As a tonic, Russell turned to cowboy music and cultivated, partly through his association with Canadian songwriter Ian Tyson, a strong audience in the West and in rural Canada. His 1991 release Cowboy Real (Philo) is a masterpiece of the genre. This summer he will release Song of the West, an anthology including updated recordings of classic material, and some new covers, including Mary McCaslin’s “Prairie in the Sky”. But the record will not be available in stores. “That [cowboy] audience is basically a mail-order audience,” Russell explains. “They buy their stuff in feed stores and through the mail.”
However, another new album, The Long Way Around, is most definitely available in stores. Due out on HighTone in May, the 17-song collection surveys Russell’s songwriting career and features newly recorded versions of some of his best songs, many captured live at the Off Broadway nightclub in St. Louis in the spring of ’96. The recordings emphasize voice and guitar, with guest vocal contributions by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, Katy Moffatt and Dave Alvin. But the finest moments are duets with Iris DeMent on “Big Water” and “Box of Visions”. Russell’s deep, stony tone and DeMent’s pealing intensity balance beautifully. “Iris is a voice right out of Steinbeck or Faulkner,” Russell says. “She reminds me of a female Levon Helm, that voice that comes through the screen door, right at you.”
Crucial to the sound of the record is Russell’s companero of 15 years, Andrew Hardin, a nimble, technically flawless guitarist (who himself has recorded an instrumental album called Coney Island Moon, featuring Albert Lee and Amos Garrett). His leads flood every song, a blinding surge of notes that never abandons melody. Hardin was also key to the 1980s Tom Russell Band records for Philo: Road to Bayamon, Poor Man’s Dream and Hurricane Season. All three are hard, chiseled country; their rock ‘n’ roll influence only ups the intensity. There’s not a wasted cut, not a slack line among them. In addition to Hardin, the band included Fats Kaplin on pedal steel, accordion and fiddle; Billy Troiani on bass; and drummers Charles Caldarola and Mike Warren.
Those records almost never got made. Russell had essentially given up music in the early ’80s, until encounters with two fellow musicians in New York encouraged him to give it another shot. One was Andrew Hardin. “I was gonna be the budding novelist, and Andrew was driving a cab and I was driving a cab. I was married at the time and sort of down and out in the music business. He wanted me to start gigging again.”
The other, oddly enough, was Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead. “I picked him up in my cab one night, and sang him ‘Gallo del Cielo’. He flipped. I had given him a line like, ‘I’m a songwriter,’ and he said, ‘Sure kid, sing me a song.’ I sang him that one and he kept saying, ‘Sing it again! Let’s go get a tape!’ He got me back into the business, and I ended up opening some shows for him in Manhattan. He got me up onstage, handed me his guitar and split. That was in front of a huge audience of Deadheads.”
“Gallo Del Cielo” is an American myth, metaphorical and true as any Hawthorne story, and wrapped in a mix of history and poetry that suggests the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The song works by the careful and natural accumulation of detail and vernacular. A young man steals a rooster and heads north across the Rio Grande, hoping to win back his family’s land, stolen during the Mexican Revolution. The saga captures the psychological and cultural dramas of both America and Mexico — violence, exile, poverty, noble dreams, disillusion — and weaves them into a carnival of music.
Not that it’s really derived from firsthand experience. “I never got into cockfighting that much,” Russell confesses. “It was more a metaphor for the story. I did see some when I worked in Puerto Rico in a carnival years ago, and some in Mexico….Here in Brooklyn, some of the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans actually put cardboard over the windows of these bars on Fourth and Fifth Avenue late at night and have cockfights in the basements. Or so I’m told. I could never get into one, probably end up getting killed.”
The song is also about a small heroic moment that intersects with larger, graver themes. As he does with the title character of “Jack Johnson”, and with the drifters in “Winnipeg” and “Blue Wing,” Russell draws from those who’ve worked hard as hell, made a mark, however brief or legendary, and perhaps have slipped off the page. He does so without sentimentality; he has no concept of cliche. His songs, like his voice, feel inevitable and decisive, and the meaning he finds in them is inherent, independent of whether 50 or 50,000 hear his stories.
“When the smoke clears on all these things,” he says, “South by Southwest and all the rituals, I’m just interested in the guy with a brand new song that’s great. If some kid walked up to me with a brand new song that blew me away, that to me would be a harkening that something was happening — one great line, one great song.”
