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PROFILE:
JAY FARRAR
It's two hours into Jay Farrar's set at Slim's, after midnight now, and the packed house continues to savor every word by the high priest of alternative country -- despite his increasing schism with that church. The resolutely anti-showbiz Farrar has challenged the audience this January night by playing most of the songs from his 2003 release, the envelope- stretching "Terroir Blues" -- but has eschewed the twangy classics from his earlier years in the celebrated roots bands Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt. Finally, as if to reward them for their open-minded enthusiasm, for his third encore he comes out on stage alone, acoustic guitar in hand. "Walking down Main Street Getting to know the concrete Looking for a purpose from a neon sign ..." The audience goes completely insane. "... If learning is living, and the truth is a state of mind You'll find it's better at the end of the line." Farrar, reluctant icon of a genre he helped create, closes his eyes as he croons the words, his thick, dark-hued baritone almost drowned out by the sing- along in the audience. Tomorrow the fan site chat rooms will be in high gear. ("He played 'Tear-Stained Eye'!"), but for now, it's Miller Time. Sort of. Afterward, the 37-year-old son of a Mississippi River barge worker is alone in his dressing room, fishing a cold bottled water out of a cooler. While the band Canyon -- a promising young quintet from the D.C. area, which both opened for and backed Farrar on this tour -- horseplays around him, Farrar is curiously detached, wrapped up in thought. With his goatee, thrift- store-looking clothes and nondescript haircut, he is about as anonymous- looking as a rock star can be. And that suits him just fine. Rushed by a small group of well-wishers who tell him how fabulous the show was, Farrar seems taken aback. "Great. Thanks." He gives a halfhearted nod of his head, a tiny smile, and backs away. The exceedingly shy Farrar, who still lives in the shadow of the great river, is a man of few words, but the ones that speak for him in his songs are exquisite. Hailed by critics as one of America's most literary songwriters, Farrar is both influenced by and the musical heir of Jack Kerouac, whom he read voraciously while working in his mother's bookstore as a teenager. "I was always surrounded with books," he says, his speaking voice unexpectedly deep and resonant. "I liked the modern classics, Faulkner to Vonnegut. But I especially loved the literature that came from here -- Kerouac and the Beats. I first heard about them listening to Bob Dylan; it's when the two art forms coalesced." As they do in his music. Farrar's songs teem with Kerouac-like images of loneliness and redemption on the road -- where an itinerant musician must spend half his life -- and reflect a melancholy romantic's longing for a more idealized world, even as he mines the beauty and poignancy of the existing one. "Nicotine and waiting Just wanting to keep it alive You turn and before you know it We're just threading this needle for life A brighter way is what you prove Anesthetize is what you do." His eccentric word combinations reflect an obsession with language that can both amuse and frustrate observers; one critic carped that he was being "intentionally opaque." Consider the album titles "ThirdShiftGrottoSlack" and the more recent "Terroir Blues," terroir being a French word that means "soil" but also alludes to a delicate balance between nature and labor. There are also song titles like "Caryatid Easy" and "Fortissimo Wah," and lyric phrases such as "sanguinary vitamins," "parabolic louver lighting" and "feedkill chain." And just when Farrar threatens to bog down in dense imagery, he will throw in a splash of elevating humor. "Anyone caught speaking Esperanto is thought crazy or headed for jail ... The devil bought the key to Branson Drives a backhoe and wears a gold chain." Enigmatic to the point of recalcitrance, Farrar has always declined to discuss meanings of songs, beyond noting their inspiration. "I leave it up to the listener," he smiles, sitting in the Pine Cone diner the next morning and hovering over a breakfast of scrambled eggs that he will not touch until the interview is over. He used to have the same attitude about publishing his lyrics -- that is, he never did -- but has recently changed his tune. "There have been some pretty bad misquotes out there, so pretty soon all my lyrics will be up on my Web site (www.jayfarrar.net)." Not that he ever looks at it; Farrar is both an unapologetic Luddite and almost completely uninterested in what's being said about him. He is startled to be shown printouts of e-mails from the Web site's chat rooms written by someone claiming to be Farrar. In one message, his doppelganger tells the e- mailing fans to "turn off your computers and go outside." "Hmm, it does sound like something I might say, but this is not me," he mutters, perusing the pages. "Sometimes people will circulate erroneous press releases saying Uncle Tupelo is getting back together. It is strange whenever I'm exposed to it, but I don't really live on the World Wide Web." Farrar sighs. "I'm going to have to track this impostor down. At least he's not doing anything criminal. I don't think." He's also bemused by a write-up on the BBC Web site (Farrar, like other alt-country artists, is huge in Europe) that credits his original band, Uncle Tupelo, with not only spawning the entire alt-country