Roots

Various Artists: Greetings from Area Code 207, Vol. 1

Sam

Digging roots

Charlie Gaylord gathers homegrown talent

For Greetings from Area Code 207, a new compilation disc featuring 19 area artists [this originally ran in the fall of 2000], Charlie Gaylord sheepishly admits that there wasn’t exactly an open casting call. “It was a bunch of people that I knew and liked,” he says. “I had a list of people I wanted on it, and after my list there wasn’t any room left, really.”

He also openly admits that he had the idea for the CD well before it became a benefit effort for the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, whose restoration efforts will receive 100 percent of the proceeds from CD sales. “I took the idea from the Homegrown ’CLZ thing,” he says, referring to the run of four CDs featuring local talent released by the now-defunct WCLZ — and no, the all-sports ’CLZ doesn’t count. “They really did a lot for local music. I wanted to keep that tradition going.” So, he pitched the idea of a Homegrown-esque album, with himself as producer, to just about every radio station in town. They all said, “No thanks.”

Then he went to ’MPG, one of the last vestiges of local radio playing local bands. Surely they would be up for the idea. Nah. “They were planning on doing something similar,” says Gaylord, “so they declined.”

However, their loss turned into the St. Lawrence effort’s gain, as St. Lawrence head Deirdre Nice happens to have a show at ’MPG, and “the idea just came up” when Gaylord remembered the successful fundraising effort he participated in with Diesel Doug and the Long Haul Truckers — he plays guitar — at the Portland Yacht Services Building last February. “They helped me out because I didn’t have any money to put into it,” he says, so, paradoxically, those who would eventually benefit started out as benefactors.

But, as it turned out, Gaylord didn’t need much by way of cash. Matt Robbins (King Memphis-track 16) and Pip Walter (The Piners-track 6) donated as much time as anybody needed at their Cape Elizabeth studio, the Track Farm. The bands all donated their songs, and when it came time for mastering the effort, none other than Bob Ludwig and his Gateway mastering took time off from the digital re-mastering of Frampton Comes Alive to polish up the 72 minutes of music Gaylord had put together. So “money wasn’t a real big factor,” he says.

To top things off, the Skinny will be donating their club for the big release party this Saturday that will feature just about every band from the album. Twelve of them, in fact, in an alt-country celebration that will be a blur of 20-minute electric and acoustic sets by Diesel Doug and the Muddy Marsh Ramblers, the Piners and Jerks of Grass, even folksy crooner Carol Noonan, of Knots and Crosses fame.

Of course, if you’re a fan at all of roots music, you won’t care at all about any of that. This is one of the best discs released anywhere, by anybody, this year.

There are some things the discerning fan will recognize. Slaid Cleaves released the opening track, “Last of the V-8s,” on his 1997 Rounder album No Angel Knows, but the choice is a great one, featuring his mellow alto voice, along with Gurf Morlix and Donald Lindley, early Lucinda Williams band members. “Eighteen Wheels of Love” is certainly a Diesel Doug favorite. Included here is a live version, recorded this summer at the Stone Coast Brewery by Lance Vardis’s magic recording truck. And Cindy Bullens’s “Tell Me This Ain’t Love” is a track off her 1993 Blue Lobster CD Action, Action, Action, but, hey, she’s been on the Today show and Conan, so Gaylord was lucky to get anything out of her.

What really stand out, however, are the unreleased gems Gaylord has uncovered. He finally coerced the Jerks into the studio, and with success. Their “Highway Paved with Pain” is resplendent with what makes the Jerks great. Jason Phelps’s high lonesome vocals are backed by solid harmonies, their instruments are apparently played at double-time, and they’re never going to be mistaken for rock stars: They include three tries at getting the song started, and finish up with the phone ringing in the background.

Gaylord has also captured the first Muddy Marsh Ramblers tune, Scott Conley’s wistful “Timberline,” and Jenny Jumpstart’s recording debut, a haunting rendition of Diesel Doug’s “Circles.”

Then there are the coming attractions. The Troubles weigh in with the only pop/rock song on the album, “Get the Money Up,” to be featured on their upcoming Here We Go Again sophomore release. With a mid-’80s Mark Knopfler sensibility, and Joe Brien’s driving vocals, they prove again they’re the best smokey, mean, dirty bar band in town, even if they don’t want to be.

