| February 1st, 2006 08:02 AM |
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| Barney Fife |
Aug. 3, 2005
Tom Russell finds inspiration in writer Charles Bukowski
By GEOFFREY HIMES
For the Chronicle
Charles Bukowski was a lot of things. He was, as Tom Russell's new song Requiem puts it, "a post-office worker, crank, outsider, drunk, madman, American and a poet, [an] authentic voice in a wasted land.'' He was a legendary alcoholic and misogynist, the thinly veiled protagonist of the 1987 film, Barfly. He was, as the 2003 documentary Bukowski: Born Into This explained, one of the few modern poets to support himself on book sales.
Bukowski was also an inspiration to a whole generation of musicians. Tom Waits, whose early skid-row persona was borrowed from the poet, willingly acknowledged Bukowski's influence in Born Into This, as did U2's Bono. On last year's breakthrough album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Modest Mouse titled a key track Bukowski. Chris Stamey, the Boo Radleys and the Real Tuesday Weld have also written songs about the poet.
Aside from Waits, though, the three songwriters who wear Bukowski's influence most apparently and most successfully are Russell, Dave Alvin and John Doe. Russell and Alvin grew up in Los Angeles, Bukowski's hometown, and Doe has lived there since the mid-'70s. Russell, Alvin and Doe all had personal encounters with Bukowski and all three echoed the poet's detailed descriptions of life on L.A.'s margins in their songwriting.
Russell, who performs at the Mucky Duck tomorrow, is a folkie singer-songwriter but his latest album, Hotwalker (Hightone), is not your typical singer-songwriter project. Subtitled A Ballad for Gone America with Charles Bukowski, the CD is a sonic montage of songs, voiceover narration, background instrumentals, interview excerpts and field recordings about the bohemian California of the '50s and '60s, when Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, Edward Abbey, Harry Partch, Buck Owens and Ramblin' Jack Elliott roamed. The album resembles a Ken Burns PBS documentary without the visuals.
On the Bukowski #1 track, for example, a tenor saxophone blows languid West Coast jazz as Russell speaks in the smoky baritone of a '60s late-night FM disc jockey. "The importance of Bukowski?'' he asks. "Just to have a blue-collar poet coming from the street and the bars and the post office, from skid row instead of the (explecitive) dead university system. At his best Bukowski told us what it was like in the factories and the bars and the bedrooms, places where America really lives. He told us what it was like to go to work in the morning and sit out there on the freeway, grinding your teeth. He told us what it was like behind the shades in all those lonely rooms in Hollywood.''
"Bukowski didn't see himself as part of the Beats,'' Russell amplifies in a phone interview, "or any other movement or group. He saw himself as what he was: the isolate crank, working at the post office every day, hanging out at the race track, and then late at night banging out on the typewriter, drinking because it freed up his tongue. He had that radical, vocal individualism, that extreme character, which is what you need to stand outside and create in America. That's what links him to the other figures on the album. That's why I got out of New York and Los Angeles and now live outside El Paso; it gives me a needed outsider perspective.''
Russell was a college student in the late '60s when he first discovered Bukowski, then writing a regular column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, for L.A.'s underground paper, Open City. A few years later, after the newspaper had folded, its building had burned down and Bukowski had moved several times, Russell had one of the few collections of Bukowski's columns. So when City Lights Books (the same press that published Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) wanted to publish the columns as a book, they turned to Russell. As a thank-you, Bukowski sent Russell some books and home-made recordings and the two men struck up a friendship-by-correspondence.
"He once said to me in a letter, 'Hemingway is easier to like when you're young,' '' Russell says. "There are writers who are better read when you're young, writers like Hemingway, Salinger, Steinbeck and Bukowski himself. I hit Bukowski at the right time. I was young; the beats were about done, and I was looking for something else. Bukowski said whatever was on his mind and young people dig that; they've heard enough (explecitive) from their professors.''
By 2003, Russell was a successful songwriter. His story-song about a champion fighting cock from Mexico, Gallo del Cielo, had been recorded by Joe Ely and Ian Tyson. Johnny Cash had recorded Russell's requiem for the Vietnam dead, Veteran's Day. Russell's tale of standing in an airport in flight from a broken relationship, Outbound Plane, was co-written with Nanci Griffith and recorded by country star Suzy Bogguss. He had co-written a fistful of songs with his pal Dave Alvin, including Out in California and Haley's Comet.
