Johnny Dowd – Pictures From Life’s Other Side

One Monday morning, 49-year-old Ithaca, New York, resident Johnny Dowd wearily rolled out of bed, still sore from a weekend’s worth of moving boxes and furniture as owner, operator and truck driver of his small moving company, and decided to make a record album. Long shot though Wrong Side Of Memphis may have been (the sleeve listed neither label name nor address), its stark, lo-fi ambiance, Southern gothic folk-blues stylings and murderous lyrics hooked a slew of critics who enthusiastically compared Dowd to Robert Johnson, Giant Sand and Tonight’s The Night-era Neil Young, summarily ranking the album high on their ’97 year-end lists.

Dowd’s sophomore effort commences with the Hank Williams title cut, rendered as a kind of bizarre polka-cum-Delta blooze. From there, Dowd — singing in an astonishing range of character-rich voices that veer from a kind of Howe Gelb hick-drawl to a nodding-out Nick Cave mutter to a Beefheart growl to (I’m not kidding) a Bono whisper — surrounds himself in an equally daunting array of arrangements that fully complement his tales of self-inflicted misery and diseased love.

The laughably tragic botched suicide attempt depicted in “Ballad Of Lonnie Wolf” is stripped and antiqued as if by Tom Waits playing the part of an alcoholic physician. “Hope You Don’t Mind”, which at face value seems strummy and sunny, has an unnervingly creepy synth line in the background, underscoring the suspicion that all is definitely not right with the singer-protagonist, whose testimonial of love slowly turns from tender infatuation (“I think about you every day”) into outright stalking (“I looked in your window last night”).

This is a man clearly in charge of his musical vision, and that vision includes a broad grasp of rock’s so-called rich tapestry. Dowd ekes out a noir-ish psychedelic blues (“The Girl Who Made Me Sick”), takes an old surf riff and slows it down to a funeral procession trudge (“No Woman’s Flesh But Hers”), and yelps his way through a slice of Panther Burns/Gibson Brothers trashabilly (“Butcher’s Son”). The Hank Williams connection even rears its head a second time: The Latin Playboys-styled “Worried Mind” includes lyrics borrowed from “Jambalaya”, sung not by Dowd but by Kim Sherwood-Caso (who duets with Dowd on several other songs); with its carnivalesque keyboard melody and Spanish rhythm, the tune comes off like a bayou tango.

What to make of the sin-and-death spoken-word hidden bonus track, I do not know — but as Dowd noted in his first record’s bio sheet, “If rock ‘n’ roll was a religion, I’d be a preacher in need of a church.” I’d say he’s found his pulpit.