TOM RUSSELL
The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder
Sunsets
Frontera Records
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
