Jeff Ellis – There Is Protest, and Then There Is Ellis

I remember when CSNY’s “Ohio” hit the radio. It wasn’t all that long after what I call The Kent State Massacre and it struck a note as deep as any song ever had. One weekend, my buddy Dave Gray and I headed into Seattle for a respite from Army life and happened upon the original Red Robin, a dive tavern on the south side of the canal at the south end of the University Bridge. We just wanted a beer and a burger but found a jukebox which rivaled any I have ever found. It was a sixties music freak’s wet dream full of some of the best songs of the late-sixties and 1970 and I spent a lot of quarters playing a lot of the songs. “Ohio” I played more than any other, driving the bartender crazy with repeated turns in the playlist, so much so that he at one point jokingly told us if I played it one more time we would have to leave. He was second to Dave, though, who already had my throat in his hands ready to squeeze.

The only other protest songs I had heard at that point were those reverberating from New York and the folkies who inhabited Greenwich Village and the clubs in and surrounding it. Phil Ochs. Bob Dylan. Pete Seeger. CSNY locked it down. “Ohio” convinced me I hated the War. And all wars.

Whereas it was The War which introduced me to the protest movements, it soon became obvious that all protests were not about war. There were songs about mining and cotton picking and what soon were called corporations stealing land and the future from The Poor, songs about death and illness produced by living conditions for which corporations were responsible, songs about lack of choices and lack of chances for The Poor to rise out of the ghettos perpetuated by The Rich. It was not fun discovering that America was not all I had been told but the fact that there were ways to get the information beyond the boundaries of migrant labor camps and company towns eased the blow. I was an idealist but music opened me to reality to a certain degree, though I always had hope that things would get better.

When I found Jeff Ellis, I found a throwback to the old days of protest, meaning the sixties— modernized, rocked up protest of maybe more of a cerebral nature. Jeff grew up in West Virginia, see, and if anyone knows the lasting effects of company towns, it is the West Virginian. They have seen the worst of mining, from deep underground to mountaintop. They had wars about it. It dominates their history. West Virginia was and is not an easy place to live what with chemical disasters in water sources and the like.

It may seem like things are better now, in West Virginia as well as the rest of the world, but for some it is not. Problems exist and affect some directly, just as it has always been. Flint, Michigan is experiencing it at this very moment. Other areas have been hit with the poisoning of water both above and below the ground. Earthquakes are becoming common in places like Oklahoma and many scientists attribute it to fracking. Native Americans are attempting to stop DAPL, Nestle would gladly sponge up every drop of potable water everywhere and are trying to do just that, and Monsanto (soon to be part of Bayer unless someone with common sense steps in) are happily protecting crops with poisons which are making it into our food. Like Jeff wrote and sings, “Must Be Something In the Water.”

When I hear the lyrics, I hear every protest singer I’ve ever heard singing against injustice or worse. The lyrics? “Can’t sing in the shower, can’t swim in the creek/Can’t wash my dishes with the water running from my sink/And now it’s costing me a fortune for what used to be free to drink/These days I wonder why I even bother/Must be something in the water.” Chemical dumps, lead pipes transporting public water, mine waste. It’s freaking Agent Orange all over again and with the same clowns in power who told us there was nothing at all wrong with Agent Orange and that soldiers who were withering away obviously had made contact with something terrible elsewhere, may clowns’ tongues turn to dust.

Even when Ellis is not protesting, he is picking things out of the air we may be missing— pointing out certain realities of life. He is a policeman by trade in South Charleston, West Virginia and a member of the Army Reserve and is proud of it. He prides himself on his work and his morals and ethics, which I find commendable, indeed, and he cares— about his family, his friends, his city, his State and his country. He has a family of which anyone would be envious and enjoys life, but he is neither deaf nor blind. He sees the problems and he hears the people and he cannot just step away.

And he takes pride in his music. I quote from an interview conducted by West Virginia Public Radio regarding Modern Time Blues, the album:

“A lot of the songs were written in a police cruiser, I’ll start with that [laughing]. I try to write songs that I think are interesting, and usually those come from real people who I’ve met that get turned into characters and real events that get somewhat fictionalized. A lot of the stuff on this record are real events, real people that I’ve come into contact through police work or military work that I just had to write about. Writing time is hard to find, by the way, when you have two kids, which is why I do most of it in a police cruiser [laughing]. I had a bunch of songs and took them to Bud Carroll. Thematically and sonically, this is probably the strongest record we have done.”

No argument here. The album is packed with good songs, all relevant to us as individuals and the world in general. About the trials of everyday life (“American Dream”). About love (“Never Enough” and “The Work”). About family strife (“Battery”). About things he knows in his heart and things he has seen on the job. About the good and the bad and about the troubles keeping them separate and together in his mind. A balance.

40 Days? It is Jeff’s band but is an organism of its own. I assume that Bud Carroll heads up the unit, judging by the way Ellis talks of him. A guitarist of repute— a multi-instrumentalist, in fact— he heads up an outstanding group of sidemen. One might expect such lineups in Los Angeles or New York or even Nashville, but West Virginia? Remind me to never badmouth that State again. Tight, powerful and malleable might be three words to describe them, but damn impressive will do.

Don’t forget to look over the album jacket carefully. It is a masterpiece of understatement.

(The video below is from an earlier album but is an example of his “roots”):

 Oh, and they can rock.

 There are other Jeff Ellis albums I suggest you check out. You can find more about him at https://www.facebook.com/jeffellismusic