On L.A.’s back pages
Once upon a time there existed a place where people of every stripe lived and worked and laughed and hurt and fought and loved. A place where people were free to say what was on their minds, free to be swindled by flim-flammers, free to put everything they had on the line to win or lose, free to dream the big dreams and indulge in all life offered.
It’s a place singer-songwriter Tom Russell transports listeners to in his grandly ambitious new concept album, but this is no fairy tale from long ago and far away.
The album, “Hotwalker: Charles Bukowski and a Ballad for Gone America,” is centered in Los Angeles -- the L.A. of the recent past. It’s the L.A. into which Russell was born shortly after World War II and which gave rise to many of his richly detailed character studies and folk narratives.
In this L.A., a nascent music called rock ‘n’ roll mixed with norteno polkas from the Mexican border, cool jazz, hot gospel, fiery blues and stinging Bakersfield country and western, and where radio stations played it all. Once upon a time.
Russell was born at California Lutheran Hospital downtown -- he points out that he arrived in this world on Hope Street -- went to Loyola High School and grew up in Inglewood. He hung around Hollywood Park and Santa Anita after his father, a general contractor, bought racehorses. And he sought out the intoxicating music that blared from nightclubs. He weaves all these elements into “Hotwalker,” at once an autobiography and a socio-cultural essay.
Russell’s songs have been recorded over the last two decades by the likes of Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Nanci Griffith and Joe Ely, and one, “Outbound Plane,” became a Top 10 country hit in 1992 for Suzy Bogguss. But on “Hotwalker,” the songs are just a starting point. The 55-year-old musician has crafted an aural collage, a musical-literary portrait of a place and time he believes has been lost, to the detriment of us all.
The album combines narration, low-tech ambient recordings of music blasting from Mexican cantinas and quasi-fictional characters. It is built not only on Russell’s words but also the words and in some cases the voices of the late poet Bukowski and such writers and musicians as Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lenny Bruce, Edward Abbey, Harry Partch and Dave Van Ronk, artists known for their “outsider” sensibility.
The idea was to document and lament an L.A. -- and in a broader sense, an America -- that used to be. In the album’s opening narration, Russell says:
The backdrop is MacArthur Park
And Hollywood Court apartments and racetrack
The old America
When music still resonated through nightclubs....
The old America
Where the big guilt and political correctness
and the chain stores hadn’t sunk in so deep
“Right below the surface of this montage on L.A. is my view of some of the things wrong with our culture,” Russell says between bites of a roast beef sandwich at one of his favorite old L.A. haunts, the Pantry cafe downtown. “Not being a political animal, I see ... a plague of conservatism in the arts, and it doesn’t come from any left or right spectrum, but from some sort of general fear.”
Russell used to frequent the Pantry while working during the ‘60s as a truck driver, hauling flowers from Santa Barbara to the downtown flower mart.
His choice of the Pantry for an interview is emblematic of the bent of his album. The atmospheric old diner, with a menu that still offers pot roast and pork chops and where waiters pour plain old coffee rather than double-mocha decaf lattes, now huddles under the shadow of gleaming, sterile skyscrapers that house multinational corporations.
“I didn’t want to do a strictly spoken-word record,” he says. “I wanted to wash it with the musicality of early black-and-white TV and the great buildings of old L.A. -- my L.A.”
Russell’s Greek chorus for “Hotwalker” is Little Jack Horton, a fictionalized version of a man Russell once knew. He’s introduced on the record as a circus midget whom he tracked down living in Florida and invited to read portions of the work.
“I had to have Little Jack Horton,” says Russell. “He can say the things I can’t get away with.”
His favorite targets are political correctness, which he defines as a belief that “my politics are better than yours,” and spiritual correctness, “the idea that my world view is better than yours.”
