WIS 24 Jan 2025

As we do a bit more traveling, I’m handing over blog duties to others for a while following this week which is themed around our destination. Enjoy!

First Word

At one point I thought I would do this blog like one of those ‘what connects these tunes’ quizzes that you get on the radio eg RadMac’s Tea-Time Theme-Time slot on their 6Music show. However, I soon realised it’s a bit impractical for a blog as anything I write is going to give it away!

So, the answer is Mexico and here are the tunes – you may well have to listen hard to pick up the connection….

This Old Porch – Lyle Lovett (1986)

On Sunday evening we went to see Texas-born country singer and actor Lyle Lovett make a welcome return to the Celtic Connections festival with a marvellous show at the Glasgow Concert Hall. He was accompanied by his Acoustic Group, a series of stellar musicians whose natural command of their instruments was off the scale. Over the course of two hours, they took on many of Lovett’s well-known tunes and some newer tracks, moving effortlessly from bluegrass to country and from swing to jazz, and all played with real soul. Lovett was on mischievous form, telling elongated affectionate stories of his life and family with his usual warmth and dry wit. Due to issues he is having with his vocal chords, his singing voice has changed – he is still perfectly in tune, it just seems to require him to force his words slightly at times, changing their tempo. It didn’t detract from the show and he left a very happy crowd in the hall.

Lovett’s songs reflect his Texas upbringing and some of them make reference to the border and the land that lies to the south of it. The title track of his sixth album The Road to Ensenada is a case in point and he introduces his brilliant Nobody Knows Me on his live album with “This is a cheating song about Mexican food.” I’m going to stick with that theme and playlist Lynn’s favourite song of his, taken from his self-titled debut album released in 1986. She recalls seeing him live in Edinburgh touring this LP where he talked of the lazy days of his youth, hanging out on his porch with his guitar writing songs. The porch becomes the subject of this song and it contains what must be the best songline ever about food. “And this old porch is like a steaming, greasy plate of enchiladas/With lots of cheese and onions/And a guacamole salad”. Makes me hungry just listening to it.

Don’t Sing – Prefab Sprout (1984)

One of the books I read at school in the build-up to my O-level English was Graham Greene’s 1940 novel The Power and the Glory. It’s the story of a renegade ‘whisky priest’ living on the run in 1930s Mexico when the government was viciously suppressing the Catholic Church. A flawed but compassionate man, his desire to care for the people who needed him leads to his eventual capture and execution – spoiler alert! I recall really struggling with its messages of duty and sacrifice and the nature of sin but I ended up ‘getting it’ – which is pretty important for something you have to write about in an exam. I have never returned to the book since those schooldays but, fifty-odd years later, I have it loaded up on my e-reader for the trip around Mexico.

I know it’s not so long since an early Prefab Sprout track appeared on WIS but I reckon Paddy McAloon also had the book on his reading list at his County Durham school. The narrative of Don’t Sing, the opening track on the 1984 debut LP Swoon, is heavily influenced by The Power and the Glory. When Thomas Dolby heard it he was on Radio 1’s Roundtable single review programme, he knew he needed to work with the band. He described it as an example of the “literary escapism” in their writing and it’s typical of their early sound – unorthodox chord changes wrapped around complex words with textured harmonies. After a harmonica blast, McAloon opens with “An outlaw stand in a peasant land/In every face see Judas” and by the time they get to the chorus, the protagonist appears to be awaiting his execution: “Oh no, don’t blame Mexico/That’s the feast that the whisky priest/May yet have to forego”. You can see a very young band perform the promotional video here, presumably on some beach on the Northumbrian coast? Watch out for a snatch of slightly clumsy symbolism where there is a whisky bottle lying in the map of Mexico drawn in the sand.

Goodbye – Steve Earle (1995)

This is another track that is not really a song about Mexico but, as one of the saddest songs I know, it does have a connection with the country. Goodbye appears on Train a Comin’, Steve Earle’s fifth album since his 1986 debut but the first he recorded after he overcame his near-fatal heroin addiction in court-ordered rehab following being jailed for possession. Most of the songs on his return from a career-threatening four-year wilderness were older tunes, written when he was a teenager. In contrast to the rock sound which he developed on 1988’s Copperhead Road, his comeback record had an acoustic bluegrass feel but the sleeve-notes declared “This ain’t my unplugged record!! God, I hate MTV”. The album also included some covers and four new songs, including Goodbye. It was the first song he wrote when he was clean and when he plays it live, it is always introduced as “the ninth step in the key of C”.

It’s a beautiful heartbreaking song, featuring some simple guitar picking enhanced by a stand-up bass, Earle’s harmonica and roots traditionalist Norman Blake on Dobro guitar in the chorus. Earle’s mournful vocal seems appropriate for the circumstances of his life at that time and it soars into the chorus with “But I recall, all of them nights down in Mexico/One place I may never go in my life again”.

