Tom Russell – October in the Railroad Earth

TOM RUSSELL

October in the Railroad Earth

Frontera

tomrussell.com

fronterarecords.com

On Hotwalker, an album released in 2005, Tom Russell mixed original songs, poetry, stories and rants with the recorded voices of Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Lenny Bruce, Dave Van Ronk and others into a brilliantly conceived and executed audio collage that delved into lost or dimly remembered aspects of American culture – what Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan, referred to as the “old weird America.”

Much of Tom’s work since then, including October in the Railroad Earth, yet another great album from the songwriter I consider to be the finest of my generation – the generation that came after groundbreakers like Dylan and Tom Paxton – has continued to be inspired by that faded American culture. Tom refers to this album as “Jack Kerouac meets Johnny Cash in Bakersfield” – a good description.

The album opens with the title track, a tribute to Kerouac, that takes its title from one of the beat writer’s prose poems – a short excerpt of it was included on Hotwalker – on which Tom references Kerouac’s days as a railroad brakeman in San Francisco and ultimately as the creator of one of the most important bodies of work in 20th century literature. The Bakersfield-style arrangement features Bill Kirchen on lead guitar and Marty Muse on pedal steel.

“Red Oak Texas” is one the most poignant songs I’ve heard in years. It tells a sad and true story of twin brothers from that small Texas town who went off to war in the Middle East and came home only to lose their battles with PTSD when they couldn’t leave the war behind.

“Isadore Gonzalez,” an infectious Tex-Mex corrido featuring Los Texmaniacs members Max Baca on bajo sexto and Josh Baca on accordion, tells the story – also true – of a Mexican cowboy who was part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late-1880s and who died when his horse fell on him during a show in England. Tom wrote the song from Gonzalez’s perspective singing from beyond the grave.

Other favorites include “T-Bone Steak and Spanish Wine,” a piece about Tom’s visit to a restaurant in Northern California where he’d gigged at back in 1981 and the nostalgic evening he spent there with the owner singing old songs and eating the same special – a T-bone steak with Spanish wine – that was on the menu almost four decades ago; “Hand-Raised Wolverines,” in which he recalls encountering “semi-tame” wolverines at a game park in Alberta; and “Back Streets of Love,” featuring Eliza Gilkyson’s harmony vocals, a beautiful love song with modern technological references.

Tom Russell & Mike Regenstreif (2018)

Along with 10 of his own songs – one co-written with his wife Nadine Russell – Tom ends the album with a great version of the traditional folk song, “Wreck of the Old 97,” that he says he learned as a kid from Johnny Cash’s first record. I remember Tom singing it in tribute to Cash at a gig in Montreal about a week after he died in 2003.

Virtually every album Tom has released over the past three decades has ended up at or near the top of my best-of list for the year. Less than three months into 2019, I suspect that will be the case for October in the Railroad Earth come December.

Watch the trailer for October in the Railroad Earth.

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–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 -- 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