Music
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Zen country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore's music is "therapy for the world."
the last time I saw Jimmie Dale Gilmore, the most poetic and lovely country singer in America, he was playing on a little wooden stage hammered up on the perimeter of the walkway to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Just around the corner from Gilmore, 8,000 people were listening to Confederate Railroad, an indistinguishable group of guys in tight jeans with long shag haircuts, singing their current hit, “Simple Man,” a Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Well, I thought, here is American culture crystallized under the summer sun. The rare, original artist, enchanting a handful of fans with his heartbreaking, tender voice, is being drowned out by a bad ’70s cover song at a “Summer Country Festival” sponsored by Seagram’s.
“It was a little odd,” says Gilmore in a soft, slow Texas drawl when reminded of that moment. “But I’ve been playing for such a very long time that I have an extremely thick skin about all of that. I’m just so aware of how the music business works. There’s a small core of intense music lovers who seek out something special, but most people are happy to go along with the crowd.”
Mind you, Gilmore is not criticizing the folks who walked by him. “I mean, to tell you the truth, I’ve probably done that myself,” he says. “I bet I’ve walked right by somebody that years later I had the chance to hear in a different context and went, ‘Wow, this is great.’ “
But then, it would be out of character for the 51-year-old singer, whose marvelous fifth album, “Braver Newer World,” has just been released on Elektra, to criticize anyone.
Jo Carol Pierce, the first of Gilmore’s three wives and an idiosyncratic — not to mention outright randy — Texas singer and songwriter in her own right, has said that Gilmore “really is a true sweetheart. I don’t think that I’ve ever heard Jimmie say anything bad about anybody. . . . It’s a kind of sweetness in the genes, I think.”
That essential sweetness is transformed into tranquility, a cycle of yearning and acceptance, in Gilmore’s music. With a precise intelligence, he uses the perfect blend of Americana to bring his songs to life: melodies from country and western, rhythms from swing and rock ‘n’ roll, fills from folk and bluegrass. Gilmore’s voice, an eerie, plaintive, lyrical warble, can turn a single prosaic line like, “Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?” into a celebration of the city’s splendors and a lament for its discontents.
So many new country artists, either those who have risen through the ranks of Nashville, like Garth Brooks, or alternative rock, like Son Volt, sound like literary critics with guitars — their performances are glosses on their heroes. But Gilmore is the artist himself. His songs feel fully lived in, like a joyous Whitman stanza. To borrow a line from novelist Richard Powers, Gilmore’s voice sounds as if it had never “inflicted hurt, nor accepted hurt as this world’s last word.”
Ironically, the one false step in Gilmore’s career was the single that was supposed to be his breakthrough: his recording of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” from the 1993 album “Spinning Around the Sun.” The only contemporary singer capable of lowering listeners into the grave of Williams’ loneliness, Gilmore sounds stylized covering his mentor — precisely the opposite of how he sounds when he sings his own compositions or those by Joe Ely and Butch Hancock, friends from his native Lubbock, Texas.
Gilmore’s beautiful twang, for some reason, has remained off country radio and on the margins of commercial success. “There are a lot of program directors at country stations who are fans of mine,” he says. “And they have outright told me, right to my face, ‘I love your music, but we can’t play it because it’s just too different from what our audience is used to.’ It’s kind of a silly way for them to go about it, but it’s something I have to live with.
With his new album, “Braver Newer World,” Gilmore wanders even further afield. “I made a real deliberate decision to become a lot more experimental and get unshackled from the ‘country music’ label,” he says. “There are a lot of people who would like my music, but are turned off by the whole idea of country music. This time around, I wanted to show that I came from a more diverse background. I’ve always had every bit as much a love for rock and roll and blues, for Elvis, Chuck Berry and Robert Johnson, as I had for country.”
“Braver Newer World,” which was produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded in Los Angeles with such fine musicians as drummer Jim Keltner, is not a total departure from Gilmore’s previous work, however. The rockabilly may be a little more pronounced than the folk music, but the legendary artists who Gilmore has evoked since he formed his first band in Lubbock in the ’60s — Buddy Holly, Hank Snow, Roy Orbison — are still wandering through his rhythms and melodies.
Some of the album’s lyrics, particularly in “Borderland” and “Outside the Lines,” seem to acknowledge Gilmore’s position outside the mainstream. For example, when he sings “I painted myself into a corner/But footprints/Are just about to become part of my design,” he seems to be making peace with his place on the margins.
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “But my attitude, and I’ve had this attitude for a really long time, is I am a type of rebel, but I’ve never been an angry rebel. I’ve just gone my own way.
“See, I feel there’s a common humanity among everybody. But if your criticism of society is that it’s unfeeling and unresponsive and unpleasant, well, then, it’s sort of absurd to turn around and fight it with those very same approaches. I think being judgmental is about the worst thing anybody can be.
