fri 29/03/2024

On the Road With Tom Russell, Last American Songwriter | reviews, news & interviews

On the Road With Tom Russell, Last American Songwriter

On the Road With Tom Russell, Last American Songwriter

Peter Culshaw takes the cowboy train with Russell and Ramblin' Jack Elliott

Tom Russell is, certainly geographically, the last great American songwriter. His adobe ranch-house is perched as far west in Texas as you can go, near El Paso and just over the border from the Mexican town of Juarez. Russell approves of the saying, “If you can’t piss in your front porch, you are living too close to town”.

Little known in the UK, the 56-year-old has put out 25 albums and built himself a formidable reputation as a songwriter in the States. He has made several records of cowboy music, but has also strayed way off beam with a “folk opera” called The Man from God Knows Where and his Hotwalker from 2005, a kaleidoscopic account of low-lifes, circus dwarves, Mexican music and reminiscences about growing up in Los Angeles in the Fifties and Sixties (his father, he says, was a “horse-trainer, land-developer and jailbird - a typical American dreamer”).

This week sees the release of his new album Blood and Candle Smoke, maybe his best yet. It’s an old-style 12-track album, which works as a kind of song cycle. It kicks off with “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam” with Russell reminiscing about his days in Nigeria at the tail end of the Sixties during the Biafran War where he taught on a grant, a “moveable feast of war and memory, a dark old lullaby”. The album namechecks several of Russell’s heroes including Hank Williams, Nina Simone, the hi-life guitarist Sir Victor Uwaifo and Graham Greene, Russell’s “favourite English writer”. Several tracks are written as if from Greene-land, what with its moral ambiguity and porous borders - Mexico and the States, good and evil, sin and redemption.

What really works with the songs are the backing from local Texan heroes Calexico, with trumpet and accordions resulting in what Russell calls a “world-mariachi” style. There are numerous lines that that jump out. Here are a couple. “When you’ve only got one headlight/ And you’ve lost your appetite for idle dreaming” from the final song “Darkness Visible”; “There are ghosts out in the rain tonight,/ High up on those ancient trees” on “Guadelupe”, a powerful song written after a visit to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadelupe. “I was moved by the spirit of the Indians that were coming in there,” says Russell, “wishing in a way that I had that passionate spirit... I think I’m really stepping forward into a bigger, broader world with this album.”

When first I met Russell in 2004 he picked me up from El Paso airport in a beat-up truck and took me to his ranch - “I love the dry heat and the way the light changes here” - which is decked out with Indian rugs (one of his best-known songs is called “Navajo Rug”), religious icons and a battered grand piano. Then there’s his Martin guitar, which has a bullet-hole in the back (“Some asshole shot his pistol at it when I was working in a carnival in Puerto Rico.”)

There is a New Yorker cartoon attached to his fridge, which says, “Don’t get me wrong - I’m pro crazy bitches.” Now he's fine (and recently happily remarried) but he tells me about a bad crack-up some years back. "They locked me up as a hopeless psycho in a dilapidated dry-out hospital out in the desert. I had not slept for a year. I broke out once and five huge Mexicans ran after me and stomped me into the park lot. They needed my money - they planned on keeping me there forever. Finally the place was closed by the board of health and I got out, and got better. It took six months.”

There’s also the Matador Room, where he has mounted the head of a bull from the Juarez bullring (“He must have been a brave bull because his ears are missing”), and a library with “everything ever written in English about bullfighting” (including Lady Bullfighter, the story of the first female bullfighter Patricia McCormick).

Indeed, he’s tried his hand at bullfighting and has had trips to Spain to improve his skills as a matador. After a day at a rodeo and much talk about the elegance of lasso work and the art of rodeo-riding (his brother is a professional), Russell told me his plan for a train ride across Canada, from Vancouver, where he started his career as a musician, to Toronto. He would invite leading cowboy musicians including Don Edwards, Paul Zarzyski and Ramblin' Jack Elliott - whom he described as “a piece of American history, a walking icon of modern folk art”.

He complained that Nashville had abandoned the western element of what used to be country and western. “Now they are only interested in crossover artists like Garth Brooks to sell to golfers - it’s pretty much corporate bullshit. Fuck Nashville, man.” The train would be a great celebration of the beating heart of cowboy music.

