West Texas rivers & wind-blown campfire tunes

(From November 2000)

By Peter Blackstock

Driving west on I-10 from Austin, the desert creeps up on you, gradually revealing itself mile after mile after mile until the entire landscape has changed. The winding rivers, lazy lakes, scrubby trees and colorful flowers of the Texas Hill Country finally give way to barren creekbeds, rocky outcroppings, desolate plains and various forms of cacti.

The transformation somehow seems as spiritual as it is physical. The world exists on a different plane: broader in scope, wider in space, deeper in soul. Here in the heart of West Texas, everything truly is bigger.

Biggest of all is the Rio Grande, and nowhere is it so grand as in Big Bend National Park, so named for the gargantuan turn the river takes as it winds through a series of deep canyons on the border of Texas and Mexico, a couple hundred miles southeast of El Paso and Juarez. Though Texas isn’t generally known for its mountains, several peaks in the park are quite impressive, rising to nearly 8,000 feet from a much lower base than, say, the Colorado Rockies, which sprout from a mile-high boost.

Hiking trails and campgrounds are plentiful throughout the park, but it’s the river that rules this region, providing a major recreational draw for adventure seekers in the Southwest and beyond. About a half-dozen companies operate raft trips on the Rio Grande, ranging from day or weekend trips through the three main canyons (Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas) to weeklong excursions through the Lower Canyons.

One company in particular has carved out a unique niche in the market by combining the rugged splendor of Texas geography with the ragged glory of Texas music. Far Flung Adventures, based in the tiny ghost town of Terlingua just outside the park, regularly offers three-day/two-night trips in which a renowned Texas singer-songwriter comes along for the ride and performs intimate campfire concerts for the rafters.

Those who have participated in Far Flung’s river music series over the past decade include such marquee names as Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Robert Earl Keen, Tish Hinojosa, Darden Smith and Peter Rowan. The unrivaled stars of the series, however, are Steven Fromholz and Butch Hancock, whose lives have been significantly redirected by the pull of the river.

Fromholz inaugurated the series in the late ’80s and was so taken by the experience that he eventually became a trained boatsman as well, and set up a part-time residence in Terlingua (his primary home is in Austin). Hancock followed suit shortly thereafter, becoming a music-trip regular in the late ’80s and earning his oarsman credentials in the early ’90s before finally heeding Big Bend’s call completely and relocating from Austin to Terlingua in 1996.



The move marks a full-circle evolution of sorts in Hancock’s life cycle. Raised in Lubbock and a member of the pioneering band the Flatlanders in the early ’70s (along with Ely and Gilmore), Hancock moved to Austin in the mid-’70s shortly after recording his first album, West Texas Waltzes And Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes. He released about a dozen records of varying textures and tones during his two decades in Austin, but 1997’s You Coulda Walked Around The World revisits the rustic simplicity of his debut, a solo recording of just guitar, vocal and harmonica.

Lyrically, Hancock has replanted himself firmly in West Texas soil as well, which is what makes his music so ideally suited to Far Flung’s river excursions. His words echo in seemingly every experience of the adventure. Driving the back roads of Lajitas to the put-in point, the chorus of “This Old Dirt Road” comes to mind; the border adventure tale of “Leo y Leona” practically provides a plot map to the area; “Barefoot Prints” ponders the reflections of moonlight, sunlight and starlight on the Rio Grande.

Starlight, coincidentally, is where our journey begins — at the Starlight Theatre, which sits next to Far Flung’s headquarters in the heart of “downtown Terlingua” (consisting only of those two facades and a gift shop). Having set out from Austin around dawn on a Thursday in mid-November, my father and I pull into Terlingua shortly after dusk (”You can drive all day and never leave Texas,” another of Hancock’s lyrics reminds) and drift into the Starlight, which functions as a restaurant and bar in addition to presenting occasional musical and theatrical events.

Across the room I happen to spot Joe Nick Patoski, a senior editor for Austin-based Texas Monthly magazine who’s in the area researching an article. Presently he’s joined by Fromholz, who informs us that our river trip with Hancock will be greatly enhanced by the ever-entertaining guidesmanship of Gary “Catfish” Callaway. We meet Callaway the next morning and instantly appreciate Fromholz’ assessment: “They call me Catfish because my mouth is bigger than my brain. And the fact that I just told you that proves that it’s true!”

Soon enough, however, Catfish’s considerable wisdom of his domain becomes evident. An outdoorsman and river guide for three decades and a minority owner of Far Flung, he knows the Rio Grande intimately, from its habits to its habitat to its history. As he rows our boat of five — Catfish, my father and me, and another father-son pair from Houston — downstream with breezy deliberation, he identifies bird species and rock formations, recalls floods and other incidents that altered the form of the river’s banks and rapids, and continually curses the tamarisk trees whose byzantine root structures drain water from the river at an alarming rate.

Drifting along lazily behind us, barely visible amidst a barricade of supplies surrounding him on his raft, is Hancock, who’s serving as cargo crew as well as campfire balladeer for our journey. Occasionally Catfish will nod back in the direction of Butch, careful to be out of earshot so as not to embarrass him, and marvel about how that guy in the trailing boat happens to be one of the great songwriters of our time.

