Moderators: Jonicont, mark lynn, Maluca3, Tequila Cowboy, BigTom, CooleyGirl, olwiggum
Clams wrote: You'd have to think he'll fill in with a couple more northeastern dates.
EddieHinton wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXVgl2Y4-Qg
This is him doing Ruby and Carlos live. He starts out saying "this'll get you reaching for the Prozac"
I've been a fan for over 20 years and I think Ruby and Carlos is my favorite
Beebs wrote:Northampton, Ma is great music town and a sure bet.
StevieRay wrote:Beebs wrote:Northampton, Ma is great music town and a sure bet.
No doubt Beebs. I saw Built to Spill @ Pearl Street a few weeks ago. Northhampton is indeed a sweet town.
Can someone explain to me why James McMurtry is so damn criminally under-appreciated? This guy is an absolute genius.
Tequila Cowboy wrote:StevieRay wrote:Beebs wrote:Northampton, Ma is great music town and a sure bet.
No doubt Beebs. I saw Built to Spill @ Pearl Street a few weeks ago. Northhampton is indeed a sweet town.
Can someone explain to me why James McMurtry is so damn criminally under-appreciated? This guy is an absolute genius.
I think it's exposure. I've played him for some pretty diverse folks and they dig him. Of course I did turn a guy that does some work for us onto him and he dug him a lot, then he found out he was a socialist and won't listen anymore. his loss.
Clams wrote:Lyrically, his songs require the listener to think and concentrate, things that most mainstream Americans seem to have a hard time with. Plus, he seems kind of surly and I'd think that he's not all that into promoting himself.
Beebs wrote:Clams wrote: You'd have to think he'll fill in with a couple more northeastern dates.
Maybe, but when I saw him in Albany (Spring '09 I think?) he was openly grumbling about how that show and the next one in NYC were badly undersold. Northampton, Ma is great music town and a sure bet. Love to see him flesh out the schedule up here but wouldn't be surprised if he plays it safe with those dates and gets back south in a hurry. We'll see.
Smitty wrote:https://www.noisetrade.com/jamesmcmurtry
give em your email, share it on facebook/twitter and receive Live in Europe free!
Duke Silver wrote:Smitty wrote:https://www.noisetrade.com/jamesmcmurtry
give em your email, share it on facebook/twitter and receive Live in Europe free!
Anyone else try this? I did and the download only included the first track (Bayou Tortous). Wording on the noisetrade site is kinda vague, so maybe that's right...?
Clams wrote:Duke Silver wrote:
Anyone else try this? I did and the download only included the first track (Bayou Tortous). Wording on the noisetrade site is kinda vague, so maybe that's right...?
I did it and got the same thing, just the one track.
James McMurtry
Into the woods with James McMurtry, the Texas troubadour who’s spent a lifetime in pursuit of great songs, open spaces, and the occasional wild turkey
When I step off the twin-prop plane in Wichita Falls, Texas, and into the late-day heat of spring, wind blasting forty miles an hour, the first thing I hear, literally, is a loud and live rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” by what sounds like a marching band. Wichita Falls is home to Sheppard Air Force Base, one of the busiest airfields in the U.S. Air Force. The band is practicing, is all—it’s no special occasion—but then the Warthogs go screaming past, and James McMurtry drives up in his old Ranger pickup, his wild Jesus hair silhouetted by the westering sun, and I get it instantly. This isn’t just something he sings about—the heartland, rural values, hard choices, wars, politics—it’s his world, his milieu.
Known perhaps best for his hard-rocking driving-beat social protest songs, McMurtry has prodigious talents that exist far beyond the one-trick-pony stance of the angry troubadour. It’s hard to articulate what’s unique about his songs, but you know them the instant you hear them, not unlike a broad chain of deep-voiced male Southern white independent songwriting folk-country rockers with great guitar licks, great voices, great minds: Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Robert Earl Keen. Gruff and gravelly in tone, energetic guitar, gold-standard lyrics—there isn’t any fluff anywhere. My own personal McMurtry favorite is “Holiday,” an extended ballad about the stresses and expectations upon modern families to uphold traditions, setting out on the road in inclement weather, determined to have a good time, a time of family unity. The story would be touching on that level alone, but with each new stanza, the stakes are raised.
He’s a traveling musician these days—he has been for over twenty years—playing about 150 shows a year, with a frequent gig at the Continental Club in Austin. It’s a tough go, even in the best of times; it’s a tough go now. Sometimes he travels with his band (a drummer, a bass player, and a sound man/guitarist); other times, he’s solo. His work has been influenced by other Texas legends such as Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, and Robert Earl Keen, but his songs are unmistakably his own.
