And He Went For a Ride

Johnny Cash (w/Krist Novaselic et al) “Time of the Preacher” – My first guest-post here on Fluxblog is a joke about two different covers of the same classic song. (Walk into a bar, etc.) The first one is by someone whose main work in the past few years has been with covers, although this track isn’t taken from one of those albums. It is instead from a collection called No Depression: What It Sounds Like, Vol. 1, wherein Johnny covers this near-perfect Willie Nelson song backed by various Seattle folks, including (sigh!) Krist Novaselic and, apparently, various members of Alice in Chains, presumably in some sort of quid-pro-quo for Cash’s cover of “Rusty Cage” on Unchained. (Apologies for the vagueness; my knowledge of this is somewhat limited.) Oddly enough–or not, depending on your opinion of the folks involved–it’s not particularly good, the halfway-between-rock-and-country bassline aside. It’s too fast, a bit too rote, and whoever mixed it didn’t seem to do justice to the usual sludgy AiC sound while also not going down the nice and dirty route taken by Van Lear Rose, on which the guitars here would have made considerably more sense. There’s a certain value to the switch between wanking and tentative, almost unschooled tail-off at the end of the solo (around 2:10), but the rest of it just doesn’t work very well, especially not as some sort of statement of what No Depression sounds like. (This doesn’t sound like Uncle Tupelo to me, but then…) As much as I’d like to blame this on the my-personal-definition-of-“better-off-dead” Alice in Chains, I think the problem is mainly Johnny’s–he sticks too close to the original and fails to really reimagine it, which means that he doesn’t entirely convey the story behind it, an almost fatal flaw in a song that was intended to stand as part of a whole. Hearing those iconic first six notes played all metal instead of on a solo nylon guitar is an interesting inversion–you almost think they’re going to launch into a Don Caballero song or something–but as a whole, it’s more an interesting curiosity. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Carla Bozulich “Medley: Time of the Preacher/Blue Rock Montana/Red Headed Stranger” – For reinvention, it’s hard to beat this cover, which takes two tracks totaling 2:49 in length and stretches it into an insanely beautiful 6:42 monster. Taken from Carla’s song-for-song cover of Willie’s original album, this is one of the multiple styles employed thereon, roughly classified as Dirty 3 without a drummer and then, uh, Dirty 3 with a drummer. And a vocalist. Who kicks ass. It takes the open spaces described in the lyrics and literalizes them with the music, spreading out the chords and reducing the attacks to slight whispers in the breeze while pedal-steel and static float on top like dust, foregrounding the vocals as the interior monologue made flesh. Bowed upright bass approximates an organ and the violin joins in tentatively. Then the drums crash in. Like in some Westerns, the power here comes from the combination of deliberateness and confidence: they are moving at this speed because they do not need to move any faster, and were they, something would be lost. Listen to it after the Cash version and I think it emphasizes how much this is a burst of steady sunshine on a dry day in an open landscape. It is slow-moving but profoundly happy, in spite of the sadness of the lyrics, or maybe even because of it. As Carla’s guitar locks in with the drums and the pedal steel fills in the gaps, it gets louder, but not faster, and sort of reluctantly. When those toms kick in you’re all like “yes, this rocks!” like the rock-out section in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” you eventually realize that it doesn’t necessarily rock any more or less than what came before. It is not ecstatic because it has been this ecstatic already. It is a lovely little thing. (Click here to buy it from Carla.)