Soon enough we’re treated to firsthand evidence of that assessment. After pitching our tents at the Friday night campsite and devouring a hearty steak dinner (Far Flung feeds folks mighty well on these trips), we gather around the fire, hoping that a threatening sky will hold off long enough to allow Butch to play a few tunes. (The story’s often told of how, around ten years ago, Hancock played his song “Just One Thunderstorm” one evening at a Rio Grande campsite and, on cue, the heavens opened forth and poured.)

The rain mostly holds off on this night, though a light drizzle eventually prompts us to scoot a few feet under the tarp protecting the makeshift kitchen. Playing for an hour or so, Hancock treats us to classics from his past such as “If You Were A Bluebird”, Terlingua-inspired tunes from his most recent album including “Long Sunsets”, and even a couple new numbers he hasn’t yet recorded. Those who have caught Hancock in the cozy confines of the Cactus Cafe in Austin might assume they’ve heard him in the ideal environment, and they’d almost be right — but nothing could ever transcend the experience of Butch’s songs rambling along the river’s banks, rolling upon its rippling waters, reverberating off its colossal canyon walls.

We don’t actually enter the majestic Santa Elena Canyon until the following afternoon, having spent the first day following the river’s twists and turns through the mesa-pocked frontier of the Chihuahua desert. We stop for lunch at the entrance to the canyon, taking a relatively short but awe-inspiring hike up a fairly steep trail leading to the canyon’s precipice. Peering one direction, down into the chasm created by the sheer cliffs on both sides, ignites the nerves with dizzying wonder; gazing another direction, across the vast cactus-covered playas of Mexico, beckons the soul to the edge of eternity.

We spend Saturday night deep within the canyon, chilled and whipped by a whistling wind that quickly renders our nice hot dinner less than lukewarm. This is, after all, West Texas, a place where “the wind is gonna blow tomorrow, just like it blows today,” as Hancock sings on “Wind’s Gonna Blow You Away”. The natives have long since learned to weather the elements, and Butch has no problem keeping us up for quite awhile, regaling us with the misadventures of “Split & Slide” (”Well Split he slipped and started to slide/And Slide he slipped and split his side”) and the simple wisdom of “Chase” (”You might chase a tune/You might chase the muse/You might chase the moon/You might chase the blues”). Finally, and fittingly, Hancock leaves the music to be carried away on “The Wind’s Dominion”.

Sunday morning, only a short float remains through the rest of the canyon to our early-afternoon takeout point, though it’s probably the most scenically spectacular portion of the trip, the canyon’s walls towering ever higher and revealing formations such as Smuggler’s Cave, a giant hole in the wall on the Mexican side. Then it’s out of the long shadows and back into the bright sunlight, Santa Elena’s tight fortress receding abruptly and giving way once more to the desert’s endless horizon.

Driving back to Austin, watching the parched plains transmute back into rolling hills mile after mile after mile, I recall all those treks across I-10 I’d made in my younger days, and how hard it always was to readjust to urban civilization after spending a few days amid the soul-stirring nature of this country. As usual, another song of Hancock’s — this time it’s “Texas Air” — comes to mind, and captures the feeling exactly:

Leave my spirit on the prairie
Bury my bones in the sand
Toss my troubles to the western wind
Baby it’s a wide, wide land.

Why the very last R.E.M. song means so much to me.

By Peter Blackstock

That it was R.E.M.'s time to say goodbye came as no surprise. Thirty years in, eleven years beyond the timeline they'd once vowed to follow, a tenure without Bill Berry approaching the tenure they'd had with him: It was time, if not past time. There had been reasons to keep going, for better and for worse, but the end was always near. And so it was here. We knew, understood, accepted.

As it happens, there was a farewell note left on the mantle. It's called "We All Go Back To Where We Belong", and I find myself drawn to it much more than I'd imagined was possible, at this late date in a lifetime relationship with a band long taken for granted. As the title suggests, it harkens back to the beginning, a reminder of why such alchemy had first coalesced, of where it all flowed from. Which is not to say it's retro: R.E.M. circa Chronic Town would not have been capable of this particular shade of accumulated beauty. The unapologetic gracefulness, the sympathetic twinges of strings and horns, the clarity of message and purpose....these are the full blooms from wisdom gained along the way.

But the artistic impulse, the underlying current of emotion -- that carries over, and connects 1980 to 2011. Then, as now, the pull of a melody divines the direction. It's the feel of the sound that determines the words. And so "I could live a million years" bridges over three decades into "I will write our story in my mind."

The poetry always mattered, even when the words were elusive. They became clearer over time; that clarity sharpens to its finest point in this final address. "This might be my innocence lost." "I can taste the ocean on your skin." "I woke up thinking we were free."

And the answer to the end of this band, fittingly, comes in the form of a question: "Is this really what you want?"

We all, ultimately, must ask this of ourselves. Where we proceed from that reckoning is up to us. And yet, the nature of the past exerts its power over the future: "We all go back to where we belong." This is not as reactionary as it sounds. "Things don't change, they never have," a contemporary of R.E.M. used to sing. But the meaning, really, was: Things don't change, they're not so bad.