The Horton character, credited on the album with “rants and raves and carny music,” is responsible for some of the CD’s most outrageously funny segments. One of the most poignant sections, and Russell’s favorite, is “Van Ronk,” in which Russell describes what it was like for an aspiring musician to spend time with the renowned folk artist, who mentored Bob Dylan and countless other would-be troubadours:
Dave Van Ronk tried to watch over all of ‘em
Every kid who walked in wide-eyed
With a guitar and a song fragment
They called Dave “The Pope of Greenwich
Village”
And I sat on his couch a few times
And it was better than any $100 shrink or
hooker ...
It’s the kind of musical mentoring, the passing on of tradition, that Russell thinks is largely missing today. He has wrestled with the question of whether he’s simply pining for the good old days of his youth. And he says some people he’s played the album for, including other respected musicians, think he’s being unnecessarily glum, that there is good music, good writing, lively culture today if you know where to look.
He recalls Bukowski once telling him: “My advice to young writers is to stop looking for advice from old writers.” His own spin? “”We’re telling young writers that the way to make it is to network and go to conferences, whenwe should be telling them the opposite: Go back to Des Moines, Iowa, learn some songs and create your own unique voice. This record is trying to hit on that a little bit.
“Bob Dylan showed up in New York already knowing 1,000 songs. He’d done his homework. He stole and created a voice based on that. I don’t think a lot of young writers are doing that kind of homework.... I really do think something significant has been lost.”
More than nostalgia for the good old days, Russell argues that the ‘50s and ‘60s period of American culture he’s exploring “was truly a significant time. It was a turning point in songwriting and in history, and that stuff still resonates today. It’s not going away.”
“Hotwalker” grew out of a book Russell wanted to put together compiling his correspondence with Bukowski over a period of more than 20 years before the poet’s death in 1994. That book, “Tough Company,” is slated for publication in May.
Rereading the letters sparked his desire to take a larger look at the world that he and Bukowski emerged from. Originally, Russell was part of a project in which several of Bukowski’s poems would be set to music and then read by actors. But organizers couldn’t clear the rights.
Instead, Russell moved ahead with “Hotwalker,” named for the racetrack workers who walk horses hot from running until they cool down. As it came together, Russell quickly realized it represented the continuation of an autobiographical exploration he began in 1999 with his album “The Man From God Knows Where,” focusing on his father’s experience coming to the United States from Ireland.
“Hotwalker” represents the second part of a trilogy, he says, the final installment of which will examine the western expansion through a woman’s eyes.
Russell describes himself as a frustrated novelist -- he even wrote one detective novel, “Blood Sport,” published in 1995, and says he’d love to write a Broadway musical -- “but an outsider musical,” he says.
You also sense in his songs the observant eye and analytical mind that helped him earn a criminology degree from UC Santa Barbara in the ‘60s. He spent a year in Nigeria teaching sociology but returned to the States, formed a country-rock band and got a gig playing skid row bars in Montreal.
“I found myself working among the people I always wanted to be around,” he says, “and I did it as a musician instead of as a criminologist.”
No easy endings
Russell has always been interested in colorful characters and stories through which he can elucidate the American experience, good and bad.
One of his earliest and best-known songs is “Gallo del Cielo,” a long fable about a Mexican man who steals a prize rooster and enters it in a series of cockfights in hopes of winning enough money to buy back land that Pancho Villa stole from his family.
As with many of Russell’s songs that mine the richness of human experience, it doesn’t have a tidy, uplifting ending.
Neither, for that matter, does “Hotwalker,” which closes with singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters’ bittersweet rendition of “America the Beautiful.”
Yet Russell isn’t a pessimist. As part of his tour to promote “Hotwalker,” he gave a concert last week at McCabe’s in Santa Monica and the next night did a combination reading-signing-performance at a Brentwood bookstore.
There, he read one of Bukowski’s letters with his response to a question Russell had posed about whether authentic American voices were going silent amid a pernicious consumer culture.
“Out of any culture,” Bukowski wrote, “no matter how watered down, will arise great or very good writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians. There’s no holding down this thrust, and we’re lucky for that.”
At the end of the day, Russell, it seems, still clings to that thing into which he was born: Hope.