In some things—his guitar work, for instance—he’s precise, just so, almost cautious, striving for perfection. In other things—such as the interior of his old truck—he’s a little less so. Priorities. Loose change sprawls on the floor and car seats. Split plastic cups crinkle underfoot, receipts flutter, empty plastic water bottles roll like bowling pins. He drinks a lot of water, probably between one and two gallons a day, as if trying to quench some burning inside.
His paternal great-grandfather moved to Archer County from Missouri in the 1880s; his grandfather said that at the turn of the twentieth century, there were “three mesquite trees” in the whole county. Then the mesquite swarmed over, due to the white culture’s overenthusiastic suppression of all wildfires. The mesquite destroyed rangeland by crowding out grasses, once a valuable thing. Then there was a big play for oil, but it’s going away; the last of the oil is way deep. Now the mesquite is the valuable thing, because it provides cover for deer and turkeys.
Landowners are locking up their land, folks he refers to as “the high-fence guys,” trying to keep deer on their land, like livestock, rather than wild animals, free to come and go. He doesn’t like it but he drives on, steady and easy. If you’re wondering whether he’s related to the writer Larry McMurtry, he is; Larry’s his dad. I’m here to talk to James about music, not his father’s writing, but I can’t help but think of the title Horseman, Pass By.
We’re driving straight out to the Langford ranch, owned now by his dad and Aunt Judy and Aunt Sue, to scout for turkeys: to listen for them going to roost, so we’ll know better where to set up and hunt in the morning. He doesn’t rhapsodize over the land’s beauty—the outrageousness of an arid land made so briefly green—but anyone can see that the land fulfills him. He points out the scissortails swooping along the road and notes that when they show up, it means there won’t be any more freezes.
I’m surprised by how much he talks about his grandfather Jeff, who evidently threw a pretty big shadow. Hell, his father, Larry, casts an immense shadow in Texas. I imagine it can’t always have been easy, being James, Son of Larry, but he sure seems to have figured it out.
We park and wander the woods looking for tracks, or feathers, and listening for gobbling. There’s nothing but a high howling wind. James points out a creek that gets real high once in a while. He says that in the old days there were a couple of weeks each year when the waters would rise so quickly and so high that they would cut off the cattle from their main pasture. His dad would have to ride over and get them and push them back across, swimming. It was dangerous business, he says, because cow ponies in Archer County didn’t have much practice swimming. A cowboy drowned once.
“I always wondered why they didn’t put a wire gate on the south fence, run the cows across the neighbor’s pasture and onto the county road where there’s a bridge over the creek. I’ve never tried to make cows cross a bridge, but I’ll bet they’d follow a pickup with a broken sack of cottonseed cake on the tailgate.” He’s just visiting, pointing out the intricacies of his home, but as writers are sometimes wont to do, I can’t help but remember that statement and wonder if it’s not a subconscious comment that speaks in some way to his life and his career: going his own way about fame, taking the long way around, avoiding the pitfalls that so often plague the progeny of big shadows.
He’s reckless yet precise. When I open the first gate, he asks to be sure that I close it in such a way that the cows can’t nose the clip open. He’s careful, too, with his guns. He shows me his old turkey-killing gun, a Browning Auto-5 12-gauge, and an L.C. Smith that he says I’m welcome to shoot, but I decline, too broke for a license. He says Larry got a whole box of guns from an estate sale that he bought for the books alone. The guns came as an afterthought. James is definitely more interested in guns, says he’s not much of a reader; when he was a kid, he didn’t read many books, though he says he was always stumbling over them, that they were everywhere.
Our plan is to split up, to spread out and liSten. James directs me to a tall camo-shrouded hunting tower, from which I can see a great distance. I should be able to hear any turkeys gobbling right before they fly up to roost, and maybe even hear the distinctive thwapping of their powerful wings. We’ll mark the spot, then come back just before dawn and seek to call them down off the roost and into shotgun range: twenty-five, maybe thirty yards.
James disappears into the brush, toward the distant sound of gobbling. It’s incredibly windy up in the tower, and after a while, I can’t hear the gobbling. I don’t know if the birds have shut up, or are moving—perhaps toward us, perhaps away. It’s a pleasant place to just sit and rock. The branches swaddle the tower, making a hidden bower that creaks.
