Tom Russell salutes 'outsider' artists in new book
Thursday, May 12, 2005
CRAIG McDONALD
ThisWeek Staff Writer,
The encounter happened in the 1970s, on a smoggy street in Los Angeles -- the city in which singer/songwriter Tom Russell was born.
Russell and his then-recording partner, Patricia Hardin, caught sight of Charles Bukowski, cult-columnist and struggling poet.
"We came out of Capitol Records; we'd made a record and we were trying to get a deal, some ridiculous thing," Russell told ThisWeek during a recent pass through Chicago to promote his newest record, Hotwalker. "I looked down the street and I said, 'Damn, there's Charles Bukowski, man.' It was like 1975 or '76. I said, 'Wow!' He was buyin' an underground paper out of a vending machine with his girlfriend. I said, 'Let's go down and give him a record.' So we walked down there. He was very friendly. He wasn't like you'd think. People think he was drunk 24 hours a day."
Russell, a fan of Bukowski's alternative newspaper column for L.A.'s Open City newspaper, "Notes of A Dirty Old Man," was acutely aware of the poet's drinking prowess. So he proposed a drink ... understandably trying to stretch out that chance encounter with a personal idol.
"I said, 'Listen, do you want to go to a bar?' He said, 'No. We have to go on an errand right now.'"
So Russell and Hardin gave Charles Bukowski a copy of their first album, Ring of Bone, and parted ways.
"He took the record, although I don't think he listened to stuff like that," Russell said. "He listened to a lot of classical."
During that brief exchange, however, "Buk" had neglected to introduce to the fledging recording artists his then-girlfriend and future wife. Russell suspects "Linda" gave the poet some grief over his gaffe:
"We split," Russell said, "got on the freeway in our truck. About a minute a later, this little VW Bug came racing up alongside. It was Bukowski and he rolled the window down. He pointed to his girlfriend, Linda, and said, 'Hey, this is Linda!' and then he took off."
Bukowski remembered the encounter, too, and purportedly wrote a poem about it. He also remembered that Russell had supplied some crucial copies of the poet's own early newspaper columns -- essentially saving a book for the presumptive "poet laureate" of Los Angeles.
The future songwriter had archived "Buk's" columns.
"Nobody else did," Russell said. "A guy named Sanford Dorbin, who was putting together a Bukowski bibliography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was chatting to me in the Sixties and I said, 'Well, I have those columns.' And he said, 'Well, Bukowski would dig that if you would let him borrow 'em.'"
From that contact, Russell and Bukowski embarked on a sporadic, decades-long correspondence. Their letters and some ensuing interviews Russell conducted with the poet comprise the spine of Tough Company (90 pages, $14.95), a collection of Russell/Bukowski letters, interviews and Russell poems published by Black Shark Press, an imprint of Mystery Island Publications.
Bukowski's original letters are reproduced in the coffee-table format book, along with his accompanying drawings of liquor bottles and dogs with which the poet embellished his correspondence. "It was sporadic," Russell said. "Sometimes he wouldn't even remember who I was. Usually when he wrote letters late at night, he was drinking quite a bit. They're pretty funny letters."
On July 15, 1982, Bukowski wrote Russell, "Thanks for the album that long time ago. And don't think I didn't notice that pretty girl you were with."
Tough Company also includes Russell's own poetry about life along the Texas-Mexican border where the El Paso-based singer/songwriter, poet and painter now makes his home. The poems -- sometimes closer to sparely composed short stories -- also capture the tone of life on the road and Russell's early years as a struggling musician, performing in strip clubs and dives in the City of Angels:
"Drunks wander in singing and
laughing. They stagger out with
bloody faces ten minutes later.
Wallets gone."
Fellow singer/songwriter Dave Alvin supplies an introduction for the book: "Bukowski and Russell share some obvious qualities. Both men write tough, clean lines that any drunk or cowboy or factory joe or prizefighter could understand though the apparent simplicity of the language should not be mistaken for simplicity of thought."
Before he turned to songwriting, Russell earned a master's degree in criminology and taught the craft in Africa: His poetry, and much of his songwriting, has a distinctly noir edge.
And Tough Company is not his first book: Several years ago, Russell penned a crime novel entitled Bloodsport. Central Ohio Tom Russell fans interested in the songwriter's mystery novel, however, better be bilingual: "It's instantly forgettable," Russell said. "It was published only in Norwegian. It was a thing I did for money. I'm always working on some prose. But tracking that one down wouldn't do you any good because it is in Norwegian."
With Sylvia Tyson, Russell, who has described himself as frustrated novelist, also published a coffee table book of quotes about the craft of songwriting: a compendium of thoughts by Kris Kristofferson, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie, among many others.
Tough Company also begat a pretty startling new Tom Russell album: Hotwalker expands and rests upon Tough Company's flinty foundation.
The new album is dominated by spoken word pieces and "found" audio excerpts ... a sublime and moody montage that functions as a kind of soundtrack for a nonexistent documentary on lost American music and literature and original American voices too raw and true to be mainstream.
