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Wednesday,
22nd September, 1999, 12 Bar Club, London
Ray Wylie Hubbard, Lloyd Maines and Terri Hendrix |
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 Ray Wylie Hubbard and Terri Hendrix |
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Texas
troubadours
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words
Mike Plumbley pictures Dave Knowles
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| Now if you are ever lucky enough to rub shoulders with the music elite and I'm not talking about the folks that actually play the music but those that write about it you will learn a lot about writing reviews. | ||||||
| I was extremely lucky once to sit in on such a conference where music journalists gathered to question whether rock journalism sucked? The consensus of opinion was that it was passe to write about hanging out with musicians because journalists with integrity had to stand apart from the subject of their pens. Well sod that . . . I'm not a journalist so I guess it doesn't apply to me. | ||||||
| So when I got to the 12 Bar Club after nine Lloyd Maines and Terri Hendrix were already on stage. The stage area, that little front parlour with the tiny stage was packed out. Even Bob Paterson, DJ, promoter, pr man for good musicians, was peering in from the bar. Ray Wylie Hubbard asked if I might join him in the back room. I didn't have to be asked twice. | ||||||
 Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines  
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| So this explains how I missed Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines set. The noisey applause, however, drifted into the makeshift dressing room, little more than a place for storing foldup tables and oddments. | ||||||
| Ray Wylie Hubbard sat at a small table surrounded by guitar cases tuning his Martin 728, shooting the breeze and picking Doc Watson tunes. Ever since that night a while ago when he was last through London with Slaid Cleaves and Carrie Newcomer I've been appreciative of his artistry. Before that I didn't know his music at all. | ||||||
| That night with Terry Buffalo Ware steaming the walls with searing Texas guitar work and Carrie Newcomer's band fitting like a glove around him, I was hooked enough to seek out Ray Wylie's three previous albums. I suggested to him tonight that Lost Train of Thought, Loco Gringos Lament and Dangerous Spirits were a trilogy. Kind of the Texas dancehall backbeat of Lost Train to the lonesome troubadour on the highway songs of Dangerous Spirits were linked. | ||||||
| No if anything he says the trilogy starts from Loco Gringos Lament through to Dangerous Spirits and now Crusades of the Restless Knights (and that leaves out the acclaimed Live at Cibilo Creek album last year). 'Between Lost Train and Loco's I'd learnt to fingerpick,' he explains. | ||||||
| 'Why don't musicians cover your songs they are so damn good, like Dust of the Chase for instance, that is so cinematic?' 'Well I guess because the kind of performer that would cover them already write their own.' One day someone will latch on and flip somersaults at the extent of this catalogue. Dust of the Chase I tell him with its biblical imagery holding onto the maverick coat tails of a saloon gambler is worthy of being on a soundtrack of a classic Western movie. | ||||||
| Shooting the breeze waiting for the off I discussed how he wrote the songs for the latest album Crusades of the Restless Knights. As he'll tell his audiences he got the studio time sorted out with Lloyd Maines at the production helm again (who else one might ask, he has to be one of the truly great talents behind a mixing desk and a bit handy on stage as well . . .) Then he worked on the detail, the songs. They were written or completed as his family slept in his music room back in Texas. | ||||||
| Ray Wylie Hubbard is a well read man and he draws from what he reads for inspiration. Lately he's been reading about the Grail Romances, the Crusades and as ever he reads Rilke's Letters to A Young Poet when he wants to get his head straight about his songwriting. Geoffrey Himes excellent sleeve notes allude to Crusades being chock with spiritual references 'not just the devil but also to ghosts, angels, baptisms, crosses, dead poets, femme fatales and untrustworthy Bible salesmen.' | ||||||
| I'd ventured to ask Ray Wylie where he learnt to fingerpick. He says a name (which I didn't write down) of a guy in Dallas and for the next ten minutes or so takes me through a lesson of how he started and I could, with enough practice, do the same thing. The lesson is priceless and he writes in my note book. And I can tell by having chatted with him that lesson would have been freely given to anyone as well as that chat. | ||||||
| The wait to go on stage has passed quickly and the soundman comes for Ray Wylie Hubbard. Lloyd Maines and Terri Hendrix have not bothered to leave the stage they are sitting waiting for the off again. | ||||||
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| Ray Wylie brings on stage the same Buddha like calm he has offstage but when he sings that is another thing. He burns. The entire evening was shown live over the Internet and watched by folks all over America. What they were missing was the charge of actually being there. Just a few feet from Lloyd Maines steel was the place to be. In just a week I\'d seen two audiences one in Holland and one in London get the tingles down the spine. | ||||||