So what exactly is cowboy music? “Much of it was Scottish and Irish tunes given new lyrics about Jesse James or something,” says Russell. “There was also a big Mexican influence with the guitar.” Just as much of the mythology of the Wild West “was created by travelling shows such as Buffalo Bill’s 80 years ago”, the most famous cowboy singers were made by Hollywood - Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Go on the train, Russell told me, and I’d see the real, unvarnished, deal.

Vancouver, day 1

It’s raining, but Russell wants to show me the Skid Row dive where he played in the Seventies, when they “had snake acts, topless and bottomless bars, cheap hotels where old sailors came to die.” Vancouver is a beautiful city but this part of town is full of skanky-looking prostitutes and hopeless homeless types living in boxes in alleyways. Russell shows me where the Smiling Buddha club was: “What they used to call a knife and gun club - people would get rolled for money in front of you. One of the most tragic things was the Native Americans drunk and lost.”

So was he a middle-class kid from California slumming it for fodder for songs? “I was middle-class but then one day Dad walked in and said, ‘We’ve lost it all.’ The next day they towed away the Cadillac, so we went from middle- to lower-class in one day. Dad did jail time for misappropriating huge amounts of money and we moved in with Grandma.”

Russell tells me he’s done something really drastic. He’s given up drinking - this from a man who told me in El Paso that the "secret of life is good tequila."

We are relieved to escape and in the evening board the train, which boasts gorgeous 1950s stainless-steel cars and a “Bullet Lounge”. There is a diverse selection of cowboy music-lovers on the train: a lawyer from Alaska, a couple from Las Vegas, others from Ireland and Cornwall. I’d love to say we were attacked by Indians, but this is a pretty well-heeled, civilised gathering - not surprising with tickets for the trip costing nearly $2,000.

We are directed to our quarters - I’m sharing a sleeper cabin with Tommy, a would-be cowboy from Finland, who has his hat and guitar primed for action. After dinner is served in the dining car, we all squeeze into a car that has been set up as a performance space and each of the acts that Russell has invited to join this journey plays a short set.

Wylie Gustafson and his band, the Wild West are this evening’s highlight, playing cowbilly songs from his latest album Hooves of the Horses. Gustafson lives in Dusty, Washington (population 11), where he and his wife tend a small herd of cattle and some Appaloosa horses (they’re America’s spotted breed). He is a champion roper, having won first prize at a Reba McEntire Rodeo competition.

On the train, day 2

We awake to the extraordinary sight of Mount Robson, the highest peak of the Rockies. It’s snowing and bleak and magnificent. We roll past Glacier Creek and Yellowhead Lake into the small town of Jasper, where we get out and stretch our legs. “It is not unusual to see elk and mule deer casually stroll down Main Street,” says the guide book, but they seem to be on holiday.

A big part of the train experience is the afternoon workshop run by Tom’s guitarist, Andrew Hardin, who seems to be able to play anything. Passengers come up and play their songs with him to an appreciative audience. Tommy from Finland is there every day - and he’s good.

Hardin met Russell when they were both briefly taxi-drivers in New York in the early Eighties. Tom had almost given up on a music career when he happened to pick up Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and sang him his song “Gallo del Cielo”. Hunter was so impressed that he hired Russell to open for him at the Lone Star Café. Russell called up Hardin and they have played together ever since. They are an odd couple - Hardin thin, lanky and quiet, Russell well-built and extrovert. They could probably make it as a comedy duo if the music career falters.

Russell has his own advice for aspiring songwriters: “Go get a job in a bar and learn 10 Hank Williams songs. Get lost in Mexico. Songwriting is about building on your roots then finding out who you are... and writing down to the blood and bones. You wanna sell out and stand in line with the other zombies? There are buses bound for Austin and Nashville and Toronto every hour. The promised land? It’s the dead fucking the dead... in a vacuum, to quote Bukowski.”

Later, he says the Americana and “alternative country” scene has “become as watered-down and phony as mainstream country and only a few souls survive. When’s the last time you heard a song that would give you the chills?”

