George Bernard Shaw once said, “The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.” But while it’s true that musically the last century would have been a damned sight poorer without such cooperative efforts as the Hot Fives and Sevens, the Family Stone, and “Ballad of Mott the Hoople,” it’s also true that there have always been musicians who believed that one is not the loneliest number but the onliest number. Whether under the influence of ego, tradition, or implosive personality, a wealth of artists–from Bo Diddley to Bob Dylan, from Robert Johnson to Daniel Johnson–have chosen to write material and take it to the stage themselves.
The performers who benefited most from the show’s friendly setting were those whose albums haven’t always caught them wearing their strong suits. Better known as a producer (of R.E.M. and the Smithereens, among others), Dixon has released four excellent LPs of his own material but has never managed to climb beyond cult status. His biggest hit? “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It),” the diegetic anthem of the dead-girls comedy Heathers. On albums Dixon comes across as amiable, talented, musically adept (though he can play serviceable guitar, he’s a bassist at heart), and possibly inconsequential. Too witty. Too cheery. Too nice. Too bad, because as this appearance proved, he’s not only a consistently interesting songwriter but a performer of the highest order. In a raspy R & B bellow that recalled John Hiatt at his balladeering best, Dixon tore into his songs with carnivorous ardor, not just wrestling the meat down but cooking it, cutting it, and feeding it to the audience. He can grill, as he did on a rousing rendition of his early rocker “Praying Mantis”; he can simmer with the full-throated blues roar of “I Can See the River”; and he can even host a Crescent City barbecue to the tune of Allen Toussaint’s “Working in the Coal Mine,” which he selected for a playful section of the concert that asked the singers to play songs they wished they had written. But since the show was about songwriting, let’s leave Dixon’s incendiary showmanship behind and marvel instead at the cleverness of “Praying Mantis” (compare his “She wanted his body so much she ate his brain” to Hall & Oates’s “Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up”; there’s no comparison) and at his new song’s reduction of domestic turmoil to a spooky triplet (“Every time I think of home / Credit cards and broken bones / I wish I had a flashlight and a phone”).
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Maybe it’s something in the Lone Star water, but both Halley and McMurtry seem more completely submerged in their own material than the others. At 30, McMurtry was the youngest of the bunch, the son of novelist Larry McMurtry and a college English professor; his friend John Cougar Mellencamp produced his 1989 debut Too Long in the Wasteland. Equal parts Cormac McCarthy and John Prine, with just a pinch of Barry Hannah thrown in for good measure, McMurtry’s wonderfully intense narratives–about prairie losers, small-town ennui, love in barren spaces–are exercises in pressure, with images so menacing you feel as if you’d be safer in a Jim Thompson novel, or in Charley Starkweather’s head, even. The title track opens with “Hear the trucks on the highway / and the ticking of the clocks / There’s a ghost of a moon in the afternoon / Bullet holes in the mailbox”–an arresting lyric that doesn’t stop until it drags you to the station, books you, and throws your ass in stir. McMurtry has his sophomore effort, Candyland, due in June, and he gave a generous preview at the Park West. Though the Methuselan beard tumbling down his shirtfront was new, the overpowering sense of place in the title track was familiar–“Candyland” is a wicked depiction of suburbia, where “Kids around the pool [are] screaming like cats on fire” and “The best circus music’s . . . hell to an ice cream man.” At his best, McMurtry is one of the most exciting young songwriters around, unsentimental and unrelenting–and uncomfortably precise, as in “Where’s Johnny,” the tale of an All-American boy’s withdrawal into himself (“Went on off to college got his head stuck in a different state of mind / When they asked him was it alcohol he told them it was nothing of the kind”). But “Where’s Johnny” also lets McMurtry’s maudlin streak come to the fore, and one new song in particular, the please-stay-with-me-always “Dusty Pages,” was distressingly generic. Emotional directness is fine, but not at the expense of texture. McMurtry without his Thwarted America is like Tom McGuane without the west or Kenneth Rexroth without the Orient; the scalpel may still be sharp, but there’s no body to cut into.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Linda Covello.