The Piners have some new things in the works as well, with a new album to be released early next year. Word is, “Take the Wheel,” track 6 here, will be the first single. It’s a slow, soulful number, and when guys hear Boo Cowie crooning that she’s “on the prowl for a man who can growl and keep me just a little insane,” they’ll be lining up outside her door.

The album ends with yet another unreleased track, a 1992 demo from Manny Verzosa, “Texas Lasts Forever.” One of the first to pick up the alt-country torch in Portland, Verzosa’s music was saddly never released; he met an untimely end in a tour bus accident with his band the Silos in ’93. It’s a poignant song that drives home the lonesome undercurrent that runs through the entire disc. A fitting close to a memorable album.

Roy Davis: We Are a Lightning Bolt

Sam

Lightning strikes

Weather the storm with Roy Davis’ third LP

When Hank Williams sang a song like “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy” he could sell it because he’d been down low: born with spina bifida, father with a paralyzed face thanks to a stroke, brother he never knew because he was already dead. And when Williams died at 29 no one was over-much surprised, since he’d been drunk most of the time he’d been alive anyway.

It can be fun to sing country songs about lives busted-up and broken, but unless you’ve got the empathy to feel those hurts, the songs just become the clichéd joke mainstream country music has often found itself.

So whatever it is that Roy Davis experienced in his travels over the past year down [this was early 2010] to Nashville and over to Wyoming and back, you’ll be thankful after you hear We Are a Lightning Bolt, his third full-length release and the record on which something important seems to have clicked. The twang and the lilt of alt-country were always there, but somewhere in the country’s small towns and wide open spaces Davis put his hands in the country’s dirt, too, and his always-smart songs have never been so fully realized, so full of real people, as they are here.

Recording down in Portsmouth with Jon Nolan — himself no stranger to great alt-country sounds, but never as dark as Davis is here — and helped out with “Dregs” like Kerry Ryan (Jeremiah Freed) on drums, Travis Kline (an up-and-coming solo artist in his own right) on guitar and backing vocals, Bernie Nye (Pete Kilpatrick) on banjo and bass, and Justin Maxwell (the Coming Grass/Sara Cox/Cindy Bullens) on bass, Davis seems to have needed to get out of his comfort zone, feel what it’s like to truly be uncomfortable, in order to make the record he’s been trying to make all along.

I still listen to those first two records—Grey Town and Deadweight. They’re good. And I like that Ryan Adams/Jayhawks/Uncle Tupelo sandbox in which Davis plays. But on the first listen, I heard something different in Lightning Bolt. Right around “Barbara Lang,” it struck me that Davis had discovered a pipeline to pathos, where chimes of piano match his tentative reaches into a squeaky falsetto like Townes van Zandt, and “he sits at a bar by the Super 8/ She cooks him food, but she waits.” Ryan’s shuffling drumline gives the song texture like sandpaper while “we get up, go get coffee/ Walk around like a couple of darlings/ Just as sweet as the sun.”

Nolan captures vocals especially well, as when you hear Davis close the “k” on “boardwalk,” part of a naked vocal part over cello and indie-rock-flavored alternating notes, before the song charges up with a heavy acoustic strum and a wood-block beat into an alt-country orchestra, staying all-instrumental through the finish where a pair of laconic electric guitars harmonize. And on “Stranger’s House” every instrument is so terrifically crisp that the pedal steel in the song’s second half is like liquid amber pouring over dry, brittle sticks.

In that song, as on album-opener “You Don’t Have to Fall in Love,” Davis explores the nuances of relationships, the degree expressed by a line like “I’m not going to fight you in a stranger’s house/ I’m not gonna give you what you want right now,” in that voice-crack of knowing that can come through with a simple “oh, honey.” The implied plea in “you don’t have to fall in love” he can make heart-breaking.

By the album’s end, Davis seems almost stripped of emotional charge. The songs become more and more bare, as presaged by the 2:02-long “Sweet Release,” where a father does his best to crush the life out of his son: “By now you’re old enough to know your mother’s dead/ And everything’s a lie … maybe you’ll fix cars, or drink yourself to death.” And so, with the finishing track, the falsetto is ever more warbly, the guitar most ghostly, the lyrics more plaintive: “I need a fix/ I need to be fixed/ For ten dollars I’ll sell all my things/ And there’s nothing that I won’t admit.”

Maybe Davis does have a secret or two. He sings with the depth of a man who’s got a few skeletons in the closet. For a songwriter, that can never be a bad thing.