That night, after we have stopped at the Godforsakenly barren station at Edmonton and are rolling in the Alberta dark towards Saskatchewan, Russell plays some rocking songs from his recent album, Indians, Cowboys, Horses, Dogs, including “Tonight We Ride” (which he played on David Letterman’s show - Letterman called it “music for horse-rustlers from Montana”). He sings a couple of songs from this Love and Fear album - including an extraordinary song recounting the tale of Mexicans who try to steal electricity from power lines and often end up electrocuted, but “the laws of nature say you get nothin' for free/ And love is like stealing electricity”. Then there is a Hank Williams jam session with everyone joining in for “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Lost Highway”. Russell says Hank is “the be-all and end-all... the hillbilly Shakespeare”, and a key influence on the likes of Bob Dylan, as was Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

It would take several books to tell the story of Ramblin' Jack’s life - he’s a kind of Zelig figure, popping up at key moments in music for more than half a century. Now aged 74, he’s been an aspiring cowboy all his life, and sang cowboy songs on the streets of Paris in the Fifties. He has also been a sailor (he once steered a nuclear submarine) and a pilot. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he ran away to a rodeo after seeing Gene Autry, the actor and cowboy singer, at Madison Square Gardens. Having heard Woody Guthrie on the radio, Elliott sought him out and ended up staying with him for two years and started life as a performer as a Guthrie copyist. He came to England during the skiffle craze and was briefly famous.

Back in the States in 1958, he got to know well all the Beats, from William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who read him On the Road. The Beats accused Elliott of stealing their girls - even Ginsberg, famously gay, said Elliott took “the only girl I ever loved”. Mama Cass later called him “the sexiest man alive”. When Bob Dylan emerged, some accused him of stealing from Ramblin' Jack. “There were a lot of people who tried to get me angry about that,” he says now. “'He’s stealing the wind out of your sails.' But I had plenty of wind left. Besides, I was flattered. Dylan learnt from me in the same way I learnt from Woody - and he said, ‘If you want to learn something, just steal it.’”

Dylan invited Elliott on his Rolling Thunder Review tour in 1975, together with Joan Baez, Ginsberg and many more; he says it was the only time he’s ever travelled first class, or had his guitar tuned by someone else. Before that he was even, briefly, almost a member of the Velvet Underground, when, along with Lou Reed and John Cale, he would back Nico at her solo shows after she left the band. “I was enchanted by Nico, although she told me she was in love with someone else, so there was no hope. I did get a cheque for $75 signed by Andy Warhol. Maybe I shouldn’t have cashed it. I didn’t like them much - they were the opposite of the ‘fresh air and sunburnt faces of the cowboys’.”

The nickname Ramblin' is not a reference to rootlessness, but to his habit of randomly jumping from one subject to another. His introductions usually last longer than the songs themselves. Only loosely based on reality, they are impossible to transcribe. On the first night on the train he told a story about running late for a gig, how he was so tired he let his dog Caesar drive for him while he slept, and ended up phoning in his performance from a call box in the middle of nowhere, while a distraught promoter held a mic to the phone.

Tom Russell recalls seeing Ramblin' Jack at the Ash Grove club in 1962 in Los Angeles. “Sometimes he’d come out on stage and never sing a song. He’d rap for 40 minutes. He must have been the first cowboy rap artist.” The second night, I share a late-night brandy with Elliott. He tells me that he simply never had the drive to make it big in the way Dylan or even Russell have. His only regrets are that he hadn’t been a better father to his daughter and that he hadn’t been a better son to his parents, who were understandably confused by their son’s waywardness. “They wanted me to be a surgeon. The gap between us was too wide. I was grumpy and rebellious and treating them like a bunch of imbeciles.”

He mentions how much he misses his wife, who died four years ago. “Break-ups can be life-threatening,” he says. We are skating on thin emotional ice and about to get very maudlin, when Jack goes off on a tangent about a couple of girls he met at a petrol station in Arkansas in 1964 and one of them looked like a baby seal and the other had a yellow jumper, which reminds him of another story...

I have my own moment in the limelight that night - summoned onto the little stage in the performance car by Russell during a version of his song about the border town of Juarez, when it was a place that Americans could grab a quick divorce (Marilyn Monroe divorced Arthur Miller there). Back then it was on the Rat Pack circuit. I’d been feeling a bit of an outsider among the cowboy music fanatics, but luckily I know the chorus (“Everything’s gone straight to hell/ Since Sinatra played Juarez”) and the audience reaction is more than enthusiastic. I feel I’m part of the gang. I even seem to be wearing a cowboy hat. Maybe I too could be a rancher in Montana, plucking a guitar on my porch as the sun goes down.