And so it follows that this "going back to where we belong" is not so bad, either. R.E.M.'s final offering is the perfect closer to my 2011 year-end collection of songs, but if you play this collection on a loop, it feeds right back into the opening track, "Burning Up The Sky," delivered in the same key by a twenty-something band called the Parson Red Heads. On the heels of R.E.M.'s end-of the-road concluding statement, the Parsons reopen the dialogue with wide-eyed wonder: "We are living, living in a new age, living in a new age, kicking up the dust."

As I write this, there is a picture on my laptop screen of a breathtaking midsummer sky -- layered shades of grayish blue, brilliant red and glowing orange reflected upon the waters of Liberty Bay, against a silhouette of evergreen trees, a lonely rooftop, and a hillside speckled with the scattered lights of town, stretching out across the horizon. It looks for all the world like a heart-stopping sunset. But, in fact, it was taken just before the dawn.

"There wasn't even time to say, Goodbye to R.E.M...."

September 21, 2011, 5:05 pm

I hadn't seen the news until late this afternoon; been busy today with an extensive project that, coincidentally, included writing a little bit about a side-project of R.E.M. Just three days ago, I'd posted to Facebook about Sept 18th marking 28 years since the first time I saw them play. (At the old Austin Opera House.)

Fair to say they changed my life in a pretty major way. My early experience is much like what others have recounted, in terms of hearing something in their music that started them down a new path. I think that's why they were such a big deal for a long while, and so influential -- because a whole lot of folks our age told that same story. They were largely responsible for my first giving a chance to music that was outside the mainstream.

They were my favorite band throughout the 1980s, with the possible exception of 10,000 Maniacs (who I discovered in part through R.E.M.) and the Austin band Zeitgeist (all of whom held R.E.M. in high esteem). Seemingly everyone I knew at the time placed them on a pedestal, sort of shared with the Replacements, but with an appreciation fully for the art of the music (whereas the Replacements' legend was partly tied to drunken antics, alongside some seriously great songs). A phone interview with Peter Buck for an Austin American-Statesman preview of their March 1989 Erwin Center concert was kind of a rite of passage for me; I'd probably never been so nervous for an interview, but he turned out to be really easy to talk to.

Fate intervened in the '90s. In the fall of 1991 I moved from Austin to Seattle, and, lo and behold, who shows up in town the following summer but R.E.M., doing some work at a local studio on what became Automatic For The People. Buck (recently divorced) fell in love with the city, and most specifically with the owner of the cool local nightclub, the Crocodile Cafe. He moved to Seattle, taking up residence in a house within shouting distance to Kurt & Courtney's place down the hill.

We ended up more or less in the same circle of friends, largely via Crocodile Cafe booker Scott McCaughey, who eventually was enlisted into R.E.M.'s lineup at the tail end of 1994. Sometime around then, a friend of mine named Gary Heffern decided to record a song I wrote on an album he was doing for a small German label; Gary had a way of enlisting anyone and everyone to play on his records, and so it was that Peter Buck ended up playing bouzouki on a song I wrote. (Still kinda freaks me out to this day.)

McCaughey's first tour with the band was in January 1995 in Australia. Realizing I could tag along for a few days and sleep on the floor in Scott's hotel room, I booked a flight to Sydney and caught the band's three shows there plus one in Adelaide. The last night in Sydney is the one I remember the most; we went to some seaside park late at night after the show, and Mike Mills was pointing out to everyone where the Southern Cross was in the sky. At some point, Bill Berry and I were tossing a frisbee back and forth on the grass, basking in the balmy January summer night on the other side of the world. I didn't really get a chance to know Bill but he sure seemed like a good guy; I was horrified when I heard about him collapsing onstage in Switzerland two months later and nearly dying from a brain aneurysm. I think he did the right thing by calling it quits shortly after that, but the band was never quite the same.

Our paths crossed in Vienna in the fall of 1998, where I caught them at a live-radio performance, but after I moved to North Carolina, I didn't see them again until they came through the Triangle in the fall of 2003. They had a day off in town the night before the show, so I met up with Scott and Peter for dinner in Chapel Hill. Knowing they were sometimes open to spontaneous guerrilla musical performances (particularly under the guise of the Minus 5, a side-project band Scott and Peter had formed a few years prior), I stopped by a tiny little Chapel Hill dive called the Cave and suggested to the band playing there that night (who happened to be friends of mine) that they might wanna leave their gear set up after they finished their set, just in case. Yep Roc's Tor Hansen and I dropped a few hints during the course of the evening, and sure enough, sometime past midnight, everyone strolls on down Franklin Street to the Cave, and a makeshift Minus 5 (with McCaughey, Buck, Mills, Pete Yorn, Ken Stringfellow and probably a couple others) proceeds to rock the joint till closing time. That was the talk of the town for all of one day, until it was superseded the next night when Bill Berry showed up at R.E.M.'s outdoor-arena gig and sat in for a song during the encore, his first turn in the drummer's chair with the band in seven years. (I think he played with them one other time since then, at a special event back home in Athens.)

