A friend of mine was telling me a story about an actress he once dated who could cry on command, but once she'd commenced the waterworks, she had to let the dredged-up sorrow dissipate in its own time. This argues for the power the imagination holds over what we perceive as the reality of a given situation. We introduce a memory like an irritation; we manufacture distress and our brains -- our hearts -- can't tell it from the real thing. We just have to live through the evoked emotion.
So when James McMurtry sings "Carlisle's Haul" on his just-released album, Complicated Game, I'm out there on the sandbar after dark, hauling in illegal seines and listening to old fishermen Carlisle and Uncle Freddy talk about their glory days. It's a mesmerizing, cinematic song, a slow burner dense with novelistic detail and fused by the sort of resignation that in some adult company passes for hope:
There's bright lights out on the sand bar
Hear the donkey motor whine.
And the donkey man minds his business
And I know to be mindin' mine,
I learned from the best ...
It's hard nuts, to cry and cuss,
This old world just bigger than us,
And all we got is pride and trust
in our kind ...
"Carlisle's Haul" is eight tracks deep in Complicated Game, but as it fades off, the two consenting grown-ups listening to the record for the first time (driving home from Memphis after a sleepover date) finally flash looks of acknowledgment at each other. These days they don't stay engaged in a record album for nearly 30 minutes without offering some comment on the quality of the bass line or the way the singer ruined a lyric by forcing a rhyme or straying off-meter, especially not these two, who joke (but not really) about giving any new music "the 15-second test." There are all kinds of ways you can rationalize an argument for any given pop artifact, but few seem stronger than being able to say exactly when and where you were when a semi-sung line pinned you to the wall.
And then the third act of the album kicks in, with two of the four remaining tracks cutting exceptionally deep. There's the heartbreaking "South Dakota," with its visions of plausible horror, and the rousing singalong "Long Island Sound," about an Oklahoma transplant doing just fine on the East Coast even as he worries about shedding his cultural signifiers. His kids "don't go to church and we ain't gonna make 'em. ... They all drop their r's like the islanders do."
I'll confess I thought I had a little mental index card on McMurtry that consigned him to a genre I think of as NPR Music (an admittedly dismissive rubric, though some of my favorite artists reside beneath it): a clever lyricist and a songwriter in the Woody Guthrie-Bob Dylan tradition who probably is a little too sensitive to critical evaluations that focus on his literary facility while downplaying his musicality. (He is a guitar player of some ability, but he can hire better, and one of the strengths of Complicated Game is the production by C.C. Adcock, who supplemented and expanded McMurtry's country-rock sound with a New Orleans feel and instrumentation.)
His best-known track, the monumental crystal methamphetamine travelogue "Choctaw Bingo," is a shuffle in some ways reminiscent of the Beatles' "Come Together" (not that that's a bad thing). He's a short-range singer who nevertheless can express more with four notes than some can with four octaves, but there's a certain sameness to his recorded work that limits his appeal. Great in a bar, but the subtlety of his songs would probably be lost in a big venue. He's got a reputation as a taciturn, sorta prickly guy who'd be happy not to have to explain himself to fools.
...
And while it's not fair to him, it's difficult not to take his pedigree into account. McMurtry is the son of Larry McMurtry, the novelist and Oscar-winning screenplay writer (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, to name a few). James McMurtry attended the Woodberry Forest School, an exclusive all-boys private academy in Virginia where he was a classmate of Marvin Bush, the younger brother of George W. Bush (whose administration he railed against on his 2008 album Just Us Kids). It was through his father that he met John Mellencamp, who produced James' 1989 debut album Too Long in the Wasteland. There was some promotion muscle behind that album and critics liked it -- 125 on the Billboard album charts -- and it probably remains his greatest commercial success.
Still, it sounded a little thin to me, promising but hardly revelatory. It could have been taken for the work of a dilettante, an erudite rich kid in a work shirt, doing his best to get out from under the nimbus of daddy's reputation and money, and if he'd given up after a try or two and moved on to a career in academia or whatever, well, maybe that would have been fair criticism. (For the record, Larry gave his son a guitar, but James credits his English professor mother with showing him his first chords.)
But anyone who knows anything about James McMurtry knows, 11 albums and 26 years in, he has walked the walk, that he tours constantly, and when he's not touring he lives humbly in south Austin and plays solo shows at the Continental Club on Tuesday nights, then comes back on Thursday with his band to roar at midnight. The bartender he writes about in a couple of songs on Complicated Game is very likely based on the woman he lives with, though we shouldn't assume that anything on the album is autobiographical. ("She writes a fine prose," he tells us on the weathered and lovely "These Things I Have Come To Know," finer than what the novelist's son produces.)
In today's pop music environment, with sonic architecture mattering more than anything else, it's possible to go for months without thinking much about anything, just sliding through the world like a shark, consuming mindlessly, feeling more or less the same about everything. You can even start to believe that it's really all about your conditioning, the flavors you've grown used to and the tastes that you've acquired. It takes a little work to engage with new ideas, and you start to sympathize with your friends who've written off pop music as a playground around which it's unseemly to be seen lurking after you turn a certain age: You can't be 20 on Sugar Mountain.
And if you're the least bit self-aware, maybe you start to regard with bemusement the person you've become as you hear in your own voice an echo of your parents ("Get off my lawn, Kanye"). And you start to think maybe it really is just fashion and nonsense. And that maybe all it's worth is a snarking Twitter account.
Then you hear something like this, and it knocks you about a bit. You feel something give within. And you need a moment to catch your breath.
Email:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Style on 03/01/2015