At dusk, a giant black boar comes trotting out of the thicket, coming from the exact place where James had entered the woods. He’s a big fellow, with tusks like a vampire’s fangs. I wait for what seems a long time but finally I see James’s headlamp coming toward me in the darkness, and he does not appear to be hurrying. I tell him about the boar and show him the picture on my camera—kind of a fine-arts film-noir-looking image, a blurry black bear-shaped animal galloping through the dusk—and James allows it might be good to take his pistol with him into the woods in the morning.
We drive back to the ranch house. Heat lightning is flashing to the west. For dinner James cooks a couple of giant venison steaks he’s been marinating all day, and we drink wine out of plastic yellow saucers from the pantry. There is very little furniture, but the shelves are all lined with books, top to bottom. If you are not a reader, there seems to be nothing to do here but play music or write. It’s a place to rest and sleep between hunts: Spartan, spare, elegant, secure. It appears not to have changed in a long time.
When I comment on the beauty of the simple plank table, James says it’s something Larry got in an auction. “Larry has an eye,” he says. “I don’t have an eye for aesthetics.” And I don’t think he’s being facetious or self-deprecating, just honest. I think his talents are not so visual or cinematic, but story-based—ballads, and voice. His girlfriend, Kellie, describes his songs as often being “about people who are bent but not broken.” He gives these people the dignity of “picking them up and carrying them for a little while,” she says. Often, too, the songs are about ghosts, and the going-away of things.
James says his grandfather Jeff built this house out in the country on the same site where the original house burned in 1928. The summer James was fifteen, he came back from Virginia and lived in town with his grandfather, who would wake him up early every morning. One morning James slept in and didn’t awaken until an old friend of Jeff’s came in and stirred him, saying only, “Well, Jeff’s gone.”
While James cooks—a lone yellow lightbulb hangs in the kitchen, the venison in a black iron skillet, olive oil marinade, cream gravy, fried potatoes simmering—I ask him how connected he feels to Texas. His answer informs me that he considers Texas to be identified more by the land under his feet than the people who flow briefly across it.
“I love the hunting and fishing here, and the countryside, and my kin,” he says. “But I don’t consider myself as Texan as they are. I don’t consider myself a Texas musician because my songs are as likely to be set in Maryland as they are in Texas.”
As with a lot of great songwriters, his songs have been covered by surprisingly few others, and I think in large part it’s because he so thoroughly owns the sound of the songs he writes and sings that it would be daunting, hard to imagine them being sung by anyone else, famous or otherwise.
It’s tricky, he says, trying to figure out how to “assemble a career”—which jobs to take, which ones to pass up. On the drive in from Wichita Falls to Archer City, he pointed out a decrepit out-of-business honky-tonk where he played once. It can be hard sometimes, he says, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Instead he seems relieved, happy to be going hunting in the morning.
His mother taught him his firSt guitar chords when he was seven. He went to boarding school but didn’t care for it, went to college but didn’t care for that so much either. He tended bar for a while, worked on movie sets, including Daisy Miller and Lonesome Dove—he was the kid who wouldn’t go in the whorehouse—and did a little cowboying on sets. But mostly, just music.
Awards and enumerations are no way to measure an artist, but he’s recorded ten albums, including a 2005 single, “We Can’t Make It Here,” which won best song, and the record it was on, Childish Things, won 2006 best album by the Americana Music Association. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King called McMurtry “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.”
Somehow it’s gotten to be late. The wine is gone, and I nurse a dark rye beer. A call has come in from one of John Mellencamp’s band members, and I eavesdrop unabashedly as the two musicians shoot the breeze, with the lightning still raging outside. Their long late-night earnest discussion over the minutiae of certain songs and sounds makes it seem to me that James is encamped in some laboratory far out in the country, where art burbles and gurgles, getting made, getting dreamed, and seeking release into the world, always seeking release into the world. It wasn’t Robert Earl Keen who spawned it, of course, any more than it was Buddy Holly or Joe Ely or Lyle Lovett or Guy Clark or even Townes Van Zandt, or anyone else. It was something older and deeper, and even though it seems those Old Ones have almost all gone away, and that that thing has gone away, it hasn’t. It’s still out there in the soil, still coming up like a vapor, in places, or a spirit. And I think that to find it, you sometimes have to sit very still, like a hunter, and very quietly, and wait for such things to rise, again and again.