The last R.E.M. show I saw was at a fitting place for my own personal history, I guess -- a taping of Austin City Limits three years ago during SXSW. Of late, I've been more likely to see Scott and Peter when they're touring with The Baseball Project, a terrific band that writes really cool songs about mostly obscure baseball players and historical events. (ESPN has championed them the past year or two, doing special promotions with them on their website.) I presume that both the Baseball Project and the Minus 5 will continue, and perhaps even step up the frequency of their performances, in light of this news. On the other hand, I wouldn't blame Peter or Scott for just deciding to take a break...but as long as I've known either of them, it's just never seemed to be in their nature.

So I'll raise a glass to R.E.M. tonight. Had they not come along, it's entirely possible I would have led a very different life.

Remembering, (or Introducing,) The Balancing Act.

By Peter Blackstock

Fitting, probably, to write about this band here; my hidden little blog is no doubt even more obscure than the profile of The Balancing Act has been over the past couple of decades. Which is probably understandable enough for the blog....but not so much for the band.

We all have bands of our youth, sounds that make us remember a certain age, place, time. You hear a song and it instantly transports you back to a little league summer, a junior-high basement hang, a high school football game. I get all that, and I have all that, too.

But this is not that deal. Granted that I discovered The Balancing Act amid such impressionable times, in the tail end of my college years. I first heard their music sometime in '86, I think, and first saw them play in the fall of '87. They didn't last much past that; they'd called it quits by '89. I'm not sure why, exactly, but I guess they all had different lives to go on and lead. And so there was an indie EP, a couple of LPs for IRS, and goodbye. Similar story for a lot of bands in that heyday.

But, damnit, this was NOT that same story. The Balancing Act was something more than all that. Maybe they all had other things to move on and become....but the music they made in their youth was not forgettable. It was not disposable. It didn't not matter.

I guess I'm not the only one who feels this way. This past spring, the band gathered in Los Angeles to play for a small but appreciative crowd, a bunch of folks who remembered and revered what they'd done. It was hard to peg exactly what The Balancing Act were, which is much to their credit. They were a folk band, a jazz band, an indie band, even a sort of new-wave-ish band in their time. A rock 'n' roll band in the finest sense of that term, such that it denotes a converging of excitable energy and adventuresome spirit. They were, ultimately, great musicians, creative souls, and positive-charged human beings.

"We're not lost, we're meant to be here," they sang in one of their most indelible tunes. That's as good a summation of The Balancing Act's raison d'etre as I could offer. Seeking, yes; lost, no. They were meant to be here, digging for songs and sounds that had yet to be found. I reveled in following them on that journey, if only for a brief time. The legacy remained with me....as, apparently, it did with them, if this footage from those recent reunion shows is any indication.

Jackson Browne, "Something Fine"

Many thanks to Jason Verlinde of Fretboard Journal for this wonderfully shot and beautiful-sounding rendition of a great song from the back pages of one of my all-time favorite artists.

Jackson Browne - "Something Fine" on his vintage Gibson Roy Smeck from fretboardjournal on Vimeo.

There are such wonderful subtle touches here. The setting itself, so simple and "home"-like, Browne sitting in a chair by an old desk, the wooden stairs hovering aside and above him. The way the sunlight flashes thru the cracks of the venetian blinds every now and again, casting fleeting beams on the stairway wall or the sheen of his guitar. And, most surely, the world-weary cracking in his nevertheless still warm and resonant voice, an imperfection that somehow just makes these words all the more meaningful thirty years later.

"Bison" -- a song by Skylar Gudasz & the Ugly Girls

A few weeks back, I posted on Facebook a link to a real nice cover of Gillian Welch's "April The 14th Part 1" on YouTube as performed by Skylar Gudasz & the Ugly Girls, a relatively young band from my neck of the woods that I've only recently come across. That clip led me to their own recently released debut recording, a seven-song disc that shows considerable promise, even if one senses their vision might not be fully formed yet.

My attention today is on one song in particular. It's called "Bison" and it's a fairly good representation of the group's artistic identity: tasteful acoustic-based arrangments which lend themselves to dramatic expression; lyrical explorations that wander adventurously rather than seeking a narrow focus; and an indelible vocal presence that's ultimately the music's primary calling-card (not only frontwoman Gudasz's highlighted lead, but also guitarist William Taylor's understated counterpoint).

This was the song that struck me most vividly when I first downloaded the record a little while back. On Tuesday, after seeing the band for the first time at the West End Wine Bar in Chapel Hill, I bought the CD, in part just to support the musicians but also because I felt the need to get a better handle on the lyrics. It was clear that Gudasz's words were an important part of her songs, but I'd been drawn in by the sound, and the lyrics are more elusive. Lines would stand out here and there, yet the stories remained mysterious.

I'm still not sure I fully understand "Bison" after having read through the lyrics, though I'm further impressed by their poetic nature, and perhaps more significantly, I'm fascinated by one very unusual detail. There is a spot in the song that one would commonly identify as the "chorus" -- Gudasz's voice soars sweetly, memorably, and this same striking passage comes around three times during the course of the song's five minutes. But here's the intriguing part: A chorus is usually a repeated melody accompanied by repeated words, yet Skylar sings a different set of words each time that melodic phrase comes around.