Alvin had been a poetry fan since attending his first reading in 1975. "It was Bukowski in a bar,'' Alvin remembers, "and it was eye-opening. I had always thought art and poetry came from Europe or Greenwich Village or Mars, but here was a guy using a kind of language that you don't get taught in school, that you use on the street corner, writing about racetracks and crummy bars. It was like seeing Lightnin' Hopkins and Big Joe Turner for the first time; it had the same effect on me.''
Five years later, after joining his older brother Phil's band, the Blasters, Dave Alvin was trying to write some songs for the group's first album. "I went home and said, 'How do I write a song? What happens if you combine Chess Records, Sun Records and small-press poetry? If Willie Dixon, Leiber & Stoller and Charles Bukowski sat down to write a song, what would it sound like?' I had been writing poetry and reading it in bars, and the songs came out of that experience as much as playing the blues with my brother. One of the things that bonded John (Doe), Exene (Cervenka) and me was poetry.''
Doe and Cervenka were the co-founders of another then-obscure L.A. band, X. Doe and Cervenka had also published poetry in small-press magazines and Doe, in particular, was an admirer of Bukowski.
"Bukowski was one of those writers who made you feel like you could do it,'' Doe explains. "Some people are daunting when you look at their style and scope. But you could read Bukowski and go, 'Hell, I could do that.' You probably couldn't, but you felt like you could, and that was enough to get you started. In retrospect, the way he constructed his poems, the details he chose to share, were where his craft shone through.
"I once moved into this house at 2347 Duane Street in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles,'' Doe continues. "In the house was a piece of plywood over a window that had a familiar-looking drawing on it. I looked through my poetry books, and, sure enough, there in the Bukowski book Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin To Bleed a Bit was a poem called 2347 Duane Street.
In 2003, Alvin came out to Russell's home near El Paso, and the two co-wrote Rio Grande, which showed up on Alvin's 2004 album, Ashgrove. During a break in the songwriting, Russell pulled out the stack of his correspondence with Bukowski. Alvin's response was immediate: This is a book. That book, Tough Company, was published, with Alvin's forward, this summer.
The book, in turn, sparked interest in an audio documentary about Russell's relationship with Bukowski. At one point Quentin Tarantino was interested in doing it with some well known actors, but that fell through, and Russell decided to do it on his own, expanding the scope to include his other heroes and to use the field recordings he had made of carnivals and markets along the border. The result was Hotwalker.
Meanwhile, Alvin, Doe and Cervenka reconvened the Knitters, who come to the Continental Club on Aug. 25. This alt-country side project had released an album in 1985. Now, 20 years later, the Knitters have released a second album, The Modern Sound of the Knitters, a collection of recycled originals, bluegrass standards, Peter, Paul & Mary's Long Chain On and Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild, all done in the hillbilly/rockabilly style of Johnny Horton in 1958. Despite their pastoral arrangements, songs such as Alvin's Dry River and Doe and Cervenka's In This House That I Call Home betray the influence of Bukowski in their gritty depictions of L.A.'s less glamorous environs.
"I don't think poetry and songwriting are all that different,'' Doe argues. "It's all writing. Some pieces have rhythm; you can emphasize that rhythm and make it a song. You have to do a little more twisting or bending with a song to make the words fit. A lot of people have been successful turning that Bukowski stream-of-consciousness stuff into songs. The early X stuff had no rhymes, purposefully, because rhymes were old and we were trying to be new.''
"I always saw Bukowski as a white blues man, like Mose Allison,'' Alvin says. "A lot of people think playing the blues is very easy, but its very difficult. Bukowski mastered the colloquial, and he did that twist at the end. That's the hardest thing to do in a poem, to twist the knife like the end of a Shakespeare sonnet. Bukowski could talk about a dump truck and a woman with no teeth for a whole poem and then in the final two lines make it about God. That's the trick and that's what the rest of us have a hard time doing.''
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