Tom Russell – Folk Hotel

TOM RUSSELL

Folk Hotel

Frontera Records

tomrussell.com

fronterarecords.com

I checked into the Folk Hotel when I was a teenager in the late-1960s. Tom Russell, who is about five years older than me, was already there. Both of us encountered many of the same legendary figures who were there before us – legends whose spirits loom large over Folk Hotel, Tom’s brilliant new masterwork; a collection that comes hot on the heels of Play One More: The Songs of Ian Sylvia, a wonderful tribute to a couple of the legendary residents who were already on the upper floors of the Folk Hotel before either of us got there.

There are 14 tracks on Folk Hotel – 13 written or co-written by Tom – and every one of them is worthy of great praise.

The album open s with “Up in the Old Hotel,” a song inspired by stories and legends of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a residence favored by writers, musicians, actors and artists for more than a century. References to “Ma and Pa Kettle on the radio,” Louis Armstrong singing “I Guess I’ll Get the Papers and Go Home,” and the death of Dylan Thomas, who died at the Chelsea in 1953, suggest a timeframe for the narrator sweetly singing about “falling in love up in the old hotel.”

Although Tom was conjuring images from another time in the opening track, the second song, “Leaving El Paso,” is a reflection of his own life. Tom lived for many years in El Paso, across the river from Juarez, Mexico, until he and his wife Nadine Russell sold their place a couple of years ago and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The song features wonderful playing by Joel Guzman on guitar and Red Volkaert on Spanish guitar and, like many of Tom’s border ballads from his El Paso years, has a lovely Tex-Mex feel.

A conversation with Canadian folk and cowboy music legend Ian Tyson – with whom Tom has co-written a bunch of songs including “Navajo Rug” and “When the Wolves No Longer Sing” – inspired “I’ll Never Leave These Old Horses.” Describing Ian in the verses and channeling him in the chorus, Tom lets us in on why Ian, well into his 80s, won’t give up the hard life on his Alberta ranch.

“The Sparrow of Swansea (For Dylan Thomas),” co-written by Katy Moffatt and recorded by her on the 1996 album Midnight Hotel, is an older song that Tom never released himself. But, in the context of the Folk Hotel, it’s one that needed to be here. It’s a lovely song – with harmony by Eliza Gilkyson – that captures the seemingly contradictory beauty of Thomas’ poetry and the rage of his alcoholism.

“All on a Belfast Morning,” introduced with the recitation of “He Stumbled Home from Clifden Fair” by Irish poet James H. Cousins, is a Tom Russell song steeped – like some of the songs Tom wrote for The Man from God Knows Where – in the Irish folk tradition. The alcohol that flowed through “The Sparrow of Swansea” is here, too, but, so, too is the wisdom of the poets and the Irish ballad singers.

In “Rise Again, Handsome Johnny,” Tom recalls a fleeting encounter he had as a young boy with presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960, the assassination of the president in 1963, and a high school football game he played that day. There’s an infectious Mississippi John Hurt vibe to the arrangement courtesy of Max de Bernardi’s fine fingerpicked guitar playing.

He doesn’t say so in the song, but I think the title protagonist in “Harlan Clancy” is one of those fed-up white voters in Ohio who probably supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but went for Donald Trump out of frustration in 2016. “I ain’t no racist, I ain’t no redneck,” sings the character as he explains his frustrations. Without specific reference to the Trump campaign, the song helps provide a measure of understanding of why some voters might have gone that way. (By the way, I’m writing this review the day after the racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and I’d like to think that the Harlan Clancys of this world would be appalled by what happened there and by Trump’s response.)

Tom relates a dream in “The Last Time I Saw Hank” in which imagined memories of Hank Williams and Jesus intermingle with real (or really possible) memories of George Jones and his parents.

“The Light Beyond the Coyote Fence” is a song from Tom’s life. The coyote fence describes the fence around Tom and Nadine’s new house in Santa Fe that is meant to keep the coyotes out and on “Some nights we can see light of fires as Indians dance/And the eyes of God shine through the coyote fence” – but, mostly, it’s a song about being a traveling folksinger, about what that lifestyle entails, and about the refuge from that lifestyle that the home inside the coyote fence represents.

I think “The Dram House Down in Gutter Lane” is the third part of a trilogy begun in “The Sparrow of Swansea” and “All on a Belfast Morning” that helps us understand the thin, fragile edge and human frailties that have defined so many.

It’s followed by a three-part track – a poem, a short song, and a standard-length song: “The Day They Dredged the Liffey/The Banks of Montauk/The Road to Santa Fe-O.” The poem is a tribute to Irish writers that, in four short verses, references James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and William Butler Yeats. The short song references the first cattle ranch in the United States (on Long Island of all places) and leads into a love song in which Tom uses the template of an old folk whaling ballad to describe meeting Nadine, the Swiss woman who became his wife, and their journey to a new home in Santa Fe.

In “The Rooftops of Copenhagen,” Tom describes observing a real-life character in a Copenhagen bar, hearing the guy’s story from a waitress, and then – 20 years later – finding out how the story ends.

The only non-original on Folk Hotel has Tom conversationally trading verses with Joe Ely on perhaps the most beautiful ever version of the Bob Dylan classic, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” Tom’s acoustic guitar and Joel Guzman’s accordion provide perfect backdrop.

The album ends with the epic “Scars on his Ankles,” a song about blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins, writer Grover Lewis, and the relationship shared by the older African American man and younger white man. Tom’s singing storytelling glides seemingly effortlessly for nine minutes on top of Max de Bernardi’s intense, Hopkins-styled playing on acoustic guitar.

Mike Regenstreif & Tom Russell (2012)

Tom Russell, as I’ve said many times before and will, no doubt, say again in the future, is the finest songwriter of my generation. He proves it, yet again, on Folk Hotel.

Folk Hotel will be released on September 8 but is now available for pre-order at Frontera Records. You can also order the companion book which contains all the lyrics, Tom’s thoughts on the songs, some stories from the Folk Hotel and Tom’s original paintings inspired by some of the residents.

I will be featuring several songs from Folk Hotel during a multi-artist feature on “Songs of Tom Russell” when I host the August 19 edition of the Saturday Morning show (7-10 am EDT) on CKCU. Listen live at 93.1 FM in Ottawa or live or on demand (after the live show) on the web at ckcufm.com.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

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.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--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