“We Can’t Make it Here,” and Childish Things, the album that included the song, took best song and best album, respectively, at the Americana Music Awards in 2006.
McMurtry followed that album with the song “God Bless America,” another pointedly political song posted as a downloadable single in conjunction with the midterm elections of 2006.
Brassier than its predecessor, “God Bless America” stars a fat-cat narrator crowing that America’s ever-growing thirst for oil is the real engine of violence in the Middle East.
“My analogy about these two songs is that ‘We Can’t Make it Here’ is like a newspaper editorial, and ‘God Bless America’ is the editorial cartoon at the top of the page,” said McMurtry. “It’s a little bit more of a parody, an exaggeration made to make the point.”
“God Bless America” and 11 other McMurtry originals grace Just Us Kids, his ninth full-length record and first studio effort in almost three years. It’s due in stores from Lightning Rod Records on April 15.
“A little something to look forward to come Tax Day,” McMurtry quipped.
Imposing presence
A hunting and fishing enthusiast, McMurtry often arrives on stage looking like he’s just come from a day rustling around in the brush. His hats, worn over a Medusan mess of curls, are something of a trademark. They range in style from fine fedoras and safari chapeaux to big-box-store camo hunting caps.
While he looks the part of one of the boys in the crowd, and is sometimes known to wander into the front house post-show, McMurtry isn’t particularly approachable. His imposing gaze alone can deflate the zeal of even the most ardent fan-boy.
“You know, I’m a misanthrope. I don’t like people all that damn much,” McMurtry has admitted.
On stage, he definitely lets the music do the talking. Banter infrequently passes between crowd and band — or gets tossed about among the men on stage, for that matter.
But McMurtry’s band, the Heartless Bastards, don’t seem to need much talking to, playing seamlessly alongside him. The rhythm section is comprised of bassist Ronnie Johnson and drummer Daren Hess, who’ve been alongside McMurtry for better than a decade. Recently, second sets have also included another guitarist, most often Tim Holt, who’s put in years with McMurtry as his road manager.
Though lauded primarily for song-craftsmanship, McMurtry is an inventive guitarist in his own right, incorporating imaginative tunings and a fluid style that can range from tender ballads to roof-ripping rockers, as the material calls for it.
To get the right tool for the job, he is known to tote a good half-dozen axes along on the road.
“It’s about not getting bored, about not having that same tone all they way through a set,” McMurtry has said of his cache of guitars.
As for his bandmates, he notes, “We’ve worked together for long enough that we sound pretty good now, I think. …When I am working on a record, I go in (the studio) with Daren and Ronnie first, usually. We get the bones of it down. Then we bring in other players and parts later. It’s pretty much how we always get this done.”
American castes
McMurtry was born in Fort Worth, Texas in the year before the Kennedy assassination. His parents split up while he was still a toddler, and he grew up primarily with his father, writer and rare-book aficionado, Larry McMurtry.
McMurtry spent a good part of his formative years in Leesburg, Va., a city he’s described as neither truly Southern or Northern in nature. But whatever the temperament in that cusp country of Virginia, the abundance of old money and political power in the region is beyond dispute.
“We often try and promote the false notion that we have no class system in this country — but we do,” McMurtry said. “My father was amazed when he moved to the D.C. area, to run across people that didn’t even carry cash, because they were so rich and powerful. They could just give you a business card and you’d bill them, no questions asked.”
On Just Us Kids, McMurtry examines this American caste system at work in the song “The Governor.” Against a driving, blues-flavored guitar riff, the song tells of an expensive cigarette boat on a lake where it shouldn’t be, mowing down a modest watercraft. The angler in the little boat ends up as dead as yesterday’s catch.
“It’s a piece of fiction about class conflict,” McMurtry said of the song. “We like to say we don’t have royalty here, but we do have these dynasties — the Bushes are part of that, of course. And the problem with royalty is that they are always more beholden to their class than their countrymen.
“That’s why all those Bin ladens were allowed to fly to Paris on Sept. 13, 2001, and my drummer couldn’t get to Austin for a recording session. American citizens couldn’t fly on that date — but royalty sure could. They made a big show of George Herbert Walker Bush getting grounded somewhere on a commercial flight? You know damn well that if he’d wanted to get somewhere, there would have been a Lear jet in the air.”
McMurtry further examines the idea of the “more-equal-than-others” mentality in “Ruins of the Realm,” a time-tour of world empires that have come and inevitably gone, looking in the last verse or two at our own times.
