Ramsay Midwood
Shoot-Out at the OK Chinese Restaurant
Vanguard Records
by William Michael Smith

I've seen the doors of heaven swing wide open
And the palace of numinous nothing spread out before me

Like some holyroller in the grip, under the spell, limbs out of control and speaking in tongues, it all just comes flowing out of Ramsay Midwood. No periods, no commas, no colons, no places to take a breath or break a thought, magically arranged haphazard accidental mementos of truth winos mumble in the nodding semiconscious, poetic graffiti found in the frothy foam created by the draught spigot and written in invisible ink on the bulletin board of a national gene pool narcoticized by its lust for the here and now, for the bright and shiny, for its own dashboard Jesus moral superiority. Ramsay Midwood's got issues, dude, and he wants it under-by-god-stood that his issues are everyone's. He's makin' em so.

So the devil and I better calm right down
So we both get loaded and who can blame us
We live in a town where the hungry feed the famous

If Ramsay Midwood had V. I. Lenin's rope, he'd know how to use it -- if he could even bother to be bothered by politics. He knows that just getting out of bed in the morning is a political act. So is driving a monster truck and not giving a rat's ass. If the medium is the massage, Ramsay Midwood is leaving the parlor.

Doctors and lawyers they won't do nothing for you
The parking attendant is a tax and I spend it
Suck it from the poor, make another war
Catch the details on the tv news at four

Midwood is a man who has tried love and thinks there should be more to it than constant attempts at spousal improvement. He looks at himself with the ironic, earthy humor of Woody Guthrie or the young Bob Dylan.

Whatever happened to the good old days and a good old-fashioned wife
One that will cook for you and maybe clean up too
Maybe that sounds kind of mean and maybe it is
And maybe I'll read some self-help book and get myself together
But I don't think I will

There are conspiracies everywhere, some meticulously planned and evil, others entirely random and equally evil. There are the powers that be and their paid armies to make sure the status quo remains the status. In the Midwoodian worldview, sometimes all one can do about the status quo is lay down in front of it, close your eyes, and take the hit. Midwood instinctively knows what all revolutionaries instinctively know, that "the police aren't here to preserve order; the police are here to preserve disorder." Christmas is the opiate of the masses. They don't have a cure for nothin'.

When I go, place a quarter in my mouth
Twenty-five cents might save my soul
From what I gather now even heaven's got a toll

How good is this guy none of us have ever heard of? So good his love songs aren't, and his aren't-love songs are. "Feed my monkey and raise my rent,/Lord have mercy, she was heaven sent...The moral of my story is close your eyes/And when she comes around always act surprised." Midwood is as brutally humanistic as he is sympathetically nihilistic. He thrives in artistic contradiction. He doesn't so much sing as let his lungs allow the humming sounds of the black Southern churches and hobo campfire singalongs to escape in a Leadbelly-in-a-cowboy-hat moan, like Woody Guthrie shackled to a New Orleans jazz outfit, like Billie Holliday deep in the druggy mystic but still able to enunciate her all-knowing hard-earned blue wisdom for hours without blinking once.

Pacing and space are key elements in Midwood's musical approach. Like J.J. Cale, Midwood couldn't hurry his music if his guitar was on fire. (Is the patient still alive? What's his pulse rate?) His LA underground sidemen (Skip Edwards, Don Heffington, Kip Boardman, Rami Jaffe, Brantley Kearns) under the slinky leadership of Randy Weeks (guitars, banjo, harmonica, and some drums) lay down a funky mixture of banjo plink with spare blues guitar, scratchy other-worldly fiddle, and lead-handed piano chords to create a plunky country blues gumbo that seems primordial, eternal, and intensely organic. It contains elements of the delta and the bayous, of riverboats and rutted mud roads, of cattle drives and long hitchhikes, of Maxwell Avenue and those Main Streets that don't look so main anymore. And alleys, lots of alleys. Covered in a patina of humanity and a sympathy for the blueness of all things, it is a colorblind music of barefoot farmers in frayed straw hats come to town to see their first movie or to stand in front of the Woolworth store and listen to 78's on a Victrola.

Friend of a fisherman, a fisherman's friend
Friend of a carpenter, a working man, a drunk
Dream of a nickel you're owed and a seed that will never be sowed
All along your unforgiven river of wrong
You're just a dying man singing a dying man's song

Said I'm disturbed...my secret lives unlived
Compassion for those near which is farther than you think
Tormented by time and ordained by the good deed
It's never what you want but it's always what you need

Midwood's "Esther" is undoubtedly the saddest song I've heard this year, an incredibly beautiful exhalation of moroseness from the spiritual bottomlands, Billie Holliday territory invaded.

I've been running with the foot soldiers
And, Esther, I'm so weary
This cowboy way has left me all alone and so dreary
Oh, Esther, won't you gentle your bow
Play me something low
Play if soft and play it slow
And put your head upon me
As the morning starts to glow

Ramsay Midwood's music is all about intersections. He's where Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and Doc Boggs meet hip-hop, where the Beat generation collides head on with roots music, where the shitkicker shares a joint with Satchmo and Mezz. Primitive and primal, stripped down like an old jalopy that looks like hell but will blow the new ones off the road, Midwood is a medicine show for the 21st century, a Captain Beefheart for the coffeehouse, a Tom Waits for the honky tonks, a Roy Rogers for the rave. And the stuff he's peddling? Well, once the cork is pulled, there's no putting it back in the bottle. Once it's in the vein, the only thing that's going to help is a bigger dose.

*Recorded in November 2000, this is one of those records that has already done well in Europe while someone tried to figure out how to "market" it to Americans. In the final analysis, it's simply roots music for the new millennium; looking backward in 2099, critics will call this primitive. www.vanguardrecords.com/ramsaymidwood/home-m.html

Contact William Michael Smith at wms-at-rockzilla.net

 
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