Tom Russell – The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets

TOM RUSSELL

The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets

Frontera Records

tomrussell.com

fronterarecords.com

The first time I wrote about Tom Russell was in a review of his 1987 LP, The Road to Bayamon. I think I’ve written about every album he’s released since. At some point along the way I referred to Tom as the best singer-songwriter of my generation – the generation that came along 10 or 15 years after Dylan. It was a claim I repeated in 2008 when I wrote the long essay that accompanied Tom’s 2-CD career retrospective, The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day and it is a claim that still resonates with me eight years later with the release of The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets.

This second volume of the Anthology is a generous 19-song, 79-minute set that includes several early songs, several previously-unreleased tracks, and many that were first released in the years since that first volume. The collection is a great introduction to Tom Russell neophytes and it has enough previously-unheard material – and a fresh-sounding sequencing – that makes it a great listen for longtime aficionados like me.

The set kicks off with an undated demo version of “Honkytonk Heart (Like Mine),” an infectious rockabilly tune that sounds like it could have been a hit for Elvis or Jerry Lee back in their Sun Records day. Then we hear a couple of great songs from the ‘80s: an alternate take of “Spanish Burgundy” from the Poor Man’s Dream sessions and a terrific live version from Lost Angels of Lyon of “The Road to Bayamon,” Tom’s vivid description of life in a traveling Puerto Rican carnival.

As I noted in my essay for the first volume of the Anthology, “I’m convinced that Tom’s folk-opera, The Man from God Knows Where, a song-cycle that documents the immigrant experience in America, is the most important folk recording by anyone in the past 25 or more years,” and the track from The Man from God included on the second volume is “Love Abides,” a duet with Iris DeMent, that was the finale to the folk-opera. Set along the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, it’s a beautiful song that contrasts tragedy with blessings, hope and love.

“When Sinatra Played Juarez,” from Borderland, featuring the masterful Tex-Mex accordion playing of Joel Guzman harkens back to decades ago when the Mexican city across the river from El Paso was a mecca for its nightlife and not a drug cartel warzone while in the rocking “Tijuana Bible” from Modern Art he tells the true life tale of a famous Hollywood murder case.

Three tracks follow with backing from Calexico from the 2009 album, Blood and Candle Smoke. On “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam,” Tom recalls 1969 when – as the war in Vietnam raged, Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the moon, and 500,000 people sat in the Catskills mud for a three-day music festival – he went to Nigeria as a young academic to teach. The song “Nina Simone” references the great blues-jazz-folk singer but it’s not about Nina Simone per se. It’s about finding what you need in a voice that understands. Maybe for Tom in a bar in San Cristóbal, it was the voice of Nina Simone on the juke box. I know I’ve heard Nina Simone cut through to my soul when she sings about being “lost in the rain in Juarez” in a way I think Dylan would appreciate. Sometimes my “Nina Simones” have been Rosalie Sorrels or Billie Holiday or a dozen other singers who understand. In “Don’t Look Down,” Tom uses a tightrope walker’s advice as a starting point to reflect on past history, the meaning of life and love, and the future.

Then we hear a couple of tracks from the 2011 album, Mesabi. The title song, which begins with about 10 seconds of solo acoustic guitar picking out the melody line to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” is named for the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota, the area where Bob Dylan grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s. The song begins with a description of the kid that was the young Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing and then shifts into the 1960s and the kid who was the young Tom Russell listening to and being inspired by the troubadour kid singing “Don’t Think Twice” on his uncle’s record player. “Sterling Hayden” is a tribute, of sorts, to the tough guy actor, author and raconteur who mostly lived life on his own terms, famously expressing one major regret: naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. “I don't think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing,” Sterling Hayden wrote years later. Tom brings a variation of that quote into the song, which he sings as both a third-person narrator and as Hayden himself. Tom’s song refers to seeing Hayden interviewed on the Johnny Carson show. I can also vividly remember a series of fascinating interviews he did in the ‘70s with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show.