First it's "Lord knows I haven't dreeeamed since then / There ain't nothin' I haven't seen that I haven't seen before / That wasn't prettier the first time, prettier for sure." A couple minutes later, while the first line is repeated ("Lord knows I haven't dreeeamed since then"), it's followed by, "The shaman's wife swears it was your love that did me in / Soon they'll be pulling from the graves, those tree-wronged Indian braves." And then, a completely different address the final time around: "Its ivory slates wiped cleeean / Oak ain't just made for you to carve your heart all over into / I'm deeper than this forest, wider than Tennessee."

I've found myself somewhat torn between whether this is a sign of the artist needing a better hold on songcraft -- that perhaps she'd benefit from following standard structures a little more -- or if she's fully aware of the rules and is breaking them on purpose. It's probably the latter. Certainly she doesn't seem to lack for quality role models; the aforementioned Welch is an obvious one (underscored by her cover of a different Gillian & David number at last Tuesday's show), and I sense a bit of Laura Nyro, though I've really no idea if Gudasz is familiar with Nyro's oeuvre. Possibly Lori Carson, or Tori Amos. Not surprising that she also covered Neko Case on Tuesday.

Mostly, though, I hear Gudasz and her band finding their own space, which is what makes them worth hearing, and seeking out.

-- Peter Blackstock

You can hear "Bison" on the group's Bandcamp page, here:

http://skylargudaszandtheuglygirls.bandcamp.com/track/bison

From the final issue of The Rocket, October 2000

A Facebook friend recently posted some thoughts on the history of the seminal Seattle publication The Rocket, for whom I served as a senior editor for a few years in the 1990s. The Rocket folded in the fall of 2000; as fate would have it, the final issue contained my farewell column to Seattle, on the eve of my relocation to North Carolina. (That final issue was printed but largely undistributed; the plug was pulled before the paper was picked up and dropped off at its usual outlets across Puget Sound.)

Here's what I wrote in that issue, for whatever the historical documentation may be worth. (Not much, probably!)

By Peter Blackstock

I’m sitting in the middle of a big empty room, windows looking out on a grove of Carolina pines that populate the alcove across the street, on the edge of the quiet little neighborhood in Durham that is now my home.

I remember this feeling well. Exactly nine years ago this week, I arrived in Seattle and camped out on the living-room floor of the garage apartment I’d just rented, no furniture yet acquired, accompanied only by a few suitcases of clothes, the stereo, and boxes upon boxes of records, tapes and discs.

There was a long way to go before this place would be home. But, man, it was an exhilarating time, just being here. The wide-open hopes and dreams that hover above those first steps of a new beginning are like no other experience in life’s journeys.

I can only hope my relocation to North Carolina will open up my world the way moving to Seattle from Texas did. I came here without a job or a plan, more or less following a hunch based on a single visit I’d made a few months earlier. I figured my writing experience at the daily paper in Austin would help get me started, but I knew just a small handful of people here.

Among those I’d met shortly before I arrived were a couple cornerstones of The Rocket: editor Charley Cross and office manager Mary Schuh. Charley kindly gave me a chance to write for The Rocket and helped advise me on numerous details regarding my relocation. Mary and her husband Sandy Milne rented me the space behind their house, the coolest little garage apartment ever, for a price even someone used to Austin’s then-slackerly living standards could afford. Without them, plain and simple, I do not think I would have made it here.

That first year was a true challenge, involving a monthlong working sabbatical back in Austin and a couple of office jobs. I was officially broke after someone set fire to my car.

What saved me was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which had hired me to write a weekly column covering music in local clubs a month after I’d moved here. They hired me as a part-time copy editor in the summer of ’92, and finally I was firmly planted.

I really expected to be in Seattle only two or three years, while I kept close tabs on daily papers around the country in hopes of nabbing a full-time music critic job. In hindsight, I realize I was fortunate such a fate never befell me.

That’s largely because of another fellow I met at The Rocket: managing editor Grant Alden. Though our musical aesthetics and professional backgrounds were quite different, I developed an enormous respect for the work he did. His tenure at The Rocket, 1988-94, coincided with the paper’s glory years, and that’s no accidental synchronicity.

My own involvement with The Rocket actually increased after Grant departed; for a year or two I was a senior editor and wrote dozens of features and reviews as well as attending weekly planning meetings. That began to come to an end in the fall of 1995 when all my attentions suddenly became focused on a little boondoggle Grant and I had decided to launch, called No Depression.

It wasn’t really my intent when we started the magazine that it would take over my life and result in a withdrawal from The Rocket. But the fruits of our labor have made No Depression a full-time pursuit over the span of five years — which has also opened up the opportunity to edit the magazine from elsewhere. And so I’ve decided to follow the same instinct and sense of adventure that brought me to Seattle in 1991 — though it is not an action taken without serious reconsideration and regret.

I think Christy McWilson got to the heart of the matter when, upon learning of my imminent departure, she expressed her disappointment about losing a member of a community she holds dear. Christy, you are right, and there’s really nothing else I can say except that I’m sorry, and that I will miss you and your husband Scott McCaughey as much as you miss me. Indeed, much more, I am certain. When I think of the marvelous music and the wonderful folks I’m leaving behind in Seattle, more than anything else I will think of the two of you.