Fun Fact: Train a Comin’ was nominated for the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Recording but, ironically, lost out to Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball, which features her cover of Goodbye with Earle on guitar.

My Old School – Steely Dan (1973)

Steely Dan have only appeared on the blog once in nearly two years yet they are about to appear twice in consecutive weeks – another spoiler alert! I can confirm this having had a preview of next week’s excellent guest blog by my friend Marion – don’t miss it.

Sticking with this week, my choice of the terrific My Old School, the second single from the 1973 LP Countdown To Ecstasy, is a real stretch in its connection with Mexico. But I think this song is the first time I heard the name of the city of Guadalajara: “Well, I hear the whistle but I can’t go, I’m gonna/Take her down to Mexico, she said/’Whoa no, Guadalajara won’t do’ “. It is such an unusual word that I recall having to ask someone what the hell it was that Donald Fagen was singing in that line. And, since we are now planning to spend a few days there next month, I felt the song had to go in.

Steely Dan songs are notoriously lyrically obscure but most of this track seems to be rooted in a resilience to returning to Bard College in Annendale, New York, where Fagen and his band co-founder Walter Becker met. They were famously among the 44 people arrested at a drugs bust at the school in 1969, orchestrated by an ambitious young state prosecutor named G. Gordon Liddy – three years before “Daddy Gee” was jailed for his role in the Watergate burglary. Whether this was the reason for their reluctance to go back to their old school is unclear, but both Fagen and Becker returned to Bard to receive honorary degrees, even though California has yet to tumble into the sea.

Mexican Home (Live) – John Prine [with Josh Ritter] (2010)

This is the track that might have made the ‘guess the destination’ game a whole lot easier! The brilliant John Prine has made the blog a couple of times before – the piece in WIS 12Apr24 playlisted the great Sam Stone on the anniversary of his death from Covid and set out his remarkable career in music – worth a read if you are new to the great man.

Mexican Home was first heard on Prine’s third album Sweet Revenge recorded in 1973 and full of rolling country-rock tunes compared with his more restrained delivery on his first two records. Mexican Home had that rock energy but over the many years that followed, the song evolved into a hushed acoustic elegy to his late father who had died before he began his recording career in 1971. His father Bill used to sit on his porch at home in Illinois and Prine moved the story down to an unspecified location south of the border. His beautiful evocative lyric creates the feel of the oppressive weather as a storm approaches (“Heat lightning burnt the sky like alcohol”) and hints at it being a metaphor for his grief (“The air’s as still as the throttle on a funeral train”).

I’ve playlisted a live version of a performance from 2010 where Prine duets with singer-songwriter Josh Ritter who had recorded his own version of the song for a Prine tribute album that year. As well as Ritter, the covers collection featured artists and fans like Conor Oberst, My Morning Jacket and Drive-by Truckers. Singing together on this live recording, Prine’s late-career, post-neck cancer gravelly voice contrasts well with the tone of the relatively youthful Ritter.

Cortez the Killer – Neil Young and Crazy Horse (1975)

Given my cetacean-related commentary on the Lou Reed track in last week’s blog, it might not come as a surprise that we plan to finish our trip across Mexico out on the Baja California peninsula doing some whale spotting. We hope to see grey whales who travel from their Arctic feeding grounds to mate and nurse their calves in the lagoons along the Pacific coast of Baja. And while we are on Baja, we also hope to experience the rich marine wildlife of the Sea of Cortez on the east coast where blue whales can be seen. Which brings me to this epic Neil Young song from his 1975 LP Zuma, recorded with Crazy Horse.

I came to Neil Young’s work late in the day, during the early 1990s, probably driven by his MTV Unplugged appearance which really exposed me to the strength of his songwriting. I knew the well-known tracks before then, but tunes like Pocahontas and From Hank To Hendrix lured me in. The unplugged work so detested by Steve Earle contrasted with the full-blown grunge mode that Young was performing in at the time. When I got a copy of the raucous live Weld album, it was the more restrained Cortez the Killer‘s emotional tale of the duplicitous Spanish conquest of the peaceful Aztec Empire that jumped out at me. “He came dancing across the water/With his galleons and guns/Looking for the new world/In that palace in the sun”. Even the original studio recording is a long, rambling listen – his vocal doesn’t start until 3:22! – and while it may not be for everyone’s shot of tequilla, I think it’s a pearler.

Last Word

And with that, we’re off on our travels. By the time this goes live we will be somewhere over the Atlantic heading for Mexico City and hopefully a bit of an adventure. Next week sees Marion de Voy kick off a series of guest blogs to cover the gap. So, in the words of Jim Lovell just as Apollo 8 went around the dark side of the moon, see you on the other side.

Hopefully, I’ll have added this week’s tunes to the Master Playlist before I get on the plane – if not apologies, I’ll get round to it as quick as I can.

WeekInSoundMaster

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