I go out to sit on the lawn chair on the front porch and listen to that dry howling wind and watch the phantasmagoric lightning storm just a few miles off. After a while James comes out on the porch with his guitar and plays an exquisite little series of chords, just noodling around. It sounds like some incredible classic folk song I’ve never heard before, like something Leo Kottke might play but without that stylish pop of self-awareness that sometimes accompanies, or rides just behind, such mastery, and when I ask James what song that was, he says it was just chords. I don’t want to jinx it or badger him by asking if it’s a song he’s working on, so we just sit quietly and watch the storm. I don’t really know how music works at all. Maybe he was just fooling with chords the way you or I might tap our finger—putting those chords together with the unthinking idleness of a grocery list perhaps, which will be gone the next day, never to return. But it was one of the most beautiful and elegant little melodies I ever heard. After a while the storm calms down and goes away.
There are a lot of joys in the world, but there is none quite exactly like the one known to the turkey hunter who, upon walking through the dimmest of pre-dawn light, hears the first nearby gobble of a wild turkey, and who knows that whether or not he or she finds a bird that day, there is going to at least be action: that the quarry is indeed in the woods. It is an electrifying sound; it seizes the blood. A lot of hunters will begin running toward the sound, but James just keeps on walking, staying cool: inside, though, he is not cool. No one can hear that sound and remain cool—no one. At best, you go to a tight small place between abandon and fierce control, and you slide along that narrow gauge, watching and listening, with all the senses so inflamed that it seems a single spark, mixed with a single gust of wind, could ignite you.
You also know dimly that the morning will not last forever, and that you will either find, or not find, the turkey, and that even if everything goes perfectly, and you engage the bird with maximum intensity, the engagement, and the morning, will end. But all that is later. The sun will come up, gold light strafing through the new-green buds and foliage, and the woods all around you will be thundering with the raucousness of wild turkey gobblers, coming in from all directions, seeking your call, fanning and strutting and clucking and yelping and scratching, coming ever closer, searching for the thing they think they want, while you are hidden motionless and camouflaged and perfectly still in the brush, with your desire burning every bit as incandescent as theirs.
There is a perfect beauty in the world, and the world belongs to you, it is yours to take, though to do so you must acknowledge who and what you are, and what your position is in the place of things—a hunter, one who comes and takes, and then goes away for a while. One who participates in the life and death of the wild.
We’re tucked into the thorny brambles of dagger-clawed greenbrier. The morning is so cool that the mosquitoes haven’t found us yet. The birds have been calling all around us, answering James’s slate call yelps, but not moving—spurring us, is what it feels like, as if knowing the difference instinctively between the authentic and the inauthentic. But James plays hard to get, is quiet for a while, and they begin to move in. One calls on our right, sounding closer, and then another one calls from our left, closer still. Carefully, I ease back farther into the thorns. All a turkey has to see is the slightest movement and he’ll be gone, a silent ghost melting away; you’ll never even know he was there.
More gobbling, thunderous now, approaching cautiously, about eighty or ninety yards out. They are magnificent in that green-gold morning light, their feathers rippling with sunstruck iridescence—green bronze gold purple—and their fiercely ugly heads are a luminous blue, their wattles crimson with agitation. They look cautious as hell, like desperadoes slipping out of town, but they’re coming our way quietly, clearly confused as to why they can hear a hen yelping but can’t see it. They’re looking hard, right at us, and if either of us blinks, we’re screwed.
Every step brings them closer to meat. Sixty yards, fifty—they’re moving slower, and we’re both holding our thoughts vacant and still, creating a void for them to come into, careful not to set up an invisible wall of resistance with our desire, our longing, for those next ten or twenty steps.
They hang up; they pause, disconcerted. Looking right at us, thirty-five or forty yards out, with only some brush and saplings between us. One of them makes the little troubled putt sound that usually precedes their turning around and leaving, but it’s the one in front, and he doesn’t entirely want to leave and give up his spot at the front of the line to his two compatriots just behind him.
They stare at us for what feels like hours: six highly evolved bright wide eyes glaring wildly at four narrow-slit hunter eyes, our faces swathed in camo netting. The young gobbler at the back fans, displaying; the lead gobbler sees something he doesn’t like and steps back. The middle gobbler steps up into his place, and takes one more step beyond that, stepping just within that thirty-yard perimeter, and into the open, and James fires—I’ve got my ear covered, anticipating, waiting—and the turkey slams down onto the ground with a flapping of wings and then is still, and the other two turn and scoot away, the bright blue color of their heads fading quickly to a duller color as they send the blood down to their legs, for running.
It’s a big bird, though a young one. James readies himself for a second shot but none is needed: a good clean kill. He walks over to examine his gift—his hard-gotten gift—in that morning light, and after a few moments, I walk over to admire it with him.
