North Coast Journal September 6, 2007 : In Review

September 6, 2007

Natural
by the Mekons
Quarterstick Records

If this record was your first exposure to the Mekons, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were some obscure British folk combo, not one of the original punk bands of 1977, still plugging away after 30 years. The Mekons were contrarians from the start -- their first single, "Never Been In a Riot" was a sarcastic rejoinder to the Clash's naive "White Riot." Over the years they've incorporated country music, dub and even electronica into their sound, and can span the distance between bar band raucousness and highbrow critical theory. In the last few years they've cast a net back to British history and have developed a more folk-inflected style.

The Mekons have never stood still, and this record is no exception. They retain their trademark mix of despair, resignation and dark humor, though here they've banked their fires a bit. According to their own bio for the new record, "they recited lines from Darwin and Thoreau and renewed their vows in a remote stone circle high up on the blasted heath where birds and branches sing beneath the roar of jet fighters as they swoop balletically over the sharp crags and dark water, rehearsing for Armageddon."

Natural is a more pastoral Mekons, favoring Susie Honeyman's sweet fiddle and Lu Edmonds' droning sax rather than the guitar histrionics of some of their earlier incarnations. The electric guitars do bubble underneath, but songs like "Dark, Dark, Dark" and "White Stone Door" depend more on skeletal thumb piano and Steve Goulding's subtle percussion. With four vocalists on tap (founders Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh, Sally Timms and Rico Bell), they trade off lead vocals on many of the songs, and on "Burning in the Desert Burning" their massed voices blend like a profane choir as they sing about "children queuing up for hell."

As always, the Mekons are magpies who scatter historical and literary references through their lyrics. In their digital meditation "Zeroes and Ones," they quote from Emerson's Nature. ("We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God.") "Cockermouth" is a reference to William Wordsworth's birthplace, and the record is infused with a dark, doomed romanticism. "Dickie, Chalkie and Nobby" is yet another Mekons warning not to let work eat your soul, but here that sentiment is tinged with a more mature regret for friends lost and absent. The Mekons might be going back to nature, but they're hardly blissed out hippies -- "Perfect Mirror" sketches an initially bucolic scene that ultimately becomes a wasteland, where the "trees are dead," and an elegy for a lost community. It's a bleak way to end a record, but beautiful.

Though some might miss the more raging Mekons of the past, it's rare for a band entering their fourth decade not to regurgitate the same record over and over. They'll be playing the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco the first week of October on a rare West Coast jaunt. I'll be there, and you should be too.

-- Jay Herzog, a frequent Journal contributor.

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Collected Poems
by Lynda Hull
Graywolf Press

On a recent brief flight from Monterey to San Francisco, a woman who sat next to me noticed me reading Lynda Hull's Collected Poems and asked what Hull's poems were about. "Her poems are not really about anything in particular, yet they are about everything," I answered. "Her strength is her description and use of metaphor -- dense, thick, brilliant."

Though Lynda Hull's Collected Poems first appeared last year in 2006, reporting on this stunning poetry collection is appropriate -- a new discovery, like much of poetry in general. In poetry, the title "collected" tends to indicate that poet is either dead, seriously ill or old. Tragically, Hull died in a car accident in 1994; she was 40 years old. By the time of her death, she had published two collections of poetry, Ghost Money (1986) and Star Ledger (1991), which won the 1991 Carl Sandburg Award. Her collection The Only World was published posthumously, in 1995.

It's shocking how complete, how precise, how powerful, how good her poetry is, based on only three books of poems. She allows you into her world, her observations, her perceptions, her stories. The result is a collection of extremely vulnerable, bare, raw poems, executed in a thick, dense language that recalls Hart Crane (she allegedly memorized Crane's "The Bridge"). Hull, at the age of 16, with a scholarship to Princeton, ran away from home (Newark, N.J)., and for the next 10 years she knocked around various Chinatowns up and down the East Coast with her then-husband. She also developed (and successfully kicked) a drug addiction. In 1982, she completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she met and married her second husband, poet David Wojahn, who is also the editor of this collection.

Hull often refers to jazz musicians in her work, figures such as Django Reinhardt (in "Charmed Hour") and Chet Baker (in "Lost Fugue For Chet," which is both heartbreaking and redemptive), while she plays with rhythm and line breaks -- appropriate to the poem's subject. What are her poems about? Well, they are about desolation, loneliness, pain, beauty -- and small epiphanies. They're about the depth of life.

-- Mark Shikuma, a local poet.

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Blues, Rags & Hollers: The Koerner, Ray & Glover Story
MVD Visual
Available for rent at Video Experience

"To me ... folk music has always been the blues."

-- Dave "Snaker" Ray

You need look no further than that quote from guitarist Dave "Snaker" Ray to identify the ethos that formed the foundation of seminal acoustic folk-blues trio Koerner, Ray & Glover. The Minnesota-based threesome, rounded out by fellow 12-stringer "Spider" John Koerner and harp-wailer Tony "Little Sun" Glover, re-revolutionized the folk and blues scene in the 1960s with their trademark hybrid style of high lonesome field hollers and Woody Guthrie half-full of Jim Beam, influencing everyone from the Beatles to Bob Dylan (who goes so far as to reference them in his fragmented autobiography) along the way. Now, after wallowing in public television and developmental purgatory for years, the definitive performance/documentary Blues, Rags & Hollers (named after their debut album) is available on DVD.

That's a cue to get down on your knees and thank your lucky, booze-addled stars.

After viewing the program for only a few minutes, you begin to realize why you've probably never heard of these guys; the DVD opens with their only filmed performance ever, which was aired on Minnesota public access television 20 years after the group's inception.

It is also here that you begin to understand why, to quote one of the DVD's chapters, "they never got rich." They just loved to play, period. KR&G never had a PR agent, no road managers, no nothing. The guys just put up flyers and played where they wanted, and where they were wanted. These are men who could just as easily sell you insurance as knock you flat on your ass with a fiery rendition of "Black Dog Blues." (In fact, Ray did own an insurance firm for a time later on in life.)

As Glover put it, "We never tried to make a living off of playing music; music is just like an old friend, and you never try to make money off of an old friend. You just hope they're there for you when you need them."

The documentary is presented in a style that doesn't belie the band's tendencies. Footage is steady but slightly grainy, and interviews are conducted in the backwoods and semi-squalid dwellings, with music from the band itself, along with Sonny Boy Williamson, Fred McDowell and Son House, interjecting throughout. The candidness of the presentation is brash, unapologetic and unflinchingly truthful.

This program's very existence is its own greatest quality. Without it, many true music fans (this writer included) would have been left clueless as to the missing link between Woody Guthrie and the '60s blues revival. Make no mistake, whether you realize it or not, these guys are the reason you're into Leadbelly.

-- Josh Ruffin, a freelance critic in Augusta, Ga.

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