LUCINDA WILLIAMS

imports and altercations
my faculties on a shoe-string vacation
I settled down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum
and listen to Lucinda Williams
oh, convenient lies, rubber knives
I'm a dastardly villain, doing belly dives
I before E except after me
I'm dousing my vitals at break-neck speed
you and your little entourage
playing amazing little parlor games in the garage
like a jury of my peers triangulating
my pretty point of exasperation
yes we gather for some of that Catholic juice
and hide behind the shower curtain, i watch the virgin spruce
I'm soaking wet and feeling funny
the mirror's a mirage, no wonder I always look so crummy
my heroes are all off in the great beyond
England is old but Atlantis is gone
feathers are floating down, and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking what's been abused
feathers are floating down and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking who's been accused

MUSIC

Beck's favourite records of 2006
TV On The Radio
Return to Cookie Mountain

Miss Violetta Beauregarde
Odi Profanum Vulgus Et Arceo

spank Rock
Yoyoyoyoyo

Liars
Drum’s Not Dead

Madlib Beat Konducta
Vol. 1-2

Crystal Skulls
Outgoing Behavior

Dr. Dog
Takers and Leavers EP

Girl Talk
Night Ripper

Cornelius
Sensuous

Raconteurs
Broken Boy Soldiers

Thoughts:

> still need to see Pan's Labyrinth
> moving this weekend; it is freezing out
> 20-some odd nights until Hawaii
> two more nights at 133 Alcorn
> i vow to improve my home improvement skills and ability/motivation to recycle food waste in the green bins.

MUSIC IS LOVE: ALBUM OF THE DAY

Forgotten by rock history, and probably by most of its participants, David Crosby's 1971 "If I could only remeber my name" is a one-of-a-kind freak-folk apogee. It's a solo album in name only, since the Croz operates as a cosmic cruise director, bringing in pals like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia and Grace Slick. In hydroponic jams like "What Are Their Names," you can hear each guest wander into the studio, plug in, play a few licks, sing a few harmonies ("Peace is not an awful lot to ask" -- dig it!) and raid the fridge. Garcia steals the show, and the two killer tracks are the ones where he burns on guitar, playing in a dark "Wharf Rat" mood: "Song With No Words (Tree With No Leaves)," where Garcia cuts Jorma Kaukonen in a guitar duel, and "Laughing," featuring Jerry's profoundly sad pedal steel.

FAT ACTORS DON'T WIN

The most moving film performance that I saw a male actor give in 2006 was Richard Griffiths as Hector, the teacher/hero of The History Boys. Yet in a year of relatively undistinguished leading-man performances, Griffiths failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best actor. Maybe Griffiths got overlooked because the academy disdains film adaptations of stage plays (though that doesn't seem to have hurt Dreamgirls, which got eight nominations). Maybe Griffiths lost the Anglophile vote to Peter O'Toole, nominated for his performance in Venus (though the academy's use of proportional voting in its nominations, a system beloved by the left because it gives smaller groups greater power, is supposed to minimize such scenarios). I suspect a different handicap. Griffiths is very fat.

My admiration for Griffiths' performance in The History Boys is not some quirky and embattled opinion. Griffiths has been widely praised for his performance in the film, and when he played the same role on stage he won a best actor Tony on Broadway and a best actor Olivier in London. All major roles in the film were played by the same actors who originated them at London's National Theater, where I saw the play in 2004, and on a subsequent world tour that finished up this past fall in New York. With the exception of Clive Merrison's manic turn as the opportunistic headmaster, every performance translated beautifully from stage to screen. Griffiths' performance acquired, if anything, a deeper resonance when seen in close-up. (On the whole I preferred the film to the stage play, for reasons extraneous to my argument here. I've related them in a "Spoiler Special" podcast with Slate film critic Dana Stevens.)

Why no academy nomination? Looking back over a complete list of previous winners in the best actor and actress categories, I can locate only one fat person. That was Charles Laughton, who won playing Henry VIII in 1933. And even Laughton wasn't all that fat compared both to Griffiths and to the mountainlike presence Laughton would become later in his career. A few other best actors and best actresses might at worst be called "somewhat beefy." I'm thinking of Emil Jannings, Marie Dressler, Victor McLaglen, Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, John Wayne, George C. Scott, Kathy Bates, Anthony Hopkins, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The categories of best supporting actor and actress are more hospitable to endomorphs, just as they're more hospitable to the handicapped and members of minority groups. (It's OK to be fat or black or the wearer of a prosthetic device, apparently, so long as you don't hog the whole picture.) Consequently you have Jane Darwell fatly playing Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, Thomas Mitchell in Stagecoach, Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier, Burl Ives in The Big Country, and Margaret Rutherford in The V.I.P.s. Hattie McDaniel won a best supporting actress award for Gone With the Wind, and she was both African-American and fat! Sixty-eight years later, Jennifer Hudson, also African-American and fat, gave what is said to be a wonderful leading-role performance in Dreamgirls (haven't seen it myself) but got slotted into the ghettoized category of best supporting actress.

