We've got a guest in the Tavern! Ed Moloy, modern manuscripts curator supreme & avid (indie) rock listener, has graced us with a top ten albums & top eight singles list for 2thousand10. I'm not too well schooled in these contemporary sounds, so the only name on the list that I recognize is Roky Erickson who helped start-up the legendary 60s Austin psychrock band 13th Floor Elevators. But if Ed is telling you this stuff be the cream of the crop, then you better believe it.
When I first wrote about the Dave Rawlings Machine's Friend of a Friend I enthused about how a feeling of great possibility emanated from the album. Seeing the band live in 2009 at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston only confirmed that feeling. Fortunately, someone recorded the next night’s DRM show, and doubly-fortunate that recording just got passed on to me by my pal John. One of the stand-out tracks meshes fellow Machine and Old Crow Medicine Show member Ketch Secor’s beautiful “I Hear Them All” and Woody Guthrie’s sturdy and triumphant sing-a-long “This Land is Your Land.” It’s one of those heaven-made matches.
There are different versions of “This Land,” and I don’t think it’s an accident that Rawlings & friends decided to include two of the “extra” verses of “This Land” when they paired it with “I Hear.” While the most well known version of the song celebrates the natural wonders of the land and the right for all to full participation in the life of the country, the extra verses call attention to the stark economic inequities and exclusionary practices which deny this right.
In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; By the relief office, I'd seen my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, Is this land made for you and me?
As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said "No Trespassing." But on the other side it didn't say nothing, That side was made for you and me.
Those verses jive quite well with the sentiments expressed in “I Hear.”
I hear the crying of the hungry In the deserts where they're wandering Hear them crying out for Heaven's own Benevolence upon them Hear destructive power prevailing I hear fools falsely hailing To the crooked wits of tyrants when they call.
It’s not hard to imagine finding those lines in the pages of the lefty folk magazine Broadside or being sung, like Woody’s song, at a 60s anti-war rally. And while a lot has changed in the country for the good since the sixties, there’s still plenty of same as it ever was injustice and rabid inequality. Perhaps at no time during the past 50 years was this more evident than during the Bush administration’s sorry, and yes, racist response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. OCMS did right by the post-Katrina gulf stream waters town of New Orleans when they filmed the “I Hear” video there.
Both are deeply American songs of affirmation: your voice will be heard and this sprawling landscape and all-men-are-created-equal idea called America has room for everyone. They are affirmations only partially incarnated throughout our history (to put it all too kindly), but they place a demand on us to find ways to make that incarnation more true to the ideals expressed.
If the world serves up a shot of the Machine in a town near you, get yourself to the bar lickety-split. Here’s the band singing the gospel at Bonnaroo 2010.
Another year presents itself -- plural, shifting, novel, offering us black ice and chance once more to step outside.
All summer I made friends with the creatures nearby -- they flowed through the fields and under the tent walls, or padded through the door, grinning through their many teeth, looking for seeds, suet, sugar; muttering and humming, opening the breadbox, happiest when there was milk and music. But once in the night I heard a sound outside the door, the canvas bulged slightly -- something was pressing inward at eye level. I watched, trembling, sure I had heard the click of claws, the smack of lips outside my gauzy house -- I imagined the red eyes, the broad tongue, the enormous lap. Would it be friendly too? Fear defeated me. And yet, not in faith and not in madness but with the courage I thought my dream deserved, I stepped outside. It was gone. Then I whirled at the sound of some shambling tonnage. Did I see a black haunch slipping back through the trees? Did I see the moonlight shining on it? Did I actually reach out my arms toward it, toward paradise falling, like the fading of the dearest, wildest hope -- the dark heart of the story that is all the reason for its telling? -- Mary Oliver, "The Chance to Love Everything"