Gilmore’s background is as eclectic as his music. Part Irish, part Native American, Gilmore studied philosophy at Texas Tech. In 1974, after dropping out of college and going nowhere in local bands, Gilmore gave up music. For the next six years he lived in the Divine Light Mission in Colorado, where he was a disciple of the teenaged Guru Maharaji.
Feeling inspired to “integrate my spiritual life and life in music,” Gilmore returned to Texas. Although his personal turmoil wasn’t entirely behind him, he began to get his career on course, playing in clubs and bars in and around Austin, where he now lives.
His first two albums, “Fair and Square” and “Jimmie Dale Gilmore,” recorded in 1988 and 1989 for Oakland’s Hightone label, cast him as a staunchly traditional country singer. His next two albums, “After Awhile” and “Spinning Around the Sun,” recorded for Elektra, are fleshed out with a wider range of instrumentation, yet one which grants them an effortless grace.
Perhaps because of his spiritual background, Gilmore’s work is often labeled “Zen country music.” “I thought it was hilarious the first time I heard it,” he says. “But now it’s become a regular attachment. Technically, I’m not a Buddhist, but I’ve got so many friends who are, and I’ve been associated with it for so long, that people always call me that… I’m not ashamed of it, but it’s slightly inaccurate.”
Gilmore has been an avid reader since he was a teenager, when Somerset Maugham’s “A Razor’s Edge” was his favorite book. He is particularly drawn to science and comparative religion; after working his way through Einstein and immersing himself in Vedanta philosophy, he strives these days to keep up with the cosmologists who link quantum mechanics and Eastern philosophy.
“I love science,” he says. “I love the idea of knowing what’s cut-and-dried. What’s hard and fast and true. But when you get into the realm of feelings and emotions, well, that’s something that science can’t touch. And that realm is so much better expressed by metaphor and analogy. And in a lot of ways that’s the whole function of good songs. I sometimes see them as therapy for the world at large.”
Kevin Berger is the former features editor at Salon. More Kevin Berger.
Thank God, He’s a Country Boy
Sam Hurwitt reviews Lyle Lovett's album "The Road to Ensenada".
Lyle Lovett has for the last decade had the dubious honor
of being a country singer for people who hate country music. “Well then,”
it’s tempting to reply, “he can’t really be country.” Ah, but he is –
not the gaudy Nashville sort, but a simpler, down-home kind, with educated
forays into jazz and gospel and talking blues. He sings of the same
heartache and simple dreams that lie at the soul of the music but in more
reflective, eloquent terms. Like Sergio Leone, or Raymond Chandler, or
Ursula LeGuin, he works within a genre but produces work that transcends
it.
Sam Hurwitt is a regular contributor to Salon. More Sam Hurwitt.
Charlie Hunter
The Charlie Hunter Quartet, "Ready...Set...Shango!" (Blue Note)
it used to be that, among jazz instrumentalists, guitarists were the
most tempted to sin. In the ’30s, guitar had been a nearly superfluous
rhythm accompaniment in big bands. Charlie Christian introduced the
electric guitar and pickers would never again go unheard. Even so,
electricity was seen as a weakness, a vice, at least partly because
amplified saxophones and pianos were such ungainly creations. Generations
of jazz guitarists worked hard to sound as much as they could like loud
acoustic guitars — superclean timbre, distinct note phrasing, no more
sustain than a piano pedal would allow. Still, slipping that proud plug
into that warm socket always left the urge to crash and clang and howl and
. . . but what would Barney Kessel think?
Milo Miles' music commentary can be heard on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." He is a regular contributor to Salon More Milo Miles.
The Heartbeat of America
James Marcus reviews Bill Frisell's career in this edition of Sharps and Flats.
over
the last few years, it has become fashionable to refer to jazz as “America’s classical music.” The phrase has its fans, who like the upscale, gentrified ring of it, and its detractors, who see it as one more piece of cultural kowtowing. But if America does indeed have its own classical music, I think that the guitarist and composer Bill Frisell qualifies as one of its standard-bearers.
Not that Frisell’s work has any kissing-cousin relationship with the symphonic tradition. On the contrary, he draws most heavily on jazz, country and pop, and his guitar playing leans less toward Hindemith than Hendrix (and jazz master Jim Hall.) But Frisell’s music seems to have emanated straight from the depths of some national unconscious. It’s as grainy and elegant and indisputably American as the Walker Evans photos that adorn his recordings.
From where did this all-American sensibility spring? Frisell was born in Baltimore, grew up in Denver, and studied guitar at Berklee during the late 1970s. Once he moved to New York, his versatility made him a top-drawer sideman. His jazz chops were immaculate, but he could also summon up the kind of eardrum-busting aggressiveness that was part and parcel of the downtown scene.
