When I wrote to tell Tom Russell that I found his "Hotwalker" album his best work yet and asked him how it was being received, he wrote back to say thanks, and said, "Not everybody gets it." One of the songs on the album, "Woodrow", a song that splatters red dirt and snake oil on to the airbrushed portrait of Guthrie that looks less like a man with every passing year, is featured in this new paganmaestro video. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was a real and complicated human being, and Russell's song does more than any to bring him back to life. Here's a review that came out in UNCUT magazine about the album...
A musical companion to Russell's forthcoming book Tough Company -- poetry, short stories and the collected correspondence between the LA-born songsmith and Charles Bukowski -- "Hotwalker" is a colossal achievement. Part Two of Russell's Americana trilogy that began with his own ancestral folk opera (1999's The Man From God Knows Where), this is a headlong journey into the soul of "the old America, where the Big Guilt, political correctness and chainstores hadn't sunk in so deep". Narrated and linked by Russell, it's the lost post-war landscape of Beat pioneers, outsider poets and drunken angels -- interspersed with snippets of Lenny Bruce, Bukowski, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, hobo composer Harry Partch, Edward Abbey and Kerouac.
Most strikingly, it's a carnival-midget speedfreak -- Little Jack Horton -- who plays Dean Moriarty to Russell's Sal Paradise. The pair first met on a circus train in the '70s. Horton's tall tales of lost weekends with Bukowski and stealing freight trains in the dead of night serve less as factual fodder than a musical voice on the scales of a disappearing world (indeed, Horton died shortly after his contributions here). The soundtrack is a grand sweep of American history: spooked parlour songs, Jesus ballads, loping carousel waltzes, Mexicali, raw folk-blues, country and squawking jazz. So a tough-love tribute to Dylan mentor and Greenwich Village Pope, Dave Van Ronk (with a snatch of the latter's "Sportin' Life Blues") nestles alongside "Bakersfield", a nod and a twang to Buck Owens, Gram Parsons and countless Okies "hopped up on moonshine and amphetamines". The reefer madness of "Border Lights" dives into "that delicious dark-eyed myth" of 1950s Mexico, high on cheap rum and forbidden dreams.
Russell gets stellar musical back-up from Gretchen Peters (particularly on poignantly-rendered closer, "America The Beautiful"), Fats Kaplin on fiddle, accordion and pedal steel and Andrew Hardin on guitar, streaming into the recorded consciousness of Kerouac reading "October In The Railroad Earth" and Bukowski doing "On The Hustle". They should seal this in a vault for posterity. (5 stars)
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83 videos
Boy, this brought up a well-spring of grief for the death of the dream of my grandparents and their parents and theirs before em. From Pennsylvania to Michigan and Ohio to Oklahoma out to California. Their bones lie underneath Walmarts and suburbs and banks that rob the people and hold them in bondage. The dreams and blood in our veins have been replaced with megabytes and fiber-optics and the dying wish of a lost generation has been paved over with Arabian asphalt. Who dreams anymore? Who?
MikeyRed76 7 months ago
Every American should be provided with this album by Tom, and "Rant in E-minor" by Bill Hicks upon graduating from high school. I think it would do wonders for this country.
recchem420 8 months ago
FANTASTIC !!!!! I have been wanting to attempt something like this ever since I heard "Woodrow" . I think it is one of Tom's greatest songs..., and you have certainly done it justice here.
sctr4230 11 months ago
great compilation !
quincydubois 11 months ago