Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Tight to the Jar  Kelly Joe Phelps's new record is called Tunesmith Retrofit, as clear an indication as you could ask for that a guy who's been, in various phases of his life, a jazz cat, a dazzling slide guitar player who played traditional blues and gospel, and a blistering fingerpicking guitarist who played mostly original songs, has now firmly decided to concentrate on composition and keep the instrumental fireworks to a minimum. Oh, and he also picks up a banjo on a couple of cuts. It may or not be a little joke that the CD's title cut is actually an instrumental (and a fairly grating and inconsequential one at that, but please don't let that deter you).Kelly Joe's songs can be hard to get a handle on, and some of these are harder than most. The lyrics aren't so much cryptic as they are private; they're made up of stray wisps of thoughts, bits of childhood recollection, scraps of the unrecorded languages that are shared by family members and those who work together every day. They rarely rhyme. Daunting at first, they eventually start yielding their secrets, or at least up to a point. Not everybody has that kind of patience, but if you do, there are rewards. I don't know anybody else who writes lyrics — frustrating, elusive, yet beautiful — quite like these, from “Loud As Ears”: Old dark ruby coats his throatNow, the only thing I know of that has a “ruby throat” is a species of hummingbird — a creature Kelly Joe refers to in “Tight to the Jar,” a song I'll get to in a bit. That would make sense together with “a feathered mind” in the next line, but then the image slips away, the gender suddenly shifts and we're seeing something else entirely, a woman writing, maybe a professional writer but maybe not. The way Phelps describes her penmanship — “plaintive, brickyard, textbook line” — is extraordinary, as is the unexpected use of the verb “whips” to describe the act of writing. And why a “fable”: because she writes stories, or because her letters are lies? I wish I could say that the rest of the stanzas clear things up, but in fact they make things more confusing. I don't know what “Loud As Ears” is really about, I can't even explain the title, but I think Kelly Joe Phelps does know. In a culture where no one is expected, any longer, to have an interior life, that kind of reticence is a major sin, and yet the language here is so inhabited, so vivid and charged, that I can't believe that Phelps is just winging it. He's holding the listener off, but I think he's doing it for a reason. Trite ideas, hackneyed stories, are easy to express and easy to follow, but some things can only be said in difficult ways, and if the price of saying them in the way that they retain what is really of value in them is that they will be hard for other people to understand, those things still need to be said. As Phelps says in “Spanish Hands,” “I'll throw no coin on grand design / I cannot understand”; it's the textures of things, the particular, that he's interested in, not the abstract pattern that can be lifted off and applied somewhere else. Here's the start of another song, called “The Anvil” There are some that blindly and happily plowI love the picture in the first four lines, and the perfect compression of “full ahead ears.” The frowning and smiling bit is old news, but “crooked affairs” is a nice way to put it. The last line is a little mysterious, but I think there's a connection with the song “Cardboard Box of Batteries,” which appeared on Slingshot Professionals and Tap the Red Cane Whirlwind, and with “Tight to the Jar,” from the present record, a song interesting enough to quote in full — I hope Kelly Joe won't mind: It's a ditch, okay. I have shoes and a blanketThis song makes more sense to me the more I listen to it. I'm still not sure whether the person in the ditch is a kid playing outdoors long ago, or an adult who's hit the skids and is looking back at his childhood, but I lean towards the former. I don't understand every part of the memories of childhood that seem to make up the bulk of the lyrics, but I think I get the gist. (I've fiddled a bit with the lyrics, as one or two inadvertent errors seem to have crept into the version in the liner notes.) I don't think the schoolmaster's whack is just a metaphor; it's also a memory, and I think I can guess who the quiet, well-intentioned kid is too. It took me a long time to puzzle out the line about “the bent steel tack rap,” but I think I finally got it: it's a tack, attached to a metal ruler, used as an implement of schoolboy torture: ouch! The line about “brains, or what goes for” is perfect: just what a spunky kid who spends his life outdoors would think of the adults in his life. So what's in the jar? Whiskey, maybe, or beer since that's been mentioned, but I don't think so. It could be fireflies (there's a photo in the liner notes that suggests that), but maybe it's just memories, or — and here's the connection to what's in the bag of coins and the miscellaneous treasures in “Cardboard Box of Batteries” — maybe it's just all the stuff, tangible and otherwise, we accumulate and experience and lose and wish we had back and find that maybe is still in there after all, all the things you gotta hold onto for dear life. September 15, 2006 [ Permalink ]
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