I’ll also often fondly reflect on my first couple years here hanging out with Pete Droge, the first real friend I had in town. Equally important in these final couple years has been Gary Heffern, the last real friend I had in town. Largely through Gary I grew closer to the Walkabouts’ Chris Eckman, who, over the past year, helped me produce a tribute record to Mickey Newbury that stands as the most personally rewarding accomplishment of my days here.

Not far behind in that category would be the Tuesday-night gig I’ve hosted the past few months at the Sunset Tavern, for which I owe a sincere thanks to Max Genereaux. Max’s Sunset, Dan Cowan’s Tractor Tavern, and Hattie’s Hat have left an indelible trail of memories along Ballard Avenue, the true soul of Seattle.

It would take most of the pages of The Rocket to reminisce about all the people and places that have made my days in Seattle special, but you get the idea. My Seattle isn’t the place of dot-com towers, downtown malls and sprawling suburbs. My Seattle is the nightclub music spilling out onto the sidewalks, the twilight summer barbecues in friends’ backyards, the quiet drive around Green Lake in the wee hours of the morn. It is beautiful.

A few words about Luluc's Dear Hamlyn

By Peter Blackstock

Tuesday, March 15, 2011: Somewhere above the Southern United States, en route to Austin, Texas. Over the next five days, I'll hear dozens of bands from all over the world perform at theaters, nightclubs, restaurants, galleries, beer gardens, parking lots, rooftops, pretty much anywhere a stage can be set up. Some will be artists I know and love; some will be musicians I've never heard before. Some will intrigue me, some will surprise me, some will repel me, some will make me want to hear more.

There's only one thing I know for sure: Nothing I hear can possibly measure up to Dear Hamlyn, the debut album by an Australian duo who call themselves Luluc.

This is not a new record, but it's new to me. Dear Hamlyn came out in 2008, but few beyond Luluc's native country have heard it yet (though a couple of its songs were featured on recent episodes of "Grey's Anatomy," and some Canadian audiences got to hear them on the folk festival circuit last summer). For the past year, Luluc’s Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett have been living in New York; a few days after I first heard their album, I found myself on a plane to NYC to catch one of their gigs. The crowd to hear them play that night at the Lower East Side bar Piano's was in the single digits.

And that’s a good place to start, really: Lest any of the above testimony imply that Randell and Hassett’s music is really "big," in fact it's precisely the opposite — this may be the smallest music I've ever heard. By "small" I mean minimal, intimate, and quiet: Luluc's music is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by larger ensembles and louder sounds. Which is to say, no, this is not the Next Big Thing. This is little, with a lower-case l. And I cannot, for the life of me, get it out of my mind, or my heart.

I think this is because Dear Hamlyn was born of specifically private and personal circumstances. Hamlyn was the name of singer Zoe Randell's father, and these recordings were partly her way of dealing with his death. He's there in every breath of "Little Suitcase," traveling wherever his daughter may go: "The indent of your strong hand, I feel each time I grip this bag, that I now carry." These things we inherit from our departed loved ones are constant reminders; true, they're merely material possessions, but sometimes just stumbling across one can bring back waves of emotion, a wistful smile or a flood of tears. "One of a set of four, that went from big to small; they belong together." In the end, Randell wonders: "If I were to travel to some new place, will I find a new home, or just more empty space?" That emptiness bleeds in the beautiful resonation of Randell's voice, which disarms with a gracefulness that is the very antithesis of pretense.

But there IS a new home on Dear Hamlyn, and it's the reason that this album was released under the name of Luluc, rather than as a Zoe Randell solo recording. Many years ago, Randell happened upon fellow Australian Steve Hassett — halfway around the world in Scotland, of all places — and it's a good thing, because musical pairings this empathetic are incredibly rare. Their vocals mesh in a manner that, I would contend, reaches deeper than sibling harmony: lover harmony, perhaps. (There's a huge emotional difference, after all, between, say, the Louvin Brothers and Richard & Linda Thompson.) To echo Randell's words about those suitcases: They belong together.

Those voices are grounded in the character and quality of the musical backdrop. Hassett fully understands how less can be more, how little can be much greater than big. One suspects he could rival most any guitar-shredder he might share a nightclub with, but you won't hear that here: You'll hear only the right notes, the ones that belong, the ones which bring out Randell's voice and songs. Not a single stroke or strum is obtrusive in 40 minutes of music. Such mindful restraint is deceptively difficult to realize, but it's a big reason Dear Hamlyn is magic.

There are minor accents along the way: touches of cello, twinges of pedal steel, a few horns here and there, all placed with care and purpose into the soul of the surroundings. The mood, very pointedly, is never broken — which is not to say there is no variance in the style or tempo, because there is. If nothing here quite rocks, much of it sways, or swells, or sweetly swings; within the spectrum of the enchanting spell they cast, there are many colors here. But nothing will jar you out of the reverie that begins with the bowing of a double bass on "I Found You" and rides all the way to the extended strums at the end of "My Midnight Special." Precious few records I've ever heard have achieved such a wholeness of spirit in sound.

