately labeled “personal hip-hop” (Atmosphere); “backpack hip-hop” (the Bay Area Anticon collective); “hip-hop straight from the fuckin’ underground” (usually some kid in his bedroom with a laptop); or even the painful “emo-hop,” which I swear I heard someone once brandish in reference to Sage Francis.

These labels provide a traceable lineage throughout our repeated musical history. Look back to the 1970s, when rock and roll, at the restless age of about 25 or so, got weird. Hip-hop is about the same age, and while the mainstream remains as bloated as ever, it’s getting a little strange on the independent scene: Anticon’s stuff is like overwrought acid rock; Atmosphere’s sort of a self-absorbed glam rocker at this point; the kids in their bedrooms are spearheading a punk-rock movement; and Sage Francis is a one-man prog band, relying on cutting-edge distractions to hide his murky points.

Aesop Rock has no ’70s comparison, and if he’s got a label, he’s given it to himself with his hard-earned literary moniker. When his lyrics are decipherable, they’re brilliant, but he generally rhymes as if there’s a long hook attached to the side of his mouth which someone in the wings is tugging at random. Thus, the dense writing for which he is famous has long been the subject of meticulous fan debate.

With the release of Fast Cars, Danger, Fire and Knives (Def Jux), the Brooklyn native has laid all lyric debates to rest, as accompanying the seven-song EP is an incredible 88-page lyric book spanning his entire recorded output so far (and justifying the $16.98 list price).

Most printed hip-hop lyrics, no matter how impressive they sound on record, unavoidably appear shallow and trite on paper. Aesop Rock’s words, however, read like the creatively pieced-together nightmares of a thesaurus on methamphetamines. Let’s flip open the book and grab a random sample: “Sensationally seismograph stabbing away on stone tablet to sketch a grouchy future. I drifted out the main spelunking unit with watered-down sample of cancelled development, courtesy America.”

Aesop Rock’s more cohesive moments center around his landmark album Labor Days, which spins tales loosely woven around the American working week. I saw him at a small club in San Francisco around this time, and onstage, distracted and disheveled, he looked like he hadn’t worked a day in his life. The lyric book, however, proves that Aesop Rock has an intriguing view of the 9-to-5 grind.

The book is also handy for clarifying those long-misheard lines, such as “I alone personify mankind’s collective soul as the result of one angry dude fisting Cole Porter in bulk.” That’s been my version, anyway.

Now I find I have been wrong all along. According to the official transcript, mankind’s collective “sulk” is the result of “one angry Zeus fist blistering cult pulp in bulk.”

And even though it doesn’t make much difference, it’s still good to know.

From the March 16-22, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

I Wanna Be Sedated: As its teeny-tiny label shows, this punker’s T is intended for the newborn school of rock.

Cotton Club

Remember when rock T-shirts meant something?

By Sara Bir

Mr. Bir Toujour just bought a Joy Division T-shirt. “I didn’t know you like Joy Division,” I said when I saw the new shirt in his drawer.

“I don’t,” he replied, “but I’ve always liked that shirt.” It is a pretty cool shirt, black with a bunch of thin white stripes making this bleak topographic design. “I remember seeing older kids wearing this T-shirt when I was in high school,” he continued. “I saw it on eBay and got it using the money I’ve been making from selling Star Wars figures.”

Don’t panic. He’s not selling good Star Wars figures, only the weird newer ones that came out in conjunction with George Lucas’ mid-’90s re-release of the trilogy. Those new Star Wars toys creep me out. The bafflingly ripped physique of the Luke Skywalker figure makes it look like he’s been throwing back steroids with the Barry Bonds starting lineup figure next door.

But Mr. Bir Toujour wasted many happy hours in his college days roaming big-box stores across the North Bay to find first-edition Boba Fetts. Now he’s selling them so he can get cheap reproductions of vintage T-shirts of bands that he doesn’t even like that much.

Rock-band T-shirts used to seem so special and rare. You couldn’t just stroll into any old Hot Topic and become an instant rocker. If you wanted a T-shirt, you had to see the band. Either that or go to college, as college towns are meccas of both rock shows and head shops full of rock-show T-shirts. In those innocent days, wearing a band T-shirt indicated that you really liked the band. It was almost like wearing a cross around your neck or a wedding ring on your finger: it showed where your allegiances lay. Think of all the metalheads back in high school, and how bands like Metallica kept them outfitted in black T-shirts for life.

The purity of this equation has been somewhat inverted with the mall-ification of youth culture; to wit, you can buy Devo and Barry Manilow T-shirts at Urban Outfitters. Perhaps this is my curmudgeonly nature getting the best of me, but I’m guessing it’s not love of Barry Manilow that draws aspiring hipsters to Urban Outfitters. And it’s probably not love of Journey that drives prices of vintage Journey T-shirts sky high. Since when did the fashion value of a band T-shirt overtake the fan value of a band T-shirt?

I’m quite guilty myself. Not counting my new Joy Division shirt (it was too small for Mr. Bir Toujour), I have eight band T-shirts. The one I wear most often is a heather gray Maserati T-shirt, purchased from the band at a show in San Francisco about two years ago. I must have enjoyed the show, but I can’t think of one time I put on a Maserati CD. I wear the shirt because I like the way it fits.

The only real rock T-shirts I have now are Ramones shirts. I have three, two of which are now too fragile to wear on a regular basis. And the third is the ugliest rock-band T-shirt in the history of the world. It was a gift from this goth-metal dude I worked with at a library in Columbus, Ohio. He was in two bands, one named Martyr Colony and the other Lördbürger. At the time, I was just beginning to come into my punk-rock self, and he took me under his wing, putting X and Buzzcocks CDs in my inbox. One day I came to work and there was this bunched-up wad of white cotton there instead of a CD.

“I was cleaning out my house,” he said, “and I found this old Ramones T-shirt that I used to wear skating.” The design of the shirt came from a time and an age long forgotten. It belongs to the mid-’80s school of fashion, so hideous even Ashlee Simpson has failed to resurrect it. I call it “the first wave of neon.” The shirt employs the oft-neglected color scheme of black, powdery blue-gray and florescent orange. It depicts Johnny in the background and Joey in the foreground, surrounded by a flurry of various fragmented Ramones slogans and symbols hanging askew in the air, accented by random swaths of eye-searing orange streaks.

The Ramones are cool; the shirt is not cool. The shirt makes orthopedic shoes look cool. Not even Joey Ramone’s mother could love the shirt. You cannot look the shirt in the eye. It strikes like a cobra and blinds like the sun.

But I am its keeper. For the safety of the public, these days I primarily wear it as a nightshirt, though I once wore the shirt for two straight weeks on a trip to Wyoming. There is a series of photographs of me standing triumphantly atop assorted breathtaking Rocky Mountain peaks, but the monstrous image of the shirt crudely interrupts the magnificence.

There are times I’ve come dangerously close to getting rid of the shirt. For a moment, I considered trying to sell it online, but the shirt may be one rock-band T-shirt too ugly to bid on—even for a quarter. This somehow renders it priceless. We may have to bronze it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bir Toujour has been wary of selling more of his Star Wars figures. “Do you think I’ll regret it? I hardly even take them out of the closet.” True. But there are some things you can never get back. I think of the T-shirts I wore in high school—all of which were extra-large, all of them for bands I quit liking long ago—and I want them back. I want the part of me back that wore rock T-shirts because I really meant it. There’s no item fitting that description in any vintage shop or catalog. All that’s left is me and the shirt.

From the March 16-22, 2005 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.