It is well-known that audiences don't especially like directing their gaze at people who fail to conform to their notions of normality and physical attractiveness. This is nowhere so true as at the movies. But it's a tad dismaying to learn that even the film professionals who decide on academy nominations are susceptible to this small-mindedness. Hell, even critics are susceptible to it; in his New Republic review, Stanley Kauffman opined, apropos of nothing, that Griffiths had "the most grotesquely obese figure I can remember in an actor." (Kauffman liked the performance but weirdly downplayed its significance, saying the role was "a piece of cake for Griffiths, as it would be for any competent actor.") Fat people are subjected to particular scorn and discomfort, because they are often thought (usually mistakenly) to have gotten that way through self-indulgence. This is a particularly inapt view in Griffiths' case, because his obesity came about as a result of an ill-considered radiation treatment when he was 8 years old—for being too skinny, of all things. Griffiths told Joyce Wadler of the New York Times that within 12 months of the treatment, his body weight increased by 60 percent. Of course, Griffiths' weight is entirely irrelevant in any case. Alan Bennett, who wrote the play and the movie, included in his text no reference to the size of Hector, the teacher whom Griffiths plays. (The fellow currently playing Hector on London's West End is of average size.) What matters is not the size of the actor, but the size of the performance. In that sense, Griffiths is, I believe, too large to ignore.


LUCINDA AGAIN

Lucinda Williams:
The Last Word
By Mark Guarino
“This is the last batch,” Lucinda Williams says of the songs on West, her new album.

But don’t call it a swan song. The new songs confront, rail against and ultimately find solace alongside loneliness and death, the two themes burrowed inside all of her songs in a lifework of 28 years.

This “last batch” are the songs Williams found cleaning out the closet of her personal history, in the dust hairs of wrecked relationships, ones which, when clumped into a single ball, revealed a consistency. “All my boyfriends were rock ’n’ roll guys, and some of them were younger,” she says. “That wasn’t really what I needed, obviously. I guess it’s an immaturity thing; you keep trying to find what you need and you have to knock on a lot of doors. And finally, you have to say to yourself, ‘I keep knocking on the same door and it’s not working. Maybe I should try a different door.’”

Through that untested door stood Tom Overby, director of marketing for Fontana Distribution, an independent arm of the Universal Music Group, and Williams’ fiancé since last March. They plan to marry near the end of 2006. The almost three-year relationship arrived suddenly and with particular ease. “I just knew. There’s just no question. You don’t have to analyze. I wish it happened sooner, but part of that was my growth. I had to get past a lot of old ideas and old expectations, old patterns that weren’t serving me well,” she says.

Remnants of that destructive grind — “I would just lose myself in the relationship and then I would resent it and then I would want to get out” — end up on West. Amid the subdued tension of “Rescue” she reminds herself in listed refrains all the things her lover can’t do for her, not because he doesn’t want to, but because it’s an insurmountable task. “He can’t save you/ From the plain and simple truth/The waning winters of your youth,” she sings.

“I’ve since written some happy love songs, if you can believe that,” she says with a laugh. “But I had to let these last ones out.”

“I’ve gone through a lot of growing and changes that I think are evident in this record,” Williams, 54, declares. It’s a process that can best describe how she somehow got here in the first place, from a university poet’s daughter to a vagabond folkie to a songwriter who today just doesn’t have the respect of an industry that, in the not-so-distant past, was content to throw her away; she is the rare songwriter who can claim literary grit. School kids can study these songs just as diligently as hungry, eager-to-absorb songwriters at open mic night. In the illuminated images of her lyrics, the sensuality of their presentation and the vulnerable roughage of her voice, she twists together elements of blues, country, spirituals and sometimes a dirty roadhouse backbeat into a near-mystical genre of confessional storytelling of which she is the single living definition.

“Lucinda set a standard for a lot of people,” observes independent Nashville singer-songwriter Joy Lynn White, who covered two of Williams’ songs on her 1997 album The Lucky Few. Williams returned the compliment by enlisting her to sing background harmonies on 2001’s Essence. “I can’t tell you of all the girls who are in the Americana genre of music that constantly refer to Lucinda as their mentor,” White says. “If a reviewer puts you in her genre, that’s a real lucky thing.”

