Rock 'N' Roll Ghost Blues

It's one o'clock in the morning and the neighborhood around me is quiet even though it's Saturday night. Maybe because of the winter hours everyone thinks it's later. Sitting here with just the computer and one lonely lamp on it feels later but it also feels timeless. The train is rolling by out across Lancaster, one lonely air horn piercing the night. Sometimes that sound relaxes me so much - I lay in bed waiting for sleep to envelop me and I hear the trains and I try and figure out if they're going east [out of Fort Worth] or coming [west, in from Arlington]. Do you want to know how to tell? Maybe I'll tell you later - but it has nothing to do with the Doppler effect.

I've been sitting here for an hour and some change watching a movie on You Tube called Ghost Blues: The Rory Gallagher Story that I came across while looking at videos for Rory's song Calling Card [dedicated to a friend, not for me, though Lord knows I know that feeling! It ain't too funny when you'd rather die / Ain't no pleasure when that girl don't reply / To your lovesick letter that you wrote in tears / About feelin' so bad for a million years...]. 

He's not well known in the States. [He was much bigger in Europe]. He's Irish. People think of Gallagher as a "blues" player but his material runs the gamut of rock and roll. Sure that playing is based on the blues, but there's little bits of country, soul, folk and anything else you can think of except maybe Yes/Genesis/King Crimson Prog Rock. He plays awesome slide guitar - electric, acoustic and when he pulls out an old National Steel or Dobro, look out. Is he Mick Jagger or Robert Plant when it comes to singing? No. But he's got his own voice and style. And he throws in some harmonica here and there. He was considered for the Rolling Stones after Mick Taylor left although his brother pointed out in the film that it would probably have been a bad fit for Gallagher: he was a singer and a songwriter and liked being totally in charge. And he would not have put up with Mick and Keith's antics. He's probably one of those guys guitar players and people who like the stuff that was a bit off the Top 40 path know.

My late "uncle Mike" was the one who introduced me to Rory Gallagher. I was deep in his vinyl closet looking for something different. Of course I loved guitar players, so he helped me find four or five albums he thought I should check out. I'm pretty sure Johnny Winter And...Live was one of those, maybe Steve Hillage and two seminal albums [for me]: Rory's Tattoo and Blueprint. I remember the moment I heard them. It's 1986 and I'm in my Dad's 85 Cutlass Supreme, headed down I-45 to Houston to see my high school buddy at college [he will remain nameless just because] and I had put those Rory albums on tape. I popped it in and the Blueprint side was up first. The first song, Walk On Hot Coals is a rip stompin' tale of three time losin': walking into a crooked poker game, lost my job, back out on the streets, betting on a winner at the track but the horse is doped. It shuffles along at a breakneck speed, Rory throwing out these amazing runs on the guitar and the keyboard guys [the late Lou Martin] trading off with them and the rhythm section just locked in right underneath them both. It charges along for about four and a half minutes then the band falls down vamping softly behind Gallagher as he throws off these lines - they're not blues lines or jazz lines or flash guitar lines [ala Jeff Beck] but something I'd never quite heard before - he does this for about a minute, then the band crashes back up to full volume and the keyboard guy solos out for a while then it crashes to a halt by reprising the opening lick. Seven minutes. That's all it took to hook me on this guy. I don't remember if I rewound the tape and played that song again or not. I like to think I did, but I don't know - for posterity, let's say I did. By the time I hit Houston I was hot on this guy - first music store I hit, I went looking for this guy's stuff, nothing to be found [maybe he was even out of print by that time] except an old Guitar Player magazine with an interview which I still have. It started a love that continues to this day.

Anyway, so I was watching this movie and besides learning about Rory Gallagher it made me miss my uncle all over again. I can't call him up tomorrow and ask where the hell he found out about Rory Gallagher. I don't know if he opened for one of those shows Michael went to or if it was a find in his "buying anything that wasn't on the radio that I saw". Great story on that - Michael bough ZZ Top's Tres Hombres when it came out, tried playing it at a party and got booted off the turntable for playing it. Three months later his best friend [maybe brother in law by that time but I don't think so], telling him about this great new song he's just heard and they need to check out this band. Then it comes on the radio - La Grange. "Bill, I have this album." "BULL SHIT, you do not!" "Bill, I tried playing this album for you guys and you told me to take it off." "Bull shit, you never played this." 'Great moment in history friends when Michael goes home and shows him the album. Good God I miss those guys. I still have the music, I still love the music but sometimes there's a sadness there that wasn't there before. I guess because I never thought about things like this. I seem to be a fixed point and everyone else is a train either coming or going, but we're all trains. Or maybe we're all passengers on the train. Some people there when you get on, some people you ride with a long time, some people you ride with a short time, some reach their destination and are lost to you.

It's a little after two o'clock now and Rory's playing me some blues.

Well its a winding highway, that never seems to end,
Well we all must travel, We'll not pass this way again,
Are you going my way, well won't you lend a hand,
Well it sounds like thunder, but it could be a hurricane,
Looks like Chain Lightnin', but its just my blues again,
Sure don't look inviting, when you see those clouds of rain,

I wish it were the morning, 'cause the night feels oh so long
With a windswept skyway, it don't look good my friend,
Tomorrow might be my day, who knows which way the wheel might turn,

So long baby, and Amen.