Sunday, March 20, 2011: Somewhere above the Southern United States again, heading home. Behind me, five days and nights filled with musical adventures, old and new friends, barbecue and Mexican food, warm Texas winds, endless throngs of revelers along the city streets, the constancy of conversation, even a Supermoon rising majestically over the Austin horizon.

In those occasional moments of pause amid the mayhem, dashing from show to show or driving back home at the end of a long night, out of the car speakers floated the songs of Dear Hamlyn. "How my heart is beaming, like the sun...and the moon, and the stars beyond." Passing through my childhood neighborhood at 2 in the morning, serenaded by the epiphany of "I Found You," it felt as if I had been waiting for this music all of my life.

"between the worlds of men and make-believe..."

This was originally posted on the now-nonexistent No Depression editorial website (not to be confused with the present community site) on December 21, 2007. Re-posting it today as a result of a friend's mention of Fogelberg:

News of Dan Fogelberg's death earlier this week hit me a little harder than I expected, given that it's been a long time since I really held the guy up on any sort of personal pedestal. But the thing is, he definitely DID rank very high in my book at one point, and without question played a fairly significant role in the evolution of my musical taste and my appreciation for singer-songwriters.

For me, the graduation process went like this: Barry Manilow led to Dan Fogelberg led to Jackson Browne led to Bob Dylan. (Really nowhere higher to go once you get to Dylan.) That progression occurred when I was between the ages of 10 and 20.

"Mandy" hit when I was just about to turn 10, and immediately made me an unabashed fan of Mr. Manilow -- which I still am, despite the ridicule that inevitably accompanies such an admission (or the chuckles that invariably follow the acoustic-guitar arrangement of "Mandy" I've been known to deliver from the stage on occasion).

My older brother Si was a pretty good early guide to music that was a little bit beyond the Top-40 AM-radio staples of the mid-'70s, and one of the first artists he led me to was Fogelberg. He and his wife included "Longer" in their wedding ceremony in 1980; I'd heard that song and "Heart Hotels" on the local FM pop/rock station by then, but soon afterward I took the time to delve into Fogerty's earlier records, via dog-eared LPs at the used-vinyl store.

Souvenirs (his second, from 1974) was probably the best, with a minor hit in "Part Of The Plan" and a lot of country-rock accents/influences on songs such as "Illinois" and "Morning Sky". Captured Angel (1975) and Nether Lands (1977) had their moments, though the fact that the sixteen Fogelberg downloads I just purchased a moment ago included just one song from the former and two from the later suggests those were overall somewhat lesser of the bunch, at least in my memory.

Phoenix (1980) was more or less his pop breakthrough, with both "Longer" and "Heart Hotels" making the singles charts. A more ambitious artistic statement was 1981's The Innocent Age, which pretty much marked the peak of Fogelberg's career creatively. Its yuletide-chestnut-to-be ("Same Old Lang Syne"), while probably his best-known song, wasn't really representative of the full depth and breadth of the double-album. I was rather amused and heartened to discover a few years later that one of my late-'80s postpunk-obsessed musician roommates also had a real soft spot for The Innocent Age.

I went out and bought Fogelberg's subsequent album, 1984's Windows And Walls, upon its release, but I sensed a pretty clear dropoff in quality. Or maybe it was just my own perspective: I was headlong into Jackson Browne by then, and Dylan was waiting just around the corner. For whatever reason, none of Fogelberg's subsequent releases ever connected with me, though the bluegrassy High Country Snows from 1985 seems probably worth revisiting at some point.

The record I DO still go back to on a regular basis, though -- seems like I pull the old vinyl copy off the shelves and put Side A on the turntable every couple of years or so -- is Fogelberg's very first album, 1972's Home Free. The songwriting's pretty green, really, but endearingly so, and quite good considering that Fogelberg was just 21 when the record came out. (He was 56 when he died this past Sunday of prostate cancer.) Musically there's real beauty in the arrangements, from the swinging country twang of "More Than Ever" to sweet swelling strings of "Hickory Grove" to the soft, simple piano touches of the opening track "To The Morning" -- one of the best first-songs-of-a-career that any artist ever had, from where I sit.

As it happens, today is my brother Si's 51st birthday, so I suppose this blog-entry can be considered an acknowledgment of thanks to him for helping to lead me down the musical path I wound up following all those years ago. And, also, an acknowledgment of thanks to Fogelberg, for making music that was such a significant step along that road.

New To Me: Luluc

Australian duo, now living in NYC. And the best new act I've come across in, oh, the last 5 years or so, probably.

The film-crew here really does justice to the spirit of their music:

Just one record out so far (Dear Hamlyn, self-released), plus a beautiful cover of "None But The Rain" on More Townes Van Zandt By The Great Unknown, a recent tribute album (which is where I first heard them).

I've yet to see them play. There are a few other videos on YouTube if you like what you hear here.

Why Should You Care Now? -- Paul Dakota and Mack MacKenzie.

