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ROCKZILLA.COM
Uncle Tupelo was not the beginning of my romance with country music. I knew my Hank Williams, George Jones and Johnny Cash long before Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy learned to figure out their first chords. However, I have to admit I quite fell for the charming enthusiasm and relentless youthful energy of what later was called "alt.country" or "No Depression." After Uncle Tupelo split, I preferred the introvert Jay Farrar and his plaintive steel- and tear-drenched sounds to Tweedy's wild bunch Wilco. When Son Volt apparently went AWOL and Tweedy created a formation of Wilco more to his new likeness, I expected great things from Farrar's first album Sebastopol. Sadly enough, its overproduced bleakness didn't work for me. I have to confess that I skipped the mini-album Thirdshiftgrottoslack there was no way I could have pronounced the title in the record shop anyway. Having been an inhabitant of a largely Francophone city for quite some time, I had, however, little trouble pronouncing Terroir Blues, the title of Farrar's latest oeuvre. I must admit, though, that I had to look up the meaning of the word in my dictionary: It is not something you are very likely to come across in your daily newspaper, not even in this part of the world. "Terroir," I know now, means "soil considered a refuge for typical rural or regional habits or tastes." It can also refer to soil where wine is cultivated, but I think the first meaning makes a more suitable entry to the album. Jay Farrar currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri which seems to be particularly fertile soil for all sorts of cultural and musical habits and tastes. More than a thousand years ago Native Americans known today as Mississippi Moundbuilders carved a civilization in earthen mounds near St. Louis. Their culture was destroyed in the middle of the 16th century by Spanish fortune hunters. French explorers and German immigrants passed through St. Louis and sometimes stayed. Later the Mississippi River brought on all kinds of music: jazz, blues, country. It looks like one day Jay Farrar felt the urge to dig in the rich, but also blood-drenched St. Louis soil and came up with a handful of regional blues. Terroir Blues, the first release on his own Act/Resist label, is Farrar's most powerful work since the Son Volt classic Trace. It offers 23 tracks including six bits of "Space Junk" (backwards noise loops) and alternate takes of four songs. Maybe that experimental approach will keep Terroir Blues from becoming a classic in its own, but there seems to be a reasonable explanation for what at first listening may sound pretentious or self-indulgent. Last summer Jim 'Pops' Farrar, Jay's father, died. Farrar Sr. was a travelling musician who had served in the Merchant Marine in WWII and in the Korean War. Terroir Blues is full of Jay's bittersweet reminiscences of his dad like "Hard is the Fall" and "Dent County." And the backwards noise loops are Jay's attempts to "escape the weight on his shoulders" in the time his father was dying. They are also like memory flashes reminding him where he and his parents came from, he explained in recent interviews. This sounds plausible, though the effect on the "neutral" listener may still be just awkward. Terroir Blues is a sparsely instrumented album. It is stripped down to the bare necessities and features the same plaintive steel that I used to adore about Son Volt. Not surprisingly, the man behind the steel sound is Eric Heywood. Other musicians contributing to the intense and coherent sound of the album are ex-Blood Orange Mark Spencer on lap steel, piano and slide guitar, Rockhouse Rambler John Horton on guitar and bass, Superchunk Jon Wurster on drums and Bottle Rocket Brian Henneman on "electric sitar." "Who do you know/who do you trust/ who keeps you sane/ who cleans off the dust," are Farrar's opening questions in "No Rolling Back," a song that comes back in a more countrified version at the end of the album. The doubt, pain and fear of history repeating itself expressed in this first song are part of the disturbing undercurrent of the album. "Deliver us from now, from this 21st century blood," he pleads accompanied by Wurster's hypnotic, almost Native American drum rolls and concludes:on an optimistic note: "but the future is free ... no rolling back." Then there is the first take of "Hard is the Fall", a classic Farrar song in the best tradition of "Windfall" or "Tear Stained Eye." The dreamlike effect of delayed steel guitar, a result of various takes of the song layered together, cutting through Farrar's echo-y vocals, makes the hair on your neck stand upright. It is Farrar telling his father's story about meeting Hank Williams, "remembrances of pride, guilt, laughter and luck," but he sounds as if he is standing at some place or soil where life and death meet. Is this a dream or is it real? the singer keeps asking, but maybe that doesn't matter because, as Delmore Schwartz put it: "in dreams begin responsibilities." In Schwartz's short story with the same title, the author is a little boy sitting in a movie theater watching his parents' lives unfold on screen. Desperate he wants to interfere and stop them from making the mistakes he thinks they made. But he is dragged out of the theater and told by the usher: "you can't carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much." What does Farrar, the boy, watch on the screen? Maybe it's the same moments of pain, horror and embarrassment about people who seem to jump about awkwardly or walk too fast, Schwartz, the boy, witnessed. And maybe he weeps like him, and is scolded for it by the rest of the "neutral" observers/listeners. The most haunting story Farrar witnesses and tells is "Cahokian," where he decribes the rise and destruction of the Native community of the Mississippi Moundbuilders (see: www.cahokiamounds.com) and the landscape and questions they left behind for post-industrial generations: Ceremonial
mounds in the back yards
and towns Farrar's voice seems to be chased by the chilling sounds of a cello, just as if he is on the run from being one of the "new Mississippians/under a smog-choked sun/waiting to be undone." Another highlight is "Out On the Road" which with its beautiful acoustic guitar and flute (Lou Winer) has a certain Townes van Zandt sadness about it: Gonna
need a crutch The song fades away like an old soldier and seems to reincarnate only seconds later as "All of Your Might" This time Farrar's voice and the sounds of a slide-guitar keep hanging in the air like ghosts. There is more incredible steel and slide to indulge in in "California" and "Walk You Down" before Farrar presents the last real "pièce de résistance" of the album, the bittersweet tribute to his father, "Dent County": Beat
bars and the Maritime The musical ballet of piano and steel on this track is simply awesome! Maybe the album should have stopped here and leave the listener with the echoes of this peerless beauty. Farrar decided otherwise. It has to be said that "Fish Fingers Norway," an instrumental with Mark Spencer playing slide guitar Indian style, is a jewel and that the alternate takes of " Hanging On To You", "Hard is the Fall", "Heart on the Ground" and "No Rolling Back" are certainly not inferior to the earlier versions. Terroir Blues, though not flawless, is a stunning album of an eerily haunting beauty. Farrar, the boy, has been watching his father's (hi)story and that of his home town and home country on the screen of his mind and didn't need an usher to tell him that "everything you do matters too much." He turned what he saw into an album that will matter enough for anyone with an open mind.
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