Two songs are from Aztec Jazz – Tom’s sublime live album with a chamber orchestra, the Norwegian Wind Ensemble – both of them originally released on Blood and Candle Smoke. “Guadalupe,” done beautifully with some gorgeous guitar lines by Thad Beckman and an orchestral arrangement highlighting the oboes, is a song that reveals more every time I hear it. And I’m not necessarily referring to new layers of understanding of what Tom was thinking when he wrote it. I mean what I hear and understand about my own truths and my own quests filtered through Tom’s words and the gorgeous melody. “Finding You” is a beautiful love song written for Nadine Russell, Tom’s wife, and is lushly arranged for the orchestra.

Four songs follow from 2015’s The Rose of Roscrae: A Ballad of the West, the third in Tom’s series of extraordinary concept albums (following The Man from God Knows Where and Hotwalker). In the Irish-influenced “The Rose of Roscrae,” the protagonist, Johnny Dutton, recalls leaving Ireland for America in the 19th century after a conflict with his lover’s father make it impossible for them to stay while in the folk-rocking “Hair Trigger Heart,” he reflects on his life as an outlaw in the (brief) time and place that was the old west. “He Wasn’t a Bad Kid When He was Sober,” deconstructs the myth of Billy the Kid and “Resurrection Mountain,” with vocal harmonies by the McCrary Sisters, is a gospel song that reflects on matters of life and faith.

The CD ends with two more songs I’d never heard before. The undated “Iron Eyes Cody” reflects on the life of an actor who played Indian roles in hundreds of western movies and TV shows – and was, perhaps, most memorably, the crying Native American in the anti-littering public service TV spot in the 1970s. Iron Eyes Cody, who died in 1999 at age 94, always claimed to be Native American but turned out to have been the son of Italian immigrants to the United States. Then Tom ends the set with “Where Do All the Cowboys Go?” a beautiful and fitting finale, sung as a duet with Eliza Gilkyson. The song was written for The Rose of Roscrae but not ultimately used on that project.

Mike Regenstreif & Tom Russell in Montreal (2012)

These songs on The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets leaves me in anticipation of whatever might be coming next from the best songwriter of my generation.

Note: Comments on some of the songs in this review have been taken from reviews I’ve written about the albums from which they originated.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell -- Mesabi

TOM RUSSELL

Mesabi

Shout! Factory

tomrussell.com

Three years ago, I had the pleasure of writing the booklet essay for The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day, Tom Russell’s 2-CD, career spanning retrospective, in which I referred to him as “the best songwriter of my generation.” It’s a conviction I’ve repeated several times since and which is only reinforced by Mesabi, yet another in his long series of masterpiece albums – albums that essentially raise and set the bar for contemporary singer-songwriters.

There are a couple of distinct, but somehow linked, song-cycles on this album. The first explores the nature of the pursuit of art, the nature of legend, and the rewards and the cruelty of fame.

The album begins with about 10 seconds of solo acoustic guitar picking out the melody line to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” as an intro to “Mesabi,” the album’s folk-rock title song named for the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota, the area that Bob Dylan grew up in during the 1940s and ‘50s. The song begins with a description of the kid that was the young Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing and shifts up into the 1960s and the kid who was the young Tom Russell listening to and being inspired by the troubadour kid singing “Don’t Think Twice” on his uncle’s record player.

While “Mesabi” was about the creation of a legend, it leads into “Where the Legends Die,” a literate jazz piece about the realization that legendary figures are just as human and flawed as the rest of us.

Flawed legends are the heart of the next pair of songs. “Farewell Never Never Land,” which shifts from a Stephen Foster-like intro to a folk-rock setting, tells the tragic story of Bobby Driscoll, a Disney child actor – he was the voice of Peter Pan in the classic animated version from 1953 – that grew up to be a drug addicted has-been who died of old age at 31.