genre, but also influencing "bands from Nirvana to Travis." "Nirvana?" for the first time he laughs, an almost soundless expression of air and mirth. "That's gonna be a hard sell." He shakes his head. "Blasphemy." A few weeks later, the article is no longer on the Web site. Farrar has been dogged and perplexed by both his cult status and the ghost of his own young genius, ever since he first emerged on the scene in his early 20s, one-third of the Belleville, Ill., band Uncle Tupelo. The band produced four albums of brilliantly original, unstuck-in-time country-punk, before founders Farrar and Jeff Tweedy, friends since childhood, acrimoniously split. Tweedy went on to stardom as the front man of esoteric, genre-busting Wilco; Farrar has followed a more winding road, first with the more traditional country-rock quartet Son Volt, and then with three solo releases - - each of which has gotten more experimental and further from his roots. Of the latest, "Terroir Blues," he notes, "I was using two albums that I like, (Neil Young's) 'Tonight's the Night' and (the Beatles') 'Revolver,' as touchstones." Rather than diminishing, the legend of Uncle Tupelo and its offshoot bands continues to grow; new generations of fans discover them all the time, generating enough CD sales to warrant a 2002 anthology and newly remastered rereleases of all albums (the most recent being 1990's "No Depression," which spawned both a movement and a magazine). The divergent talents of Farrar and Tweedy -- the Lennon-McCartney of their genre -- have been debated for more than a decade since the breakup. And still, neither will say why it happened. Even today, Farrar just gives a Zen-like smile. "It was not one thing, it was cumulative. You're young, you're going in different directions. In retrospect, I think we did a pretty good job at making it last as long as it did." Does it bother him that fans continue to clamor for his older songs? He scratches his head thoughtfully. "I don't think in terms of owing the fans something, although you can't just act like what you've done in the past doesn't exist. I just try to find the songs that still mean something to me, that I can maintain a connection to. But most people seem pretty willing to go along with the new stuff." If some of his fans have not moved beyond Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, Farrar has -- although he's not ruled out a Son Volt reunion album. But, he says, he relishes the freedom that making a solo album offers. "Coming out of Son Volt, I wanted these solo records to have something of an experimental element to them," he notes. And so they have -- his latest contains six tracks of noise montage called "Space Junk," and four of the songs have two versions among the 23 tracks. His subject matter has shifted, too. "Terroir Blues" is rife with images of his father, Jim "Pops" Farrar, a folk musician, artist and merchant marine who died two years ago as Farrar was writing the songs. In "Hard Is the Fall," he recalls his father telling him he'd met Hank Williams as a young man: "Shaking the hand/ of the rambling man from Montgomery/ a music evangelist/ a never-ending quest." "I was reflecting on how our lives were intertwined," says Farrar. "He was a pretty inspirational character. After he was diagnosed with cancer, he took a second lease on life and outlived the prediction by a year and a half. He started taking music more seriously and started playing in bars and stuff. He made a couple of CDs. I felt like he was living the same life I did when I was a teenager. He was getting out there -- a lot." He sits back and looks away. "It was also great that he was here long enough to know my children." Farrar, who married his high school sweetheart, is the father of two children: Ava, 2, and Ethan, 4 -- the mention of whom causes him to brighten. "Ethan called today and said he got a perfect score on a math test. He's also good with language," he smiles. "He started speaking around the normal time, but in full sentences. And it was more like rapping than talking." Perhaps out of concern for his children's future, Farrar's songwriting has turned increasingly political. His ruminations about a grim future reflect a concern for the kind of planet they will inherit. "Breathe in all the diesel fumes/ admire the concrete landscaping/ and doesn't it feel free?" There are also pointed references in his recent release to the "Fool King's Crown" of current popular culture, as well as our wars for oil -- "21st century blood." "I notice that when a government is conservative, that stuff has to bubble up," he says grimly. "It's not like I want to be a political songwriter, but it's hard to think about those issues and not have them find their way into my writing." Most poignant is the song "Cahokian," about an American Indian civilization that existed a thousand years ago in the South and whose impressive, giant burial mounds have been all but destroyed. "Building our mounds out of control/ full of our finest throw-away things/ the new Mississippians/ under a smog-choked sun/ waiting to be undone. " "They don't really know what happened to that culture, but it apparently just imploded," he says. "They might have just polluted their own environment and weren't able to save it." An apocalyptic note on which to end a Saturday morning breakfast, but somehow fitting for Farrar. He slips quietly away, onto the crowded Tenderloin sidewalk. He is utterly, happily unrecognized. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
