Graham Lindsey
Famous Anonymous Wilderness
Catamount Records CCR 016
By Marianne Ebertowski
 The
kid on the CD cover shot is frowning under his over-sized cowboy
hat. He stares straight ahead into the camera with a world-weariness
almost unhealthy for his age. Dylan could frown and stare like
that when he was young and, hell, he could even make records
like this. Famous Anonymous Wilderness, the debut solo-album
of Wisconsin-born Graham Lindsey, sounds as if it has been beamed
into our time from way back when folk music was still unsettling
and even subversive in various respects.
Lindsey picks up that subversive thread where it got lost or,
in the words of Greil Marcus, he picked up the old tradition
of "taking ghosts out of the air," those ghosts that
were collected by Harry Smith on his Anthology of American
Folk Music. Graham Lindsey, like Gillian Welch, has earned
the citizenship of "Smithville," a small town where
"murder and suicides are rituals, acts instantly transformed
into legend, facts that in all their specificity transform everyday
life into myth, or reveal that at its highest pitch life is a
joke."(Greil Marcus)
It's hard to decode Lindsey's lyrics sometimes as they tend
to be as highly idiosyncratic as traditional songs with their
"roses growing right up out of people's hearts and naked
cats in bed with spears growing right out of their backs."
(Dylan). It's even harder to believe that Graham Lindsey is only
25 years old. Then again, his musical subversiveness goes back
a long way. According to legend, he was responsible for breaking
up the preteen punk band Old Skull in the eighties at the tender
age of 12, for the simple reason that he got grounded.
Older and wiser he left home aged 14, equipped with an acoustic
guitar and a harmonica, and went on the road, which took him
all the way through the States from his native Wisconsin to New
Orleans to Brooklyn and Nebraska. After more than ten years
on the road, he felt able to tell his tale and he does so with
a vengeance and with an extraordinary poetic literacy. His use
of images, alliterations and internal rhymes has an almost frightening
matter-of-factness.
With a phrasing not unlike the young Dylan or Ramblin'Jack
Eliott and some sort of swallowed anger strangling his vocal
chords, Lindsey sounds frantic, crazy, dangerous; a Smithvillian
maniac on the run. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar and
harmonica and, sometimes, dobro, and with the help of some friends
on bottleneck guitar, accordion and mandola (Matt Cartsonis),
pedal steel (Doug Livingston), Joel Hamilton (upright bass) and
M.B. Gordy (drums, percussion) Lindsey addresses "the mess
of this and that and this that famous anonymous wilderness this
bliss undressed by wisps of dim confusions." ("My Museum
Blues")
Following Mr. Lindsey on his road to the Hutch Jack Flats
where he wanted "to be alone in peace" turns out to
be scary business. The song ("Hutch Jack Flats Rag")
in which the singer has a sudden apparition of "twenty
men all tied together digging twenty graves" is, in fact,
a fine illustration of Lindsey's ability "to take ghosts
out of the air:"
The wind blew bones across the road/ but my ghosts were
already dead. / And suddenly I longed for all the places I'd
already been. / And for the people and the things that I ignored
when they all said/ Hey boy slow down slow down.
Dead lovers (preferably female) are another favorite subject
in old folksongs. Graham Lindsey finds his true love mysteriously
slain in the snow after spending the night with the beautiful
black-haired Emma Rumble. That the lover is covered in Emma Rumble's
clothes whereas beautiful Emma's arms are "glistening and
frozen from the snow" adds to the mystery. The singer cries
and loads his shotgun, but the road goes on. "All along
the winding way I came I saw I did not stay I lived I died I
did not change," he explains in "Hey Hey Hey".
My favorite songs are the steel-drenched "I Won't Let
You Down," a sweet, but strange love song that could have
tumbled from an Uncle Tupelo or Son Volt album and the twangy
"Dead Man's Waltz," a real "desperation blues"
with superb finger picking backed by pedal steel.
Every folk singer should do at least one or two protest songs,
and Lindsey does. There's "Everybody Sings a Lonesome
Song" with obvious references to older protest material
("Where have all the singers gone/Gone to churches one by
one") and then there's the ultimate country protest song
with a real punk attitude "If I was a horse:"
If I was a horse/ I'd want to be a bucking horse/ If I
was a mule/ I'd kick and spit and scream and roar/ And I would
never work no more.
Graham Lindsey's journey through the famous anonymous wilderness,
started in Nebraska, draws to a sudden halt in New York where
he comes to a pretty harsh self-critical conclusion:
I am useless to the wild earth/ So sings the bowels of every
place/ I used to map the laughter/ Though I could never find
its face/ And anywhere that I may go my judgment roars its restless
bells/ I never knew and shall never know a worse place than myself.
("Song to New York")
What a way to end an album! There are many reasons why Famous
Anonymous Wilderness became my favorite debut album of 2003
and made my personal Top-10 of the year. The most important
is probably that Graham Lindsey has proven capable of preserving
his gutsy punk attitude and, at the same time, mixing it with
knowledge of and respect for musical and poetic tradition. In
short, Lindsey sounds as honest and authentic as an artist possibly
can. I don't know whether he will remain anonymous or become
famous one day all I can hope for is that this guy will
stay as wild as possible.
www.grahamlindseymusic.com
www.catamount.com
Contact Marianne Ebertowski at ebertowski-at-rockzilla.net
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