Tom sings “The Lonesome Death of Ukulele Ike,” as the song’s title character in a bouncy 1920s or ‘30s pop style. Ukulele Ike – Cliff Edwards – was a popular singer in those days, and achieved his greatest success as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio. (Who can forget his classic rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star?”) Ultimately, though, Edwards died penniless, another fallen legend.

“Sterling Hayden” is a tribute, of sorts, to the tough guy actor, author and raconteur who mostly lived life on his own terms, famously expressing one major regret: naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. “I don't think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing,” Sterling Hayden wrote years later. Tom brings a variation of that quote into the song, which he sings as both a third-person narrator and as Hayden himself. Tom’s song refers to seeing Hayden interviewed on the Johnny Carson show. I can also vividly remember a series of fascinating interviews he did in the ‘70s with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show.

“Furious Love (For Liz)” follows. It’s a short, sad lament for Elizabeth Taylor sung at the time of her death and recalling many years earlier when Taylor lived with husband Nicky Hilton in El Paso, across from Juarez, Mexico, long before Juarez became a battleground in the Mexican drug wars. The song is also the first hint at the direction Tom will soon move the album in.

In “A Land Called Way Out There,” set to a kind of folk-brass band arrangement featuring members of Calexico, Tom recalls the quick, early death of James Dean and then sings a new version of “Roll the Credits, Johnny,” which Tom first recorded in 2008 as one of the two new songs on The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day. The song uses the symbolism of the end of a movie to bring closure to the first of the two major song-cycles on the album.

“Heart Within a Heart,” is a beautiful, spiritual song featuring the gospel harmonies of Regina and Ann McCrary. It provides a few minutes of respite between the album’s two main thematic blocks.

Tom lives near El Paso in the West Texas borderlands just north of Mexico and he’s often written about the back-and-forth exchanges and border town interdependencies of the area. The next song-cycle is about that and is heralded in the first few bars of “And God Created Border Towns,” by the quasi-mariachi sounds of pianist Augie Meyers (legendary for his work with the late Doug Sahm, from the days of the Sir Douglas Quintet to the Texas Tornados), accordionist Joel Guzman and Jacob Valenzuela on trumpets. The song lays bare the realities of the border: migrants looking for a better life are exploited and murdered by the thousands, guns flow south across border to enable the drug wars, and the drugs flow north to the seemingly insatiable American market.

“Goodnight, Juarez” is a Tex-Mex lament for Jurarez’s descent from an open tourist town to the battleground it’s become. Tom looks at contemporary Juarez and remembers the time – not that many years ago – when it was a different place and imagines how it could be again. “Juarez, I had a dream today/ The children danced, as the guitars played/ And all the violence up and slipped away/ Goodnight, Juarez, goodnight.”

“Jai Alai,” named for a once-popular sport, is a brilliant, fast-paced flamenco piece – featuring the guitar Jacob Mossman – about passion: for the game – and for love.

The borderland song-cycle draws to a close with a new version of “Love Abides,” the finale from Tom’s folk-opera, The Man from God Knows Where, an album I still consider the best, the most important, piece of work by any musical artist in the past three decades or so. It’s a beautiful song that looks at a world filled with tragedy but also filled with blessings, hope and love.

The album ends with two songs labeled as bonus tracks but which I think are a kind of restatement of the first theme Tom explores on this album.

Tom's sublime, newly definitive version of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” is a duet with Lucinda Williams on top of an atmospheric arrangement by the musicians of Calexico that brings us back to the Mesabi Iron Range. The song seems as fresh and as topical now as when the troubadour kid wrote it almost half a century ago.

The finale, “The Road to Nowhere,” written for the new Monte Hellman film, Road to Nowhere (“Roll the Credits, Johnny” is also used in the film), could be about almost any of the fallen heroes and legends in the songs sung earlier in the album – or not yet written about.

I’ve mentioned a few of the musicians Tom uses on this album. Among other great contributors worth noting are pianist Barry Walsh, who co-produced the album with Tom; multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin, who played in Tom’s band back in the 1980s; guitarist Thad Beckman, who tours with him now; legendary pianist and studio arranger Van Dyke Parks; and harmony singer Gretchen Peters.