“That one’s like a history lesson,” said McMurtry. “I started drawing parallels between the state of the country now, and the decline of various empires — starting with the Romans in the first verse, then I got a couple verses on the British, and now, our situation in the Middle East. And that verse on the South? That just kind of got in there, really because I liked the imagery.”
Two lines and a melody
While overt political outings may be relatively new to McMurtry’s oeuvre, his studies in social commentary are not. Since Too Long in the Wasteland, his 1989 debut, and throughout the eight albums that have followed, the population of his musical landscape can’t even catch a decent glimpse of the American Dream.
McMurtry tales speak mostly of damaged folk clinging without much purchase to the fringes of society — the disillusioned, the addicted, the rebellious, the trapped. And while love songs are the mainstay of most rock, love in the McMurtrian universe is, at best, unrequited.
“I can’t make any promises about writing any (love songs),” he said in a radio interview with this writer, in the months before he recorded Just Us Kids. “guess I am not much of a lovable guy. The songs don’t much turn out that way.”
A number of songs on Just Us Kids go on to prove his point. Lovers abound, but not the variety with starlight in their eyes. In “Ruby and Carlos,” a poignant acoustic ballad featuring intricate internal rhyme-work, tells of a middle-aged couple going their separate ways — he, trying to keep going as an road drummer while fighting Gulf War Syndrome-related ailments; she, a horsewoman who takes a bad spill off her colt, breaking her hip.
“Freeway View,” a rocker driven by former Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan’s barrelhouse piano, concerns a man trying to escape a relationship, but uncertain he has the willpower to pull it off.
“Hurricane Party,” a crowd-pleaser the band has been playing out for about 18 months, features a classic McMurtry character — a man waiting out the storm, thinking dusty memories of lost love and chances both, alone despite his presence in a bar full of other stranded folks.
“He is kind of beaten down by life,” said McMurtry of his “Hurricane” character. “He is looking back and not entirely happy with what he sees, either. He doesn’t seem to care that much that his house will still be there after the storm. He doesn’t care about much by that point, though.”
Whether he is writing about events on the world stage or a life lived loveless in a thicket-swaddled shotgun shack, McMurtry allows that the actual nuts-and-bolts of his writing tend to be much the same.
“It’s still about figuring out who is speaking,” McMurtry said. “Political songs start pretty much the same way as the others — with a couple lines and a melody. And if that works, if it keeps me up at night, then I keep on writing it.
“But the way political stuff can be more difficult is that they turn into sermons real easily,” he added. “And if they do that, you have to say to yourself, ‘Is this a good enough sermon? Does it have merit in pursuing beyond this point?’ And there are a lot of them I haven’t finished because the answer to that question was, ‘No.’ But the ones on [Just Us Kids] seem to work pretty well.”
The kids involved
Along with McLagan’s keyboards, McMurtry brought a few other guests into the studio. He brought in pat mAcdonald, formerly of Timbuk 3, to add his harmonica to the mix. Jon Dee Graham, who usually shares the Wednesday night Continental Club gig with McMurtry when both are in Austin, adds soaring guitar lines to “Fireline Road”—a story of the twin horrors of incest and meth addiction.
McMurtry’s teenage son, Curtis McMurtry (who, his father notes, now has a couple of bands of his own) lays down the honkin’ baritone sax on crunchy rocker, “Bayou Tortous.”
Swamp-rock ace C.C. Adcock also adds some blistering six-string to opener “Bayou Tortous.” McMurtry, who’s been producing his own albums in recent years, points to Adcock as a talent he thinks of tapping to helm his next album as producer.
“I am kind of tired of [producing],” said McMurtry. “I think I’ve done a pretty good job of it, but I think I need to go back to school on that now. I have kind of used up all my tricks. It’s good to work with different people because everybody brings something new to the table. All the producers I work with gave me some tools I still use.”
Election highway
But in the meantime, there is an album to sell, and shows to play to help get that done. The first step to getting listeners on board is the release of the single “Cheney’s Toy” as a free download (see http://www.JamesMcMurtry.com for more). Lightening Rod Records is holding a contest for the best homemade video related to the song. The band also played a number of SXSW showcases in March as well, and then in April embarks on an Eastern U.S. tour. Parts West are likely on tap later this year, with talk of a possible overseas leg in the near-future.
But then, McMurtry is not the only colorful character hitting the highway to sell his vision of America in the coming months. Perhaps Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain will cross paths with a certain vanful of shaggy Bastards out on the lonely highway between gigs—political and otherwise. Weirder shit has been known to happen out there in an election year.
As to whom McMurtry would like to see go all the way come time to cast the ballot, he said, “I intend to vote for a Democrat. McCain lost me with the ‘Bomb, bomb Iran’ gaffe.”