THE COWBOY JUNKIES
Live at the Belly Up (2015)
* * * * *
A few ago, I was famous for a New York minute for teaching a
college-level course on the Grateful Dead. (Put aside your outrage: It was
really just a hook for exploring recent US history.) Even now, someone—students,
media, a person I met at a conference—corners me to ask, "What's your
favorite jam band?" They expected me to name groups like Phish, Assembly
of Dust, Umphrey's McGee, or String Cheese Incident, but my answer is: The
Cowboy Junkies. Students often reply, "Who?" It's a fair question in
an unfair world. The CJs, after all, are Canadian and haven't charted in the
U.S. since 1994. Those a bit older may recall that their "Sweet Jane"
rose as high as # 5 on the pop charts back in 1989*, and that "Sun Comes
Up, It's Tuesday Morning" went to #11 the next year. That's a long time
ago, I suppose, but the Junkies never went away: 17 studio albums, 9 live
albums, 4 compilations, and 10 singles in the past 26 years.
Let me go a step further. If you ask me to name the best jam band of all time, I'm tempted
to say The Cowboy Junkies. Before you call me nuts, here's the deal of the
century: go to Noisetrade's Website, and for a suggested "tip" of $5
you can download a 2014 concert from the Belly Up in San Diego whose 12 tracks
sample from various CJ releases from 1988 through 2012. One of the things
you'll hear on this and the band's other live albums is that, unlike the Dead,
the Junkies never gave a bad performance and they continued to grow as they got
older. The other thing you'll hear is lead singer Margo Timmins and if you
never have before, you'll curse those who've kept her a secret from you. I like
to think of her as a singer with the husk, power, and sexiness of Janis Joplin,
but with the control of Grace Slick. You'll also hear that, like the Dead, the
Junkies' repertoire draws from psychedelia, the blues, country, and jazz. In
fact, on acid rock offerings such as "Sweet Jane," "Wrong Piano,"**
and "Hunted," you can mentally time travel up the coast to the Bay
Area and imagine yourself at the Fillmore circa 1967 (except the sound quality
will be better)—fuzzed out electric guitar, reverb, sonic walls through whose
cracks liquid guitar notes pore, robust swirls, and bring-me-up-ease-me-down
arrangements. Check out also the country blues vibe of "MisguidedAngel," *** which is the sort of song Joplin would have sung, but maybe not as
well as Ms. Timmins. It's about a woman in love with a bad boy. She knows the
relationship is an addiction and won't end well, but she's all in. Timmins
grinds out the pathos, but she never goes over the top, which heightens her
vulnerability.
On the latter score, many CJ songs deal with women in
precarious, even dangerous, situations, but her women are more complex than
mere victims. Add solid songwriting to the list of CJ virtues. How about this
line from "Sun Comes Up…:" Lunchtime.
I start to dial your number/then I remember and reach for something to
smoke/and anyways, I'd rather listen to Coltrane/than go through all that shit
again. Or this one from
"Misguided Angel:" Telephone's
ringing but I don't answer it/'Cause everyone knows that good news always
sleeps till noon.
If you can buy a better album than this one for five bucks,
buy two and I'll reimburse you for the second, plus shipping. Buy this record
folks. Then get out your floodlight, shine it through a glass pie plate filled
with veggie oil, drop some colored water onto the surface, crank up the
Junkies, turn off the room lights, swirl the pan, and groove. You can enhance
your time travel by listening to songs that take down hucksters and a lot of
crap that used to be dismissed as "plastic." Peace, brothers and
sisters.
Rob Weir
*Oddly, "Sweet Jane" never charted for Lou Reed,
though he wrote it. It first appeared on a Velvet Underground album in 1970 and
didn't make it onto the rock/pop charts because the Underground eschewed commercialism.
Reed released it as a solo single in 1974, but it never cracked the top 100.
Today, of course, it's an iconic Reed song, but he always claimed that the
Cowboy Junkies' version was the best he ever heard.
** "Wrong Piano" was written by a sadly neglected
musician, Vic Chestnutt (1964-2009), who was paralyzed in an auto accident in
1982, but continued to write and perform until his untimely death at 45.
*** On this clip, Timmins shares the song with Natalie Merchant. Wish I had been a fly on the wall for that one!
No comments:
Post a Comment