Little Bit Of Dirt Mixed With Tears

I don’t like country music.

Well, I do like Johnny Cash. Then there’s the Willard Grant Conspiracy, Handsome Family, Iron And Wine, Steve Earle, Gear Daddies, Rose City Band, 16 Horsepower and various bits of ancient bluegrass. Then you know Gillian Welch & David Rawlings make my soul ache with just how perfect they are.

I don’t like country music but if you call it Americana, does that mean I can like it? if you define that as a darker, independent, folk-veined version, scoured clean of nauseous right-wing politics, saccharine sentiment and cap-gun commercialism, then yes, I’ll listen.

Okay then. I still don’t like country music but I freaking love Lucinda Williams Car Wheels On A Gravel Road* easily one of the very best LPs of the 90’s.

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Car Wheels, as I shall henceforth abbreviate it, is nigh on perfection. Lucinda Williams had all the talent and guts in the world, but just none of the luck in the decade following her self-titled debut in 1988. Record labels either decided she was too rock, too country, kept going bust on her or were just plain indifferent. She kept playing, kept plugging away and as every bar of Car Wheels shows, kept living.

For the sake of brevity I will skip over the reputedly fractious and drawn-out creation of Car Wheels, needless to say there was plenty of input, production and playing from Steve Earle and Roy Bittan, but Williams seems to have finally wrestled the beast into the light after wrangling it into the shape she needed it to be.

From the none-better LP title and blurry picture of a juke joint on in, this is a special album. I got that the first time I ever sat and listened to it, for an LP so closely tied to a place, the South, it is utterly transferrable, transcendent and timeless.

I am in awe at her song writing, the way she paints light vignettes with her words so comprehensively, so completely that you know so much more about her protagonists lives than she ever needs to tell us; its a talent not often heard in music, I associate it more with great short story writers like Raymond Carver.

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Starting your make or break LP with a song about longingly having a wank is just brilliant, such a perfectly ballsy move. That the song is a classy, poised paean to love and desire makes ‘Right In Time’ burn bright. The opening lines about a tattoo would be worth the price of admission alone, even if every other line on the whole LP wasn’t.

Title track ‘Car Wheels On A Gravel Road’ is a sensory feast, tinged with a Proustian evocation of the sadness and uncertainties of an imperfect childhood. The upbeat nature of the music hints at later hope, or at least an ability to abide. Williams’ singing manages to be simultaneously both matter-of-fact and emotional here.

Child in the backseat, 'bout four or five years
Lookin' out the window
Little bit of dirt mixed with tears
Car wheels on a gravel road

Car Wheels is one of the very few LPs I own where I greet every track with ‘this is my fave one’**. My fave track right now is ‘2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten’, the title (and some of the lyrics) taken from juke joint graffiti, refracts hip-hop, gritty realities, inoculation from the pain of life and a romanticised suicidal impulse all through the sweetest playing and coolest singing on the album. The slight swell of accordion behind the episode on Lake Charles bridge has a subtle beauty.

In contrast Williams adopts a bare knuckle vocal approach on ‘Drunken Angel’, singing pugnaciously and strongly about the life and death of Blaze Foley. It’s such a real blast and the squall of Dylanesque harmonica, courtesy of Earle, is a treat. I love that while it is a stomper it also questions why Foley died so young, blown away in an argument.

For the sake of brevity, not as any reflection on quality, the prison lament ‘Concrete And Barbed Wire’ will just be noted as a clear, bluesy protest blast.

On the other hand ‘Lake Charles’, on the death of a former boyfriend needs an entire 3-hour movie to do it justice. It is a romanticisation of a place, a time and contains the kindest thing anyone could ask for in the case of a loved ones’ death^

Did an angel whisper in your ear
And hold you close and take away your fear
In those long last moments

Side 2 opens with the punky attitude of ‘Can’t Let Go’, the LP’s sole cover, Williams sneering and swaggering to cover her loss, the guitars rock it up to thrilling affect here. ‘I Lost It’ is a more elegiac, less playful take on the same scenario but I prefer to drink at the Sneer & Swagger personally.

Even if ‘Metal Firecracker’ was not a brilliant evocation of a lost passion and irresponsibility, I would still revere it for namechecking ZZ Top^^. Word up. There is something alarmingly lubricious in Ms Williams vocals here and Gurf Morlix’s guitar licks around the edges of the song longingly.

The next track ‘Greenville’ is an abrupt pivot into a clearly volatile, abusive relationship and is all the more poignant for it. This fighter is no drunken angel, he’s a taker and a user. Williams sings this song without regret, just relief and a sense of abiding. I like the brawny guitar and committed vocals on ‘Still I Long For Your Kiss’ but in this company I am afraid it’s a much lesser light.

The primal blues raunch of ‘Joy’ is a wonderful righteous howl of self assertion. The percussive almost continual use of the word ‘joy’ becomes the song’s punctuation. There’s a great snarl to the guitars here – unsurprising as there are 3 guitarists playing here as well as Steve Earle on resonator guitar.

Broken hearted travelogue ‘Jackson’ is a great way to end Car Wheels. Williams plays on the casually evocative poetry of place names in a way that only ever works stateside^* as she pretends to herself that she won’t miss him. You can tell she will. There’s a lovely subtle harmony vocal from Jim Lauderdale underscoring her voice too.

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I beg your indulgence gentle reader, I’ve written about 34,000 words on Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, but I needed to. I don’t play it very often but when I do it tends to live on my turntable for about 3 days as I immerse myself in it, marvelling at the craft and execution of it on one level and at the hard-won wisdom and juke joint fidelity of it on the other.

The clear radio friendly production of Car Wheels is a clever choice, the spoonful of sugar that helps you digest such loss, heartache, uncertainty, assertion, anger, joy and desire while humming along. Needless to say the musical performances are uniformly excellent in the service of the songs throughout, a real team effort.

I still don’t like country music, this ain’t that.

1272 Down (a gravel road).

PS: Thank you so much to Aaron at KMA without him sending me ‘Joy’ I would never have gone here and missed out on a classic.

PPS: Cool as fuck:

*was Americana even a thing in 1998? let’s pretend it might have been, purely for narrative reasons.

**PJ Harvey To Bring You My Love, Bob Dylan Blood On The Tracks and Tom Waits Bone Machine leap to mind in the same category.

^the way Williams sings the word ‘Nacogdoches’ is a thing of rare beauty indeed. A place I knew already from Joe R Lansdale’s Hap & Leonard books.

^^We’d put on ZZ Top and turn ’em up real loud
I used to think you were strong, I used to think you were proud
I used to think nothing could go wrong

^*the only UK equivalent I can think of is for comic affect on The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu ‘It’s Grim Up North’.