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Exile On Mermaid Avenue
07/01/1998 3:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Steven Mirkin
There's a certain irony in talking to Billy Bragg about
Woody
Guthrie in the lush confines of Beverly Hills, and don't think Bragg
doesn't realize it. "The only way I can survive here is to imagine
I'm somewhere else," he jokes.
The somewhere else he's been mostly these days is Mermaid Avenue,
the street in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York where
Guthrie lived the last 20 years of his life. It's also the title of
Bragg's new album, which consists of unpublished Guthrie lyrics given
new musical settings composed and performed by Bragg and the alt.country
band Wilco.
Bragg, who visits New York about twice a year, had never been to
Brooklyn, much less Coney Island, until he toured the area on the 30th
anniversary of Guthrie's death with Guthrie's daughter Nora and her son
Cole. The experience, he says, was "very spiritual." They
visited the block where the Guthries had lived, the boardwalk, and the
breakwater where Guthrie's ashes were scattered.
What struck Bragg more than anything else about Coney was its
timelessness. "The freak shows, the rickety old rides, even
Nathan's, it doesn't have a modern feel about it." It evokes the
1940s, he says. "It's down there if you're attuned to it."
Guthrie, Bragg claims, is from that era, but "leaps out of the
page with incredibly vitality and modernity." Referring to him
affectionately as "the little guy," Bragg speaks of Guthrie
with a rare passion. "There's not a movement in popular culture in
the past 50 years that Woody didn't touch in some way--the beats, punk,
the Beatles, even
hip-hop." Although well-intentioned, he says, the "lefties and
folksingers who sold Woody as a political singer were in some way
reducing him to a one-dimensional figure." The accepted image of
Guthrie as dust bowl singer is only part of his oeuvre, Bragg says.
"When you close you're eyes and imagine Woody Guthrie in a movie,
it's The Grapes Of Wrath, but he could just as easily be on the
subway going to Coney Island with Frank Sinatra and
Gene
Kelly in On The
Town."
To prove his point, Bragg reaches for a brown folder with a photo of
Guthrie taped on one cover and the word "Woody Guthrie lyrics"
written in Magic Marker on the other. He turns to a page and points out
a lyric for a song called "The Ten Spiritual Secrets From The
Kingdom Of Tibet." "He was way ahead of his time," Bragg
remarks with a smile.
Mermaid Avenue,
Bragg thinks, is the first step in showcasing the full picture of Woody
Guthrie. "He only recorded 150 sides in his lifetime," he
explains, "and there almost 2,500 songs in the archives. That means
we've only heard five percent of his genius." Until those songs are
heard, Bragg says, Guthrie "hasn't made his last record. His body
and physical being is used up, but his mind, his genius his contribution
is still there."
Bragg first saw the archives when Nora Guthrie invited him to view
them, with the idea of Bragg producing an album. "I told her, 'You
call the shots--whatever songs, what ever format you want.' I had one
condition: I chose the musicians." Bragg wanted one band throughout
the record to avoid a tribute album feeling. Mermaid Avenue, he
says emphatically, is not a tribute album; it's simply "the
first new album of Woody Guthrie songs in 50 years."
While he has "no idea what people mean when they talk about
'Americana' music," Bragg chose Wilco as collaborators on the
project. "I knew Uncle Tupelo, and
knew Jeff was familiar with the music of that period." But he was
determined to make a modern record. "We're not setting out to find
some sort of purity, we're setting out to put a frame around lyrics that
stand up on their own and are still very vibrant."
One of the reference points Bragg returns to when talking about
Mermaid Avenue is Bob Dylan and the
Band's Basement
Tapes. "I was reading Invisible Republic [Greil
Marcus's book about Dylan's Basement Tapes] while making this
record. And among of the many insights was that these guys were playing
these songs that were writ 50 years ago, but they couldn't undo the fact
that they heard Little Richard. It
occurred to me that we were also dealing with the same 50 years ago and
couldn't undo the fact that we had heard Blonde On Blonde
and the first Clash album and
we'd heard Exile On Main
Street, and whatever input that Wilco and myself had taken
during our life. There's no point in pretending we hadn't heard
them."
Finding the frames for each set of lyrics was easy. "The lyrics
just jump off the page," he explains. "You read 'Ingrid
Bergman' and the melody just falls into place." And songs such as
"Another Man's Done Gone" are "the first examples of the
singer-songwriter genre...a self-reflective lyric with a bit of social
commentary thrown in."
The process of writing and playing the songs was so easy and joyous
that Bragg and Wilco ended up recording 40 tracks, of which 15 made it
onto Mermaid Avenue. "If this is well-received, we'll
release the rest." So far, early reaction has been overwhelmingly
positive.
Reaching again for his folder of Guthrie lyrics, Bragg turns to
"Another Man's Done Gone." This song is the key to the album,
Bragg claims, pointing out the lines "I don't know/ I may go/ Down
or up in the world/ But I feel like this scribbling will stay." For
Bragg, those lines "could have been written about this
project." When Guthrie wrote the song in the '40s, "nobody
gave a shit about what he was doing, but he knew his work was worthwhile
and people will come along later and appreciate it." Reading those
lyrics today, Bragg feels that Guthrie "imagined someone--he didn't
know our names, he didn't know when he didn't know how--would come along
and finish the work." He pauses for a moment. "I'm just
honored it could have been me."
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