Oh - you want to know about the trains? If they're coming up out of Fort Worth there's fewer whistles before they get to a fairly loud volume.. They have to blow the horn for each crossing and there's tons more as you head east towards Arlington. Or if you're coming west from Arlington.

Thoughts On A Rock N Roll Ghost

Playing the Replacements Don't Tell A Soul for the first time in a long while. Pulled out the old vinyl that I used to sit in my room and contemplate. Almost 26 years later, it seems to be the watershed album for Paul Westerberg the songwriter but the plastic bag over the head of the band. Not to shrug off or discount the death rattle that All Shook Down ultimately is for the Replacements catalog. Far from it. it's an album that I still love though some consider it not worth the plastic used to press it. [If it turns out to be the Let It Be of the Beatles to a new Replacements album which becomes the band's Abbey Road. Lennon wanted Get Back/Let It Be to go out warts and all, "can we please stop pretending now?" but ultimately turned it over to Allen Klein and Phil Spector to do what the hell they wished with it and McCartney was outvoted three to one. And that's your Beatles minute. Where was I? Oh, yes if a new "Replacements" album should appear, does it fix the legacy of All Shook Down? Probably not for a lot of people.]

It's a tough call for some people, I guess. Westerberg said that Slim Dunlap was ultimately the key to opening up this album, that Slim encouraged him not to hide the stuff that wasn't three chord rocker stuff. One can feel it right from the drop of the needle onto Talent Show. Is this the band that made Tim and Pleased To Meet Me? Well, yes and no. The voice is the same. Most of the names are the same. But the sound is different. Walls of guitars but mostly acoustic guitars this time. The 80's big drum sound sits fat and heavily reverbed in the middle. Where did the imagery of We'll Inherit the Earth ["Waterfalls of grain flow through our hands/ We're too weak to stand and too weak to stray /Big trees sway and the air is still/Lovers climb at the top of a hill and say..."] come from? The sad beauty of the two enders on each side, Achin' To Be/They're Blind and Rock 'N' Roll Ghost/Darlin' One. For me, Achin' To Be and They're Blind were important songs, surely describing me and some people I know/knew. Ultimately, this is what music is supposed to do - grab you by the heart and make you feel what's coming out of those speakers. Thump - thump - thump - thump "S-A-T-U-R, D-A-Y.... NIGHT!" Grabs you by the collar and pulls you up out of the chair and makes you forget for a second that it's the god damned Bay City Rollers. Those choppy Keef chords that start off Brown Sugar [or Start Me Up if you must...] grab those ears and you go whatthefuckwasthat????!???!!! right? The opening bars of any Motown track kick you in the ass and announce "we got thr groove going, get up and shake your rump!" And don't even mention James Brown ...

So side two gets a little louder than side one with Anywhere's Better Than Here, I'll Be You and I Won't but you're not going to confuse this with Sorry Ma... or Pleased To Meet Me [which incidentally contains two of the best Replacements songs and they're the slower ones: Skyway and Can't Hardly Wait].  But again, for me it's the haunting final two that just connect to me. Maybe it's because 1989 and 1990 were yo-yo years for me, the start of my real coming of age - girlfriends, break ups and a string of short lived jobs. Putting on a smile when I was really aching inside, yearning for someone to connect to or pining for someone who had rejected me. Drowning those things in a lot of beer and generally being young.

It was also a changing period for the music. Hair metal was dying off, killed by Guns N' Roses. The bands the record store guys liked - Smithereens, Long Ryders, Jason & the Scorchers - all got dropped. R.E.M. went to Warner Brothers. Grunge / underbite rock hadn't arrived yet, though some of those bands were starting to make a noise if one read deep into Rolling Stone or Musician magazine. I guess you could say I was growing up and the music I was getting into was a little more grown up - more mature than Motley Crue and Poison. I know some of you love those bands - I still love my Faster Pussycat but I was looking for something deeper than Nothin' But A Good Time, though there were always times when you just wanted to put something loud on and just vbang your head, shout along and make your ears bleed.

Flash back to me at my little desk, my flat screen monitor and the 1985 tech of my turntable and ancient but honorable Pioneer SX-737 receiver. Me and Mr. Shadow have traveled through the record, each side twice and we now I sit and try to find words to relate my feelings about this album are. But as always, I can spin a few good lines but you can't feel what's in my soul. I can tell you about alternately happy and sad nights driving around in many cars with a tape that was Don't Tell A Soul on one side and All Shook Down on the other and how it was the soundtrack to... and you'd get a glimpse, you'd see it in my eyes and you'd hear it in my voice but I could never give you that feeling. Am I a fool for trying? No, because this is what I'm passionate about.

25 years later, this is still a good album - solid. It rides the roller coaster of emotions and life and seems to be a record about coming to grips with "being an adult" or something like it. I still rate it solid four stars. It's still the slower, quieter, sadder sounding stuff that gets me right here [taps right on the center of the chest]. I mean, how can one argue with: 

She closes her mouth to speak and
Closes her eyes to see
Thought about an' only loved
She's achin' to be
Just like me