Mary McCaslin – Way Out West
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Posted On August 1, 1998
“I tried to be a cowboy but I could not hold a gun,” sang Mary McCaslin on her 1973 album Way Out West. Her confession was literal as well as metaphorical.
McCaslin first fell under the spell of TV westerns and the gunfighter ballads of Marty Robbins when her family moved from Indiana to California in 1952. She was just six years old. To her disappointment, though, there were no wild, open spaces in the “great stucco suburb forest” of Hollywood in which she grew up. Nor could she see stars at night, except of course in the sidewalks, where the engraved names of celebrities reminded her of “never-ending tombstones from some forgotten time.” Even worse, she soon discovered that the only cowgirls in tinsel town were young women with “fancy vests upon their breasts and nothing on their minds,” the only “wanted men” those who “wanted to make instead of give love.”
Born of McCaslin’s desire to reconcile the Western mythos she loved with both her incipient feminism and the alienation she knew in Hollywood (her “home away from ‘Home On The Range'”), Way Out West remains one of the finest, albeit unsung, singer-songwriter albums of the 1970s.
A convergence of folk, country, and pop music — and essentially a collection of short stories set to melody — the record paints emotional and physical landscapes as indelibly as Guy Clark’s Old No. 1. Not only that, it probes male-female entanglements as frankly as Joni Mitchell (with whom McCaslin shares a lilting, bell-like soprano) and boasts the definitive version of Randy Newman’s “Living Within You”.
More than just words set to music, McCaslin’s airy, acoustic guitar-based arrangements serve to heighten the emotions expressed through her lyrics. Witness how the rolling piano on “Down The Road” — part saloon style, part parlor proper — conveys her ambivalence about leaving home to go out on the road. Or how the chopping mandolin on “Northfield” evokes the steady gait of her horse as McCaslin sings, “Eighteen miles to Northfield, one more town along the line/I wish I knew how far to go to leave the pain behind.”
