Live in Aught-Three: Distortion, But In A Good Way

(N.B.: This is a review of a James McMurtry album I wrote from the old Epinions site–they are tearing the site down, and there are a couple of odds and ends that I wanted preserved for no particular reason. I am letting most of the content go, but there are a couple of things that I wanted to keep, and this is as good of a place as any.)

The way that you write a review — some of you know this — is to tease it out. It’s there, already, inside your head, inchoate, waiting to appear on the screen or on the paper or whatever medium you choose, holy, and singular, like one of the Platonic forms. It may not come out of your head in just that way, since the process is what it is, but what would you be if you didn’t try? (You have to try.)

If you’re lucky, everything will spill out at once, in a torrent, and all you have to do is sit back and watch for typos. That doesn’t happen often. No, what you generally have to do is grab hold of a slender thread, something to pull on, some way to get a purchase, and hope that the rest of the review will follow, unrolling slowly. Sometime it’s a fragile thread, and it breaks, scattering bits of metaphor everywhere. Sometimes it’s like a fifty-pound test line of meaning, thin, but strong, pulling everything along like pulling a shiny, wet, silver catfish into a boat. (There are two different fishing references in Live in Aught-Three, but that’s not the right line to use.)

Sometimes, what you get is a thick cord, and that’s what you want, because you can wind other thoughts and feelings and ideas around it. The really thick cord won’t break under the weight of the review, won’t snap in the middle of the process, making you start over.

Which might not, the way things are going, be such a bad idea. Stay with it, though.

The word you have to start with in Live in Aught-Three is distortion, but in a good way. I do not here talk about factual distortion or anything like that, but the sort of rough edges on guitar riffs and suchlike that gets smoothed out in a recording studio. This is a live album, and proudly so. (It is largely free of audience reaction, for some reason; this isn’t a Robert Earl Keen concert with five hundred half-drunk Texan expatriates in the audience who know every single word, and sing along, off-key.) Part of that is the harshness of McMurtry’s growly baritone, part of that is the thunder of the electric guitar, and part of it is just the way that the sound system in a small club sounds on a Friday night.)

Most of the songs, but not all of them, are on McMurtry’s previous album, St. Mary of the Woods; it’s a good mix. Choctaw Bingo is really the only loser in this group, even though it’s got the most infectious beat going. It’s repetitive, and too long, and repetitive, and it’s also the only one you won’t ever hear on the radio, not even in the alternate universe where I am Supreme Director of Programming for Clear Channel Worldwide; there’s just too much stuff about guns and graft and crystal methamphetamine going on. Red Dress is not one of my favorites; it’s a solid enough song but there’s a vicious undercurrent to that I don’t like. The title track, St. Mary of the Woods, is on here, and it sounds quite a bit different than its studio counterpart; maybe the first hint that this is going to be a little bit of a different sound — while, at the same time, being every bit as good as the original, which is all you could ask for. (The songwriting never changes, you see, and McMurtry is the most literate and literary of the y’allternative crowd.) The last of the last-album songs is Out Here in the Middle, which sounds awfully different from the REK version on his last album; it’s much darker and dryer here, with an authentic sense of loss and longing.

For the rest of the album, you have things like No More Buffalo and Levelland, which are classic McMurtry tunes. (Lights of Cheyenne is in this category, even though it’s the only new song on the album.) It may be — unlikely, if you have read this far — that you’re not overly familiar with the basic James McMurtry catalog, which would be a shame if true. McMurtry, musically, has what might be called the High Plains outlook; spare, bleak, minimalist, with an undercurrent of bleakness and sorrow and regret running through everything, short and simple words punched through with an aggressive beat and an electric guitar. Levelland is like that; it’s about the depression of living in a West Texas prairie town, and the impossibility of escaping anywhere when you’d show up like a fly on a plate before you got ten miles out of town:

And I watch those jet trails carving up that big blue sky

Coast to coasters watch ‘em go

And I never would blame ‘em one damn bit

If they never looked down on this

Not much here they’d wanna know

Delivered, of course, with more than its fair share of distortion, and accompanied by a sardonic reminder that the song was not, in fact, written by the aforementioned REK.

Paradoxically, the jauntiest song on the album is the only cover; McMurtry takes on Townes Van Zandt’s Rex’s Blues, which sounds like a dirge when Guy Clark does it (beautifully, I might add) but does it up-tempo and with any hint of sorrow buried in the distortion.

I suppose, for me, the highlight of the whole piece is Rachel’s Song, which sounds simple but isn’t; the narrator is the abandoned wife of a runaway drifter trying to manage her soon-to-be-wayward teenage son and her own drinking problem, and you’d wonder why it’s such a great song based on that description. I can only say that it is because it is about my plight, and yours, and while it differs in its specifics it is right on about the tone:

I’m all alone

It’s all right

Isn’t gonna wound my pride

If anyone can say

They’re all right

So can I

And there you have it, clear as clear can be, despite the distortion everywhere around us. Live in Aught-Three is what you should be listening to, even though you don’t know it yet.