| MEMORIES CAN WAIT
I mentioned in my end of year dispatch that I would be still discovering
missed musical treasures for years, just like every other year,
but a couple of ‘05 buried nuggets have already appeared that
are special enough to be worthy of your attention.
Musical memory is both a blessing & a curse,
a marvel but maddening, many of us have literally 1000s of lyrics,
riffs, beats, melodies & more stored in our mental jukebox,
it’s an iMind continuosly on random play. Out of the blue
or one note recognition, it’s often surprising how accurate
musical memory can be, not just the recalling of the sounds but
even the exact spaces in between. But every so often out will pop
a piece of music that you’ve never liked & thought that
you’d successfully avoided it’s pernicous puerile pop
bop, but it has somehow imprinted itself, almost against your own
will, onto your inner playlist. Weeds in the mind garden.
I recently had a positive experience of musical
memory, where I finally heard a piece of music again that I had
last heard 34 years ago & that had permanently been etched onto
my hard drive in my head ever since. So here’s the story.
After the success of “Easy Rider “, Peter Fonda was
able to write, direct & star in his own movie making debut “THE
HIRED HAND “, also starring his pal Warren Oates. Released
in 1971, he created an American art movie that was a hazy mystical
meditation on the nature of the western itself, stripped down, the
stillness, hardly anyone speaks, the shit & the grit, the dust
& the light, the primal themes of love, loyalty, sudden violence,
revenge, death & transcendence. And tying the whole thing together,
filling the spaces inside & out was the soundtrack, a haunting
elegant & elemental tapestry of guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica,
fiddle, Appalachian dulcimer, all put through a tube based echoplex
over an ancient Martin guitar. Both very much of this world &
yet strangely otherworldly. It was cosmic folk of the most high,
drifting in from another time & place, resonating into the deepest
areas of the subconcious, layer after layer of seemingly ancient
melancholy.
But the movie flopped in industry terms &
so was forgotten & relegated to the “failed noble experiment”
category. The soundtrack was never released. The master tapes lost
or destroyed. Turns out the record was alchemised by a guy called
BRUCE LANGHORNE, the only project under his own name, even though
he was a veteran of many recording sessions, most notably with Bob
Dylan on the Bringing It All Back Home & Pat Garrett & Billy
The Kid albums, as well as being the the real life inspiration for
Bob’s “Mr Tambourine Man .“ Great street cred,
& that may be why Peter Fonda approached Bruce to do the soundtrack
& supplied him video tapes to enable him to compose to. Which
is what he did, in his garage, with an assortment of instruments
& a 2 track tape recorder operated by his girlfriend. Seemingly
lost forever, the only record he ever made.
Fast forward to 2005 & the release of the
movie on DVD & finally the technology to be able to lift the
sound from the original film stripe & at last we have the release
for the first time of a psych/country/folk classic, years before
it’s time & place, predating Ry Cooder’s soundtrack
work by a decade & sounding so much akin to the current neo
folk movement. And it sounds exactly how I remembered it! It’s
short, only 25 minutes, but I always push repeat & immerse myself
in it’s mantric quality, each track is short, they emerge
out of silence & return to it, perfectly appropriate for the
shining stillness at the desolate heart of the soundtrack &
the film. Memorable.
Memory was at the heart of last year’s
Ry Cooder musicumentary Chavez Ravine, assembling musicians, documentary
footage, spoken word & samples as a lament & celebration
of a long gone Latino community that because of politics, corruption
& greed was bulldozed & destroyed in order to make way for
Shea Stadium. Ry created an indelible portrait of the loss not only
of place, but culture & tradition.
Celebrating & comemmorating not a time, place
or community but a number of rugged individuals who were out of
time & place, who broke traditions, rebels with a cause who
dared to express themselves in life & art to the full, singer
songwriter TOM RUSSELL’s HOTWALKER, subtitled Charles Bukowski
and a Ballad For America is a blend of music, spoken word &
Russell’s own inspired commentary that celebrates the post
World War 2 culture that bought us the voices of Bukowski, beat
writer Jack Kerouac, martyred comic Lenny Bruce, musician Ramblin
Jack Elliot, great American composer Harry Partch, mentor to Dylan
& many others Dave Van Ronk & circus performer & spruiker
Little Jack Horton, all represented in their own voices on this
disc along with Tom’s own recollections & journals of
the time. Russell befriended Charles Bukowski & corresponded
with him until his death as well as making a memorable visit to
Van Ronk’s pad & other first hand memories that he recounts
in his hickoried baritone. We will never see their like again seems
to be the message, like dinosaurs before the ice age, they loom
like giants from our distant past that make our current heroes seem
like puny pretenders.
It’s a hard bitten, unsweetened requiem
to ideas & character that unless it is remembered will be forgotten
forever. There are no monuments or museums, just memories to these
ideas. Like music.
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