R.B. Morris – Zeke and the Wheel

Those new to R.B. Morris should probably know he’s a published poet, playwright, and editor of the avant garde Hard Knoxville Review. He’s also a songwriter, singer and performer who — when backed by some of Nashville’s most adventurous players, including guitarist Kenny Vaughan and bassist Dave Jacques — can deliver an enthralling rock ‘n’ roll show. Morris approaches music with a poet’s intensity of purpose, testing the boundaries between traditional song structures and spoken-word reveries.

Zeke And The Wheel is a loosely tied concept album, part dirty roots-rock (courtesy of producer R.S. Field), part lyrical vision, drawing on the stylistic registers of the King James Bible, the poetry of Corso and Ginsberg, and the country narratives of Tom T. Hall. The concept is straight out of Dylan or Kerouac, or, if you will, Rimbaud: the outlaw as poet. For Morris, the human spirit holds an essential lawlessness; each song explores the price paid by those who assert or betray rebellion, be they bootleggers, Old Testament prophets, prisoners, slaves, rock ‘n’ rollers, dreamers of all sorts.

Yes, this is ambitious stuff, and it’s surprising how frequently it all works. The closing “Lest We All Lose” has genuine country soul, and “A Winter’s Tale” is the best song Morris has ever written, a glowingly spare narrative of travelers in hard times. The title track has just the right menace and mystery to intimate apocalypse, and on “Maybe The Soul”, Morris sings, “There’s laws of men and laws of god and laws of nature too/There’s judges everywhere you look, but there are outlaws too.” It’s memorable songwriting, terse and suggestive.

Later, when Morris screams, “I was born a criminal, that’s what I am,” his voice, given the tin can treatment, cuts through torrents of raging drums and vicious, feeding-back guitars. It’s a genuinely thrilling rock ‘n’ roll moment.

The denser, more elusive lyrics — in “Call Me Zeke”, for instance, the outlaw grows a beak and spouts riddles — never quite find what they reach for, but the majority of these songs both stand on their own and make good on their imaginative risks.