If you're Canadian, you may know these two guys' names; if not, you almost certainly don't. Though I'm writing about both artists in this entry, there isn't any direct connection between them that I'm aware of, other than this: Their respective bands -- the Lost Dakotas and Three O'Clock Train -- appeared together on a bill of Canadian bands at South By Southwest in Austin in 1992.

Recently I was combing through old SXSW program books as part of a historical project I've been working on for awhile now (it'll be out next month; more on that later), and I came across the listing for this showcase, which was at the 311 Club on Sixth Street on Saturday, March 14, 1992. In those days, I spent a few weeks each winter writing short descriptions of every band playing at SXSW for the conference's program book, so I was frequently plucking a band's submission tape or CD off the shelves in the office and seeing what the act I was writing about sounded like.

Several of the Canadian acts made an impression on me that year, and none more than these two. The Lost Dakotas' disc, Last Train To Kipling, was an endearing affair, kinda ramshackle acoustic rockabilly-ish stuff but with a punk sensibility underneath it. There was more variety than their street-busking habits might have suggested; while this video of "To Love Someone" gives you a general idea, and their brilliant acoustic reworking of AC/DC's "Back In Black" was naturally a live favorite, I found myself equally enchanted by the hopeless-romantic ballad "Heart Of Mine" and a rendition of the classic Irish sing-along tune "Wild Rover."

Best of all was a three-and-a-half-minute Dakota original called "California" that, 20 years later, still stands apart as something really special. I was reminded of that a few days ago when I was playing it in my iTunes and my wife's ears perked up in the other room: "Who's that?" she asked. And so I went through the whole story about stumbling upon them in the SXSW office, going to see them play at the 311 Club, driving from my home of Seattle to a club in Vancouver to see them again a little later on, and eventually meeting up with Paul Dakota and his wife Erella Vent (yes, irrelevant!) in Toronto one summer afternoon. Good folks, they were (and Paul turned me on to another fine Toronto band, Lowest of the Low, that weekend).

But, about "California": It was different from the rest of the songs on that record, more of a tone-poem, sorta. The backing-music was evocative and ethereal, and the lyrics were a series of metaphors...brilliant, vivid, creative, colorful metaphors:

California

Is a proud young mother

Who's calling up her brother

And she tries not to wake the kids

Who are stretched out sleeping in the park

California

Is a Beverly Hills matron

Who's waiting on a friend

Who's a sophisticated patron of the arts

It's earthquakes and Sundays

Freeways and runways

And young things that die and leave no mark

California is a pretty young girl

Who's taken something impure

And she's dancing so hard she's flying

It goes on like that for another couple of verses and choruses, painting a picture of a place with fleeting thoughts and visions and memories. And then, at the very end, "She's dancing so hard she's flying" is followed by: "She don't know she's dying."

One of the things I've felt drawn toward over the past several years (though I suspect it'll never come to pass) is serving as a music supervisor for TV or film projects. It's because of songs like that -- where what I'm hearing just seems like it's destined to be part of a visual story.

As it happens, the song that stood out the most on Mack MacKenzie's disc with the band Three O'Clock Train had a similar pull. It's called "Some Evenings Never End," and while the bulk of the album found MacKenzie and his bandmates cranking out sturdy, rootsy, guitars-bass-drums rock 'n' roll, on this one track it's just MacKenzie's voice and piano. "The bottle holds the truth, but that truth will find me dead," he sings, casting a dark shadow that stands in stark relief to the simple but beautiful piano melody. Movie stuff, for sure. (Apparently I wasn't alone in that thinking; the album's liner notes indicated that four of its tracks appeared in a Canadian independent film.)

MacKenzie's ability to traverse the territory between such chamber-folk stylings and harder-edged rocking abandon led me to consider him a sort of Canadian cousin to Alejandro Escovedo. (There was even an odd similarity in their physical presence; just as Escovedo's Mexican bloodlines affected his stage persona, so did MacKenzie's Indian heritage.) And they both had a soft spot for train and rain songs: Whereas Escovedo's debut with the True Believers featured a cover of Lou Reeds "Train Round The Bend" and his own "The Rain Won't Help You When It's Over," MacKenzie and Three O'Clock romped their way through "Train Of Dreams" (the video here is folly, but the song is great) and the anthemic "Love To Rain".

I never did get to know Mack MacKenzie at all, as I did Paul Dakota; there was a similar drive up to Vancouver to see his band play at the great venue the Railway Club, but the most I ever did was maybe say hello briefly after the show. Still, I remember his songs -- and was glad today to see someone had posted a video of him doing "Love To Rain" solo at a club in Montreal (which I believe is where he lives) last summer. An even nicer surprise was finding a self-titled MacKenzie solo album on eMusic that's apparently a fairly recent release -- and it has another of those great piano numbers, a tune called "All In Vain."

A search for Paul Dakota, meanwhile, turned up a MySpace page that included a relatively new composition called "Stars," which was quite good (and apparently placed fourth in a recent American Songwriter lyrics contest). There's also a Paul Dakota listed in the staff box of the Toronto alt-weekly Now; pretty sure it has to be the same guy.

So -- why should you care now? If you're not Canadian, I suppose you may not, as it's likely you never even knew of them in the first place. For me, though, it's coming on 20 years since I first heard those songs....and I still can't shake them.