On the train, day 3

We pass through 1,000 miles of almost uninhabited terrain before reaching Winnipeg, which is depressing thanks to the incessant snow. In the 1850s this was where Sir George Simpson, the “Little Emperor”, reorganised the fur trade and became one of the richest and powerful men in the Americas as head of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The key was to find the routes through the Rockies, which the Native Americans knew. When the railway line was constructed in 1885, it was called “an act of insane recklessness”, but it was the railway which united the coasts and drove economic progress in Canada.

I talk to Don Edwards, a gentlemanly troubadour, who as well as putting out albums like Saddle Songs and A Prairie Portrait, songs from which he performed on the train, is something of a historian and musicologist. He has learnt many of the tunes collected by the likes of John Lomax in the early part of the 20th century, including a number by Charles “Badger” Clark, whose name is mentioned with awe several times on the train. Edwards is the son of a vaudeville magician and part owner of the White Elephant saloon in Fort Worth. He explained, if I understood correctly, that the Civil War (“the War of Southern Independence as we like to call it”) left ranches in the south deserted, after their owners died, and cattle there had to be driven along trails towards the north.

The train’s resident poet, Paul Zarzyski, a former rodeo-rider and rancher, echoed Edwards’s point. “They pushed the cattle north and started fencing the cowboy in - so the day they put up the first strand of barbed wire was the beginning of the end [of the Wild West] really.” Zarzyski purveys semi-comic Kiplingesque cowboy poems of the old school, but also performs free verse, symbolic pieces like “All This Way for the Short Ride” about a friend’s death at a Spokane rodeo. The short ride of the rodeo rider, only a few seconds at best, becomes a meditation on mortality. And if that suggests these cowboy types are a long way from the Republican good ol' boys stereotype, my conversations on the train bear this out. “You cannot get any more left-wing than me,” says Zarzyski. “We’re independent,” adds Bill Farr, another working cowboy. “No one’s gonna tell us what to think".

But Farr did feel the old lifestyle was under threat, with fewer and fewer working cowboys. This sense of a lifestyle under attack, almost disappearing, is pervasive - but the cowboys are fighting back. The town of Elko, Nevada, stages an annual big cowboy poetry-and-song gathering, which seems to get bigger every year (10,000 people made it this spring). In fact, if you want to see real cowboys these days you would be better off looking in Mexico, Brazil or even Mongolia. The cowboys are symbolic of a disappeared, authentic America, of self-sufficient individualists. Most of us on the train were not cowboys at all. But as the teenage Ramblin' Jack was once told at a rodeo, “It’s not where you come from that matters, it’s where you are going to."

The final night is a cowboy celebration - too much to drink, flirtations, things better left unsaid, jam sessions and poker games till the small hours. I end up talking to Tom Russell about Dylan. “I met him a few times when he played the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Next time he came back, he was a star.”

In the hungover morning, the train rolls into Toronto. “The ride was a blur of great songs and wild landscape and flashing moments.” So says Russell afterwards. “Old freight trains with graffiti coupling in the middle of the night somewhere in outlander Ontario. Dark frozen moments. A dream." We rode, or flew, off into the sunset - with Ramblin' Jack spotted singing “Old Shep” at the departure lounge of Toronto airport. The camaraderie that had built up on the train felt deep and genuine. We were a group of desperadoes, pitted against a corporate music business that refuses to value the authentic cowboy soul of America.

A Yahoo user-group still sends me emails several times a week with news of other gatherings - in particular the rabbit that Charlie, the trip’s organiser, pulled out of his Stetson on the last day. He announced that there will be another cowboy train ride next year: leaving Tucson, Arizona for the Mexican coast and the Copper Canyon and Sierra Madre, allowing participants to hang with some Tuhamara Indians. Hasta luego, vaqueros.

  • Blood And Candle Smoke is released on Proper. Buy it here.
  • www.tomrussell.com. Tom Russell tours the UK in January 2010. Details here.

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