There are really only two new Russell tunes on the album: "Woodrow" is an unsentimental depiction of songwriter Woody Guthrie that strays far from the romanticized and terribly distorted "Bound for Glory" and Bruce Springsteen-buffed image of the Oakie musician that proliferates these days. "You were a drunken, wild misogyneer/and your politics were crude," Russell asserts in his song. "It's thugs that run the unions now/and use your songs like hymns."
Russell on Guthrie: "I don't dig a couple of things that people have done. People that have finished his songs ... I don't get that angle. I wouldn't want my kids to be finishing my lyrics. You know, I'll burn 'em all. And putting political sloganeering in a dead man's mouth?
"I got at Woody by talkin' to Ramblin' Jack (Elliott) a lot, who knew him as good as anybody," he continued. "Probably better than his kids knew him. And Jack really gave me this very unique view of Woody. I'm more interested in the individual. I mean, he did jail time. He was a real womanizer and he wrote great songs. I'm more interested in that than his family saying, 'Woody would have voted for Kerry, man.' Give him a break. Let him have the life that he had."
The other tune is "Grapevine," a Bakersville-flavored nod to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard that somehow succeeds in blending and evoking the best of both recording artists' music.
Border tunes, vintage recordings of blind sibling evangelists and the voice of Little Jack Horton, a salty-mouthed deceased circus midget, round out much of the rest of Hotwalker.
The CD also includes audio samplings of Charles Bukowski, Lenny Bruce, Harry Partch and "the high priest of western outsiders" Edward Abbey ... Steve Allen playing piano behind the recitations of Jack Kerouac.
Russell regards himself in their uneasy company:
"In this culture, I'd hate to be an insider," Russell said. "I'd be playing 18 holes of golf a day and listening to country music. This other crap. A fear-driven culture. If they call me an outsider, that's fine because it leaves me alone to do whatever I feel like, really."
Next up for Russell is a DVD documentary about one of his many recent "songwriter" train trips, Hearts On the Line, coming from Canyon Productions.
This fall will also see the release of another album, a cycle of love songs Russell has titled Love and Fear.
He's also recently taken up painting: Tough Company's cover illustration is Russell's painting of boxer Roberto Duran. His paintings are also spotlighted in the current issue of Paste magazine.
On Aug. 13, Tom Russell is tentatively scheduled to perform at the Columbus Maennerchor with Andrew Hardin, Gretchen Peters and Barry Walsh. Plans for the concert are still being finalized.
Russell's noir sensibilities inform Tough Company
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Craig McDonald
Tough Company (Black Shark Press, 90 pages, $17.95) is a hardboiled mix of singer/songwriter Tom Russell's poetry, paintings and letters exchanged with poet/novelist Charles Bukowski until Bukowski's death in March 1994.
In his 1996 book of songwriter quotes (And Then I Wrote), co-edited with Sylvia Tyson, Russell wrote, "I often thought there's a closer kinship between the painter and the songwriter than there is between the poet and the songwriter."
As he has attempted all three mediums, Russell is uniquely qualified to speak to those comparisons.
Russell's poetry in Tough Company, however, does mirror some of the elements of his best songs: Story dominates ... spare but evocative images bring it all alive. And Russell's poetry, like some of his most memorable songs, favors the dark.
Russell's earliest musical performances were in strip clubs in Los Angeles ("Charles Bukowski territory" as Russell puts it). In "Getting Off Work at the Topless Bar," the only songwriter with a master's degree in criminology mines those seedy L.A. dives and violent death for a poem that evokes the essence of the work of the shutterbug "Weegee":
"The alley behind The Gulf Club
ran the length of skid row
At three in the morning
two cops were standing over
an old man
who had jumped from the top floor
of a flop house ...
The alley looked like a crime scene photo:
death and blood running down the gutters
and off the edge of the photograph."
In "El Paso" Russell writes of his life in the border outpost where he has made his home:
"I've seen skunks and
raccoons
crawl out
of the irrigation pipe
when I drew the water
in from the Rio Grande ...
...There's some kind of
crawdad
in the river,
though,
I wouldn't eat 'em."
Russell also gently mocks another songwriter-turned-poet (though much less successfully, in her case) in "Whatever Happened to Happily Ever After? (An Alaskan Fable)." Russell remembers a story told him about Jewel's brother's wedding, held on a "bluff overlooking the Bering Sea" -- a kind of neo-hippie ritual in which the two released a pair of doves. As Russell retells it,
"A Falcon appeared on high." The raptor descended "with a grand circling war swoop" and beheaded the two doves. "I asked," Russell writes, "how the marriage went/and she replied/they broke up/six months later."
Tough Company is must-have for Tom Russell and Charles Bukowski fans (the book also includes interviews conducted by Russell with Bukowski). But it is also a rich read for those seeking a master wordsmith and unflinching, risk-taking craftsman who isn't "lacking in the gamble," as Bukowski once put it to Russell.
Special thanks to THIS WEEK COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS, where these articles originally appeared, May 2005. Reprinted with permission from Craig McDonald.
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