| The 12 Bar is built around a forge circa 1634. The musicians on a tiny ridge of a stage and an audience below their feet and up in the Gods in the balcony. The sound is always excellent here and the acoustics when the notes whang off the old brick walls is cracking. | ||||||
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| And this was the last night of the tour and they really went for it. This lineup makes acoustic music electric. Having Lloyd Maines on stage with you is rather like being Butch Cassady and having the Sundance Kid at your side. Terri Hendrix's mandolin just fits perfectly and her vocals they just make your neck hairs stand up on end. Lloyd Maines really does reinvent the wheel everytime he sits down to play that steel. | ||||||
| In the middle Ray Wylie sat there on a stool, a pair of torn jeans, dusty cowboy boots has a quiet Texan way that hushes an audience between songs then catches them on fire when he sings. | ||||||
| There were so many highpoints, I think the whole show was a highpoint. But Lloyd Maines uncorked a solo somewhere in the middle of the set and even Ray Wylie gave him one of those looks like wow where did that come from. The singalongs were fantastic. | ||||||
| Great to hear Dust of the Chase tonight and be in the middle of an audience who hear him crack the one liner about the worst outlaws coming from Oklahoma such as 'Pretty Boy Floyd and Jimmy LaFave' that had about everyone rolled up. And what a song, who writes songs with lines like 'and when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I take along Samuel Colt'. There's a whole gaggle of Stetson hatted Nashville lookalikes who are like Milky Bar Kids compared to the guy that wrote this one. Lloyd Maines hits the harmonics on the steel, Ray Wylie sings like he's in some dusty saloon fingering a marked deck. Wow. | ||||||
| On Conversation With The Devil Ray Wylie suggested Lloyd Maines could play if he wanted to but he let the master just whang the walls with an intensity and passion that generally you might regard as being the birthright of the Delta bluesmen. The pre song introduction was a classic. Ray Wylie took a swipe at the infidels in Nashville and what they've done to country music, the country music that he and Lloyd Maines grew up on. | ||||||
| At one point in the show Lloyd was made Pope of Texas and got a massive applause to the suggestion that he has contributed volumes to Texas music. No argument there. Ray Wylie says 'the last time Lloyd was here was 1981 with Joe Ely supporting the Clash and you frightened him . . '. (howls of laughter). | ||||||
| The River Runs Red was about as close the acorn gospel of something that I've heard Ray Wylie describe as getting down to that voodoo thing. They cooked red rice and beans on this one. Terri Hendrix sounded like an off the wall gospel choir on her own. It was deep, dark and hung on a chugga chugga rhythm like a steamboat at full throttle. | ||||||
| The official set ended with that train song from Lost Train of Thought, Wanna Rock and Roll. Ray Wylie says it was influenced by hearing Van Morrison singing Gloria with Them, the Louvin Brothers and murder ballads. Tonight's version was an extended romp through Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love and all kinds of Texas references like seeing Dallas out of the wing of a DC9 (which raised the roof with applause, a Flatlanders songs, thanks for that Jay Cox . . .). Lloyd Maines as ever just smoked the walls on this one and the vocals and power of it coming right at you was awesome. | ||||||
| There were a couple of encores. As last week in Holland they did The Messenger which to these ears sounds like one of the great anthems written to what Butch Hancock calls 'troubadours of the drifting kind.' Appropriately, having nodded to Townes Van Zandt in song the trio sing Townes Snowin On Raton. A gorgeous take on that one tonight, the instruments just seemed to be picked so gently and the vocals were fragile and beautiful, the audience who had been shouting for a song by Townes were knocked out. And then to top it off another famous Texas son Butch Hancock, they did his Bluebird song. | ||||||
| They thought they were done but this audience brought them back one more time. 'I'm feeling great,' said Ray Wylie 'but I probably won't when I have to get up at six tomorrow to go to Victoria.' A lady down front shouted for Little Angel Comes Walkin which the songwriter promises they will do next they come through. Maybe March he says. The trio go for Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother. | ||||||
| The song to lazy journalists and MCs is a convenient pigeonhole to put Ray Wylie Hubbard into since Jerry Jeff Walker made it into an anthem for Texas beer joints. Such folks remind me of one dimensional English folk singers who continually cover Tom Paxton's Last Thing On My Mind because they haven't got a clue about the extent of his work. | ||||||
| But Ray Wylie Hubbard, Lloyd Maines, Terri Hendrix are on safe ground tonight and they have an audience here who have enjoyed every last song and jokes. So they rip out the song and the audience sings the choruses. | ||||||
| Afterwards as in Holland last, fans were grinning from ear to ear. It was another one of those special nights. A man with a quiet take on life and a subtle humour combines with a lady who has bags of talent and an affable Texan steelman who conjures magic out of thin air. Ray Wylie Hubbard brings them, and us, songs that the formalised Nashville air conditioned lift music can't even get close to. And together they really do burn the walls. | ||||||
| Mike Plumbley | ||||||
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