As I mentioned at the top of this review, Mesabi is another in Tom Russell’s long series of masterpiece albums – all of them different from each other, all of them layered to reveal more with each hearing. And, I’ll say it one more time: Tom Russell is the best songwriter of my generation – the generation that followed 10 or 12 years after Dylan.

By the way, I’m not sure how long it will be there, but tomrussell.com is currently giving away free downloads of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

Mesabi is scheduled for release on September 6.

--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell -- Blood and Candle Smoke

TOM RUSSELL
Blood and Candle Smoke
Shout! Factory
tomrussell.com

OK, I know I’ve said it before –- like in the essay I wrote last year for The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day booklet -- but it bears repeating: I think Tom Russell is the finest singer-songwriter of my generation; the generation 10 to 15 years younger than Bob Dylan, that walked in his footsteps through the streets of Greenwich Village, that went back and listened to the same music from old weird America that he listened to, and that went to the University of Staying-up-all-night-on-Dave-Van-Ronk’s-couch. I’ve thought that about Tom Russell for the better part of 25 years and I’m as convinced of that now, as I keep listening to Blood and Candle Smoke, a state-of-the-art album, as I’ve ever been.

From the dawn of his career, Tom has always delivered a set of superbly-crafted songs on each of his albums. On many of them, he’s also delivered carefully constructed arrangements that color the songs beautifully. In terms of the songwriting craftsmanship, these 12 songs stand with Tom’s best while the arrangements –- featuring backing from members of Calexico and several others, including the sublime harmonies of Gretchen Peters -– and production values take his studio work to their highest heights yet.

In 1969, the Vietnam War raged on, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, and half a million people showed up for a three-day music festival in the Catskills. While all that was going on, the young Tom Russell, armed with his newly-minted degree in criminology, went on a teaching assignment in Nigeria. That sets the scene for the Calexico rhythms and mariachi trumpet that pulls us into this album and never lets go as we hear Tom remember those days in a hard place “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam.

Other killer songs tell us about the Santa Ana winds, those hot, dry winds that set the golden mansions of paradise on fire every year, or about what it’s like to stare down the barrel of a gun in desperate places ranging from African warzones to depressing lumber camp bars in Canada.

The song “Nina Simone” references the great blues-jazz-folk singer but it’s not about Nina Simone per se. It’s about finding what you need in a voice that understands. Maybe for Tom in a bar in San Cristóbal, it was the voice of Nina Simone on the juke box. I know I’ve heard Nina Simone cut through to my soul when she sings about being “lost in the rain in Juarez” in a way I think Dylan would appreciate. Sometimes my “Nina Simones” have been Rosalie Sorrels or Billie Holiday or a dozen other singers who understand.

And “The Most Dangerous Woman in America” isn’t just about Mother Jones, the great labor organizer. It’s also about the sons or grandsons or great-grandsons of the miners she organized a century ago who still live marginal lives that can lead them into violence.

“Guadalupe” is one of those very rare songs that that reveals new layers of understanding with every hearing. I’m not necessarily talking about new layers of understanding of what Tom may have been getting at about himself when he wrote it. I’m talking about we, the listeners, hearing and understanding our own truths and about our own quests through the filter of Tom’s words. There are some Leonard Cohen songs that work like that.

In my essay for The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day booklet I talked about some of the songs Tom’s written over the years about the ending of love relationships and predicted at the end that, with Tom having found a new bride, we’d hear a different kind of love song from him. The beautiful “Finding You,” written for Nadine, fulfills that prediction.

Sonically, it’s easy just to get caught up in the southwestern creativity of these arrangements. Every note played by every musician adds something to the magic of Blood and Candle Smoke. But still, for me, a Tom Russell album comes back to the songs – and like I can’t stop saying, I think he’s the finest singer-songwriter of my generation.

Blood and Candle Smoke will be released on September 15.

--Mike Regenstreif