“One thing I’ve always noticed about her is some of her songs are so simple but in just those few words and the way her melodies are, they’re so effective. It’s just a natural thing,” says songwriter Jim Lauderdale, who has sung harmony vocals and played guitar with Williams since the mid-1980s. “It’s very hard to write a song that seems so simple but in just those few words, it says all that it needs to. There’s not really any extraneous stuff going on.”

If West is a reaction to the turmoil on its heels, then she’s right on target. Williams earned her reputation as a prickly perfectionist by default: one who will fight until the sound in her head is also coming out of the speakers. When a producer added drums to her second album in 1980 against her will, she vowed never again; the radar was up. When critical favor and commercial success met at a crossroads that was Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, her breakthrough album in 1998, it was accompanied by magazine articles that detailed the sweat equity it took to finish it, a process that ground through a prolonged cast of musicians, producers, studios and sessions over a period of years.

Of course, the characterization can be taken another way: the defensive offense.

“I heard through the grapevine that she would chew up guitar players and spit ’em out. I was willing to go out there and give it a run,” said Doug Pettibone, the guitarist in Willliams’ current band. To survive, he learned to read body language. “If she moved her body towards you but didn’t look at you but looked at your amp like maybe there’s something wrong with [it], that’s when you knew she didn’t like it. You knew she liked it if she would turn around and be smiling like a kid in the candy store. And those were the moments you’d go after. She knows exactly what she wants.”

Lauderdale sees Williams as “very sensitive” about how she wants her songs to translate. “That must be one of the reasons why things are so powerful when she records and performs,” he says. “She’s one of the few writers and singers I know who moves me to tears and at the same time, another song later, will move me to this mystical experience. When I sing with her, I’m sort of transported somewhere.”

West was likewise recorded, then torn apart and stitched back, toyed and tinkered with, until it became what it is today: her spookiest record. These are beautifully bleak songs even with such dim lights of resolve. While known for ballads eliciting heartache, these songs buck their hind legs hard. Williams’ voice is particularly gnarled; atop the creeping grooves of “Unsuffer Me” she delivers bruising lyrics (“My joy is dead/ I long for bliss”) with no salve remaining in her voice. On “Come On,” the album’s biggest rock moment, she scalds a former lover by blaring a repeated sexual innuendo. The quieter moments find her drained. On “Learning How to Live” she sings of finding a way to go on after being abandoned even though the weariness in her voice tells us the chances are slim. “All I have left is this dime store ring/But I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” she sings.

Those vocal scars, more cragged as she gets older, are exactly what made iconoclast Chicago songwriter Robbie Fulks campaign for Williams to share a duet with him on his 1998 album. “There are a lot of singers who can hit the notes and convey conviction … but her particular value is in all the ‘wrong’ things she does, in terms of modern commercial music, anyway: singing in between and around notes, not hiding her regional accent, revealing herself to a sometimes less-than-glamorous effect, the folksy vibrato,” Fulks said in an email interview.

For recent fans who discovered Williams through Car Wheels, West can be a heavier listen, one that relies less on the story narratives of her past albums and more on personal moods. The songs are textured and less straightforward. Hal Willner, the eclectic producer known for working across the spectrum, from Marianne Faithfull to Allen Ginsberg, is credited for bringing in an ensemble of inventive players that included jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Jim Keltner, bassist Tony Garnier, keyboardist Rob Burger, string player Jenny Sheinman and others whom Willner thought of as musicians second and experimental stylists first. The first thing he did was strip Williams’ demos of everything except her vocals and Doug Pettibone’s guitar. Then he rebuilt.

“We did have somewhat of a credo at the beginning: no steel guitar. We thought ‘Let’s do this differently.’ Lucinda’s just so much more than that,” Willner says. “I love contrasts, taking Lucinda’s voice which is just so emotional and direct and raw, and contrasting that with strings. The effect is more.”

That is definitely the effect of a song like “Wrap My Head Around That,” nearly 10 minutes of electro-blues featuring Williams groove-talking to Pettibone’s hardnosed blues guitar riffs, countered by Frisell’s spacey accents. “Words,” a love letter to the art of writing, is presented in a garden of subtle delights: slyly shifting percussion, flecks of accordion and shimmering guitar chords.

“Everybody who played on the record really got involved in the musical creative end of it,” Williams notes. “I really haven’t gone into a studio with what I would call a quote-unquote actual producer. Everyone I’ve worked with”—Gurf Morlix, Steve Earle, Roy Bittan, Bo Ramsey, Charlie Sexton—“has been a musician-slash-producer. I always had this fear that a natural producer was going to come in and overproduce me. I was still coming from that rootsy, folksy place I started out in.” But as her most recent albums broadened her musical boundaries, she said she was finally prepared for the ambiance of West.

“I feel this album is really the one I always wanted to make,” she said. “I wasn’t quite sure how to get there at the time. Or maybe I wasn’t quite ready.”