Walking out, toting the heavy bird on hisback—walking quietly but with a bounce in his step—remembering what it was like, and trying to hold on to the morning for as long as it will or can be held, James points out a series of strong cattle pens made out of oilfield pipe and sucker rod. He says that about fifty years ago a buffalo came through this country, and somehow the cowboys caught him and held him in those pens. They looked up his brand but couldn’t find registry of it in Texas, nor in Oklahoma or New Mexico. They finally tracked it down to a rancher in Kansas, who said the bull had run away months ago and had been traveling all that time, no doubt leaving in his wake a string of torn-up barbed wire, broken necklaces all the way to Kansas. It was just that bull’s bad luck to finally come through this place that had such a capable holding pen—following, perhaps, the old ghost trails of buffalo eighty years gone, or longer—and a couple of days later, the Kansas rancher drove down and picked his buffalo up, then went back home.
If the bull hadn’t come through the McMurtrys’ ranch, he might have made it all the way to the Gulf. It almost sounds like a song, I think, and I start to say so; but today, at least, James isn’t working, and so we just walk on, quietly, and I watch and enjoy the morning, with stories, and ghosts, dense and thick, all around us.
The Music of James McMurtry
An abbreviated discography with comments by the artist
Too Long in the Wasteland
(Columbia, 1989)
“My first record, produced by John Mellencamp. My vocals are woeful, but the band rocks and I played some pretty good acoustic guitar. I learned some tricks from John, ways of structuring songs
so they lend themselves to recording.”
Where’d You Hide the Body
(Columbia, 1995)
“Produced by Don Dixon, the album that gave us ‘Levelland,’ later covered by Robert Earl Keen, which I guess is why the frat crowd started coming to my Wednesday night shows at the Continental Club in Austin. I’m not complaining.”
Saint Mary of the Woods
(Sugar Hill, 2002)
“My first self-produced record. Recorded in ADAT (a now pretty much obsolete format), bounced to Pro Tools, and mixed to one-inch analog tape (ancient technology, but great sounding) by Ross Hogarth, one badass engineer.”
Childish Things
(Compadre, 2005)
“Americana Music Association album of the year 2006, thank you thank you. It includes ‘We Can’t Make It Here,’ the song that got me pegged as a protest songster and was named AMA song of the year 2006, thank you thank you.”
Live in Europe
(Lightning Rod, 2009)
“My latest release. Came out in October of last year. Features Ian McLagan on keys, includes a live DVD, and is available on vinyl, if you’re into that.”
Smitty wrote:
James McMurtry & The Heartless Bastards
Asheville Music Jamboree
5/25/2008
1. Bayou Tortua
2. Bad Enough
3. Red Dress
4. Just Us Kids
5. Hurricane Party
6. Choctaw Bingo
7. We Can't Make It Here Anymore
8. Ruby & Carlos
9. Childish Things
10. God Bless America (Pat MacDonald Must Die)
11. Levelland
12. Too Long in the Wasteland
http://welfare-music.blogspot.com/2010/ ... tards.html
Duke Silver wrote:Smitty wrote:
James McMurtry & The Heartless Bastards
Asheville Music Jamboree
5/25/2008
1. Bayou Tortua
2. Bad Enough
3. Red Dress
4. Just Us Kids
5. Hurricane Party
6. Choctaw Bingo
7. We Can't Make It Here Anymore
8. Ruby & Carlos
9. Childish Things
10. God Bless America (Pat MacDonald Must Die)
11. Levelland
12. Too Long in the Wasteland
http://welfare-music.blogspot.com/2010/ ... tards.html
This looks fantastic, thanks for sharing. The filetype (.7Z) is one I haven't seen before. What is that? I'm a little gunshy after spending the last month in virus hell thanks to a megaupload file.
Clams wrote:Smitty, that Into the Woods piece is a gem. I never would've guessed McMurtry is in tight with Mellencamp. Cool.
Clams wrote:Smitty, that Into the Woods piece is a gem. I never would've guessed McMurtry is in tight with Mellencamp. Cool.
cortez the killer wrote:I've been a big McMurtry fan ever since I heard Live in Aught Three about 6 years ago. I had never seen him live, until last night. He played a sold out show at a small little venue (Iron Horse Music Hall) in Northampton, MA. It was just James and a couple of acoustic guitars. He opened with an excellent version of "Down Across the Delaware." A few other highlights for me were Rachel's Song, Choctaw Bingo, Hurricane Party, and Ruby & Carlos. His playing is so crisp and his voice is very strong. How he has not garnered more of a following is beyond me. Incredible talent and a great way to spend a Wednesday evening. If he comes your way, you should make every effort to check him out.
