LITTLE ROCK — The song and the singer are familiar and, though you’ve never imagined her singing it, the casting seems perfect.
Since digital technology has freed us from the tyranny of album sequencing (and that is in some ways a shame), there’s no reason not to start listening to Twistable Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein with track No. 12, and get to the rest of the album later.
It begins with a stray, almost inaudible, clink; something like flesh muting a steel vibration, the scrape-y testing first notes of a just-switched-on electric guitar, neck squeaks, a wooden click, the sizzle of a cymbal, a pure sustaining ring that sounds like a coin bounced off concrete, a block on block noise. Suddenly we’re into the faintly martial rhythm, percussion falling into order, the guitar chiming tentative chords ... at the 35-second mark, Lucinda Williams begins singing.
“The morning sun touched lightly on, the eyes of Lucy Jordan,” she sings, and as quickly as that she has reclaimed Silverstein’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” from the vaguely Teutonic clutches of Marianne Faithfull - aka Baroness Sacher-Masoch, aka Sister Morphine - who, while she was born in Hampstead, England, has always sounded a bit like Marlene Dietrich Sings Eva Braun.
Faithfull’s 1979 version, with its relentless period synths, was devastating in its way. It totally erased whatever memory I had of the Dr.Hook and the Medicine Show version that preceded it.
(Their version - which you can find on YouTube - isn’t bad. Dennis Locorriere, who was the Dr. Hook vocalist who sang lead on the track - he’s not the guy with the eye patch, that’s Ray Sawyer - does a beautiful solo acoustic version of the song on his 2000 solo album Out of the Dark.)
“In a white suburban bedroom, in a white suburban town.”
Lu drags the lyric to a glow, pulling on it like a funny cigarette, her accent snagging a little on “bedroom” - the second syllable of which rebounds in ghostly echo - and growling through the final “town.”
It’s a fine opening, reminiscent of E.A. Robinson’s “Tilbury Town” series of dramatic poems.
Silverstein, the song’s writer, was born in Chicago in 1930 and would likely have encountered Robinson’s poems in school, although most biographical essays stress that he always denied having many influences. Most of his poetry and song lyrics fall closer to the work of Edward Lear, Ogden Nash and Dr. Seuss than Robinson, anyway.
And though Silverstein wrote dozens of songs, including “A Boy Named Sue” and “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” and had dozens of hits via the likes of Bobby Bare (who, with his son Bobby Bare, Jr. produced this tribute album), Dr. Hook and Johnny Cash, he was probably better known as a Playboy cartoonist and author/illustrator of children’s books like The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends.
He was a quirky guy. I’ve got friends who knew him and they all say he was the worst singer in Nashville.
“As she lay there ’neath the covers, dreaming of a thousand lovers, ’til the room turned to orange and, the room went spinnin’ round ...”
Now we’re taking up the subject of suburban ennui, and Lucy’s gilded predicament. You might think of January Jones as Betty Draper in Mad Men or of Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour, but Williams is already on her way to the devastating chorus, the wised-up moment when mortality intrudes on daydreams.
“At the age of 37, she realized she’d never ride, through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair ...”
The lines are cruel and there’s something of a chilly shriek in “37,” though Williams warms up “sports car,” caressing the words with her frayed silk voice. While there’s nothing histrionic in her performance, it’s all conversational, you can feel the tight tug of madness lurking, as the bass drum pulses insistently and Eric Schermerhorn’s guitar holds back, skywriting on the horizon.
“So she let the phone keep ringin’, as she sat there softly singin’, little nursery rhymes she’d memorized, in her daddy’s easy chair ...”
Williams is the daughter of the poet Miller Williams, and she has often performed with him, alternating her songs with his poems.
“Her husband’s off to work, and her kids are off to school, and there are, oh so many ways, for her to spend the day. She could clean the house for hours, or rearrange the flowers, or run naked through the shady street, screamin’ all the way ... ”
Here, just before the electric storm we sense winding up in the background, Williams insists on underplaying, reversing the polarity of the song. Where Faithfull pushed the image, leaning hard into the “run naked,” Williams gives it no more stress than she does rearrange the flowers. It’s simply another possibility. It’s time for the chorus again.
“At the age of 37, she realized she’d never ride, through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair. So she let the phone keep ringin’, as she sat there softly singin’, pretty nursery rhymes she’d memorized, in her daddy’s easy chair ...”
This time through, her phrasing is slightly different;
there is a little more edge in the “never ride,” a little quaky shiver that suggests the noose is tightening, that the band - bass player David Sutton, drummer Butch Norton, Schermerhorn and probably Williams herself, though her acoustic guitar, if it’s there at all, is mixed subliminally low, though we do hear the occasional raked arpeggio - is growing restless. She’s gone back to the lyrics as Silverstein wrote them, switching out “little” for “pretty,” a songwriter’s way of groping toward coherence, or the tiny flaw intentionally woven into a Persian rug.
“The evening sun touched gently on the eyes of Lucy Jordan, on the rooftop where she climbed, when the laughter grew too loud, she bowed and curtsied to the man, who reached and offered her his hand, and he led her down to the long white car, that waited past the crowd ...”
Faithfull once said she took this last verse to mean that Lucy was rescued from the roof from which she meant to jump, and was taken away by ambulance - “the long white car.”
But the verse really isn’t clear, the “long white car” - a negative image of the long black Cadillac - could just as easily be a hearse or maybe some spirit ride, a Mystery Train to some other realm. Maybe she took the streaking option she considered earlier, maybe the laughing crowd is a physical phenomenon, maybe it’s just the voices in her head. Maybe her savior is Jesus. Maybe she just jumped into the abyss and walked toward the light.
Williams isn’t saying, as she wades into the final chorus:
“At the age of 37, she knew she’d found forever as, she rode along through Paris, with the warm wind in her hair ...”
Now her voice steps back, and the electric guitar comes forward, elegantly shaving off silver partial chords while the percussion rattles and tinks and a ghost chorus of Lucindas shimmers extraverbally just before we reach the five minute mark.
And then the movie’s over, the credits roll. Is there a dry eye in the house?
The rest of the album, well, it’s fine - especially John Prine and Ray Price. Billy Bob Thornton’s Boxmasters do a great straight-ahead job on “Sylvia’s Mother.” But this is the killer cut, the reason we still listen for, and hold out hope for, transcendence.
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Style, Pages 29 on 06/29/2010