The unusual setting led Williams to write songs at night and bring them to the band the next day, a significant blow to the anxiety she endured in past years when faced with writing songs on demand. The major revelation became the two new songs referencing Lucy Morgan, her mother who died of aneurisms three years ago in March while living in an assisted living facility in Fayetteville, Ark.

Williams’ biographers tend to dwell on Miller Williams, her Arkansan poet father who once recited his work at President Clinton’s 1997 inauguration and with whom she shares her lyrics with before recording them. Her mother, a long-time New Orleans resident, is less known. She was a living room musician raised against a repressive Methodist backdrop in rural Louisiana. After she and Williams’ father divorced when their daughter was 11 and Lucinda went to live permanently with her father and stepmother, her mother turned to a quiet life. Lucinda later discovered she was an avid reader of psychology, was enrolled in therapy her entire life and was the owner of a library of books by Jung and other leading analysts.

“My mother was an incredible, intelligent person,” Williams says. “She was in trouble. Mental illness has run through the family on my mother’s side. So some of [my songs], she wasn’t ready to deal with. ‘Bus to Baton Rouge’ [on Essence] really says a lot about all of this. I remember when I recorded that song; she didn’t want me to put it on the record.”

A memento of her mother’s death is the new song “Fancy Funeral,” a drowsy lament protesting the marketplace of grieving and the artifices pitched to the bereaved. “No amount of riches/Can bring back what you’ve lost/To satisfy your wishes/You’ll never justify the cost,” she sings.

Calling the song “a literal portrayal of what I’d gone through planning my mother’s funeral,” Williams says her immediate family’s plan for a simple cremation service in Arkansas was hijacked when her mother’s Louisiana relatives insisted she be given a traditional burial in the family plot back home.

“It really turned into a Flannery O’Connor/Eudora Welty/Carson McCullers short story,” Williams explains. “I found myself in a funeral parlor for the first time of my life shopping for caskets. It was the most surreal and disturbing experience I ever had.

“Funeral parlors should all be shut down. They just suck you in. As soon as you walk into that door you might as well forget it, you lost control over your senses. In my case, my mother just died and I was the one paying for everything and handling it all. And somehow I got talked into buying all this stuff I knew my mother didn’t want. It was a nightmare,” she says, adding a laugh. “I had to write that song.”

Lucinda Williams fans are familiar with the songwriter’s geography of grief. In past albums, and especially on Car Wheels, her songs recount, memorialize or address characters from her past who died unnecessary deaths or young deaths, or abandoned their relationships in towns spanning the map of her early wandering: Lake Charles, Lafayette, Slidell, Greenville, Pineola.

After Car Wheels made her a headliner and resulted in a Grammy win for best contemporary folk album, Williams hit a writer’s block: “It was an albatross around my neck because I was defined by that record.”

The laborious process she came to accept for writing songs was broken. Instead, in a two-week sprint, she found herself in an unprecedented writing spree, resulting in Essence, an album of songs that turned inward instead of cataloging stories from the outside.

“They were so different in that I didn’t feel I had to work on them as long. I remember consciously thinking, ‘Can I get away with this? Is this OK? Don’t I have to work long, don’t I have to labor over them, don’t I have to have more narrative songs on this record like the ones on Car Wheels?’ I was really, really worried about it.”

With lyrics hinged on simple repetition, a crucial link to the blues, Williams turned a corner. Through later albums, including West, she let herself be open to different sounds, making room for influences ranging from soul poet Jill Scott and the basement punk of Paul Westerberg to electronic duo Thievery Corporation and the fuzzed-out North Mississippi blues of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside. The space between albums slimmed, her songwriting loosened, and her self-confidence grew.

Turns out the prime motivator for this creative renewal was a single album: Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his blues-minded but gorgeously dark album from 1997.

“I’ve watched his career for so many years, ever since I discovered him in 1965. I saw him go through the same kind of transgression from when he was doing the older stuff—Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde—all of these heavy metaphorical and heavy narrative songs. And now, all of the sudden, he comes out with Time Out of Mind, which is really open and moody and has real simple lyrics. He almost gave me permission for what he’s been able to do,” she says.

She met Dylan twice, once in 1979 when he gave her a kiss on the cheek after watching her perform at a Greenwich Village folk club, just after recording her Folkways debut. The second was 19 years later, in 1998, when he appeared opening night to thank her for opening a leg on his never-ending tour. “He had this very, almost nurturing, sweetness about him,” she recalls. “Then I never saw him again for the rest of the tour.”

Still, they are linked. Dylan and Williams both understand how to filter suffering in their songs—by revealing the real beauty within deep sorrows—so it doesn’t translate as boilerplate misery. There is a process and, unfortunately, there is a price.