Soon he was a featured performer in such hardcore ensembles as John Zorn’s Naked City (whose tendency to play at volume levels above the threshold of pain once made the critic Francis Davis consider a lawsuit.)
Frisell also recorded on his own throughout the 1980s, often in the company of drummer Joey Baron and bassist Kermit Driscoll. His early records give plenty of room to his distinctive, pedal-steel-like guitar, as well as showcasing his compositional gifts. But Frisell really hit his stride as a leader in 1993 with “Have A Little Faith,” a superlative assortment of American music, with cover versions of Aaron Copland and Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters and Charles Ives, John Phillip Sousa and (of course) Madonna. The band, which included Don Byron on clarinet and Guy Klucevsek on accordion, sounded
alternately stark and ravishing. And although several of the composers represented probably would have refused to shake hands with one another, Frisell gave them all the red-carpet treatment, banishing any distinction between high art and low.
Having tapped this vein of Americana, Frisell just kept going. “This Land” (1994) represented something of a follow-up, with a beefier ensemble and Frisell’s own compositions. A year later, he returned to a trio format to record accompaniments for several silent films by Buster Keaton, and he also contributed music for a mammoth, three-disk set of William Burroughs reading “Naked Lunch.”
Frisell’s latest release, “Quartet,” continues his journey into the
heart of the heart of the country, this time with a distinctly Wild Western accent. Again the leader has pared things down: along with his guitar, the disk features only Eyvind Kang on violin, Ron Miles on trumpet, and Curtis Fowkles on trombone. No drums, no bass. Think chamber music. More to the point, imagine the kind of chamber music that might complement the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton, this disk’s appropriately chosen cover boy.
Frisell never stoops to peddling nostalgia. Whenever the music veers toward folksy traditionalism, he gives it a firm shove in the opposite direction. On the opening cut, for example, Kang sketches out a pleasant, vaguely Appalachian-sounding melody on his fiddle. For the first minute you might think you’d wandered into Folk City, although the muted brass figures don’t exactly fit the bill. But then Frisell dive-bombs the performance with a screaming, feedback-laden guitar solo, and the brass players discard their mutes in a
hurry.
Similarly, Frisell produces two separate variations on “Deep In The Heart of Texas,” neither of which shows much in the way of family resemblance. The first, “In Deep,” is closer in feeling to the original, but its careening ensembles and Ron Miles’ slashing trumpet guarantee that it will never be heard at halftime in the Astrodome. The second, “Bob’s Monsters,” is an odd and
atmospheric piece, as lovely as anything the guitarist has done.
In the end, “Quartet” doesn’t manage to nudge aside “Have A Little Faith” as my all-time favorite Frisell. The idiosyncratic sound can wear thin after a while. In addition, much of the music was originally written for soundtracks–including an animated TV special of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”– and that may account for the emphasis on mood over melody. Still, it’s an original and beautiful disk, and like the rest of Frisell’s work, it deserves to resuscitate that much-maligned label, Made In America.
James Marcus is a critic, translator and novelist living in Portland, Oregon. He is a regular contributor to Salon. More James Marcus.
As nice as they wanna be
Milo Miles reviews The Fugees for Sharps and Flats.
in1990, the big-time public image of rap music was established: a row of nearly naked female butts on the cover of 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as They Wanna Be.” Scatter around some purloined Glock revolvers to symbolize Ice-T’s notoriously banned “Cop Killer,” and you have the rap scene as it has stayed, frozen, for years. Casual use of the term “rap” proves that, for people other than fans, the style means only “gangsta rap.” At the top of the pop charts, the subgenre aptly characterized by essayist Ellen Willis as “macho death culture” has dominated every other type of rap. Sensitive intruders like P.M. Dawn are the exceptions that prove the (harsh) rule.
Continue Reading CloseMilo Miles' music commentary can be heard on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." He is a regular contributor to Salon More Milo Miles.
Eclectic Light Orchestra
David Fenton reviews Beck's album "Odelay".
We loved you, Beck. But then, of course, we hated you. The massive about-face that spread through our ranks was as contagious as your famous refrain: “I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me.” We sang along happily when your rootsy folk-hop piqued our ravenous appetites for tasty hooks and catchy choruses. Then we shouted you down when you tried to teach us the Delta blues at Lollapalooza. We loved you, baby, when your cheesy iron-on retro-tees and shit-brown corduroy flares matched ours. Then we laughed in disgust when we saw your crooked teeth and realized that thrift stores were where you’d always shopped. We anointed you spokesman, you loser — we even called your song “anthem” — and then used the oil left over to lube up the waiting alternaculture grist-mill. And off you went, doe-eyed and laconic, acoustic guitar in hand and harmonica in mouth, right through our gunsights and into the sad, sad life of the one-hit wonder. Right?
Continue Reading CloseDavid Fenton is a regular contributor to Salon. More David Fenton.
Page 280 of 284 in Music
