Screw You were from Texas

Eric Westbury’s "Burnt Tongues & Blue Truths"


If you’re a BuzzFlash reader, you may know that since last September, I’ve been writing daily political poems and drawing twice weekly editorial cartoons. What you don’t know is that I’m also a hopeless music geek.

When the favorable John Kerry exit polling suddenly went south last November, so did I. A few days later, I began looking through the many hundreds of CDs I’d acquired while writing a music column over the last five years for a weekly paper in Santa Monica. It was asking a lot but I wanted something to help me get my head on straight. It didn’t take long to find a certain 2003 indie release: Eric Westbury’s Burnt Tongues & Blue Truths.
Speaking of that color, let me digress for a moment and talk a little about The Blue State Jukebox.

Two very Liberal people I’ve been corresponding with since coming to BuzzFlash are Norma from Oklahoma and Traci from Arkansas. Last time I checked, those aren’t exactly left-wing strongholds. Which is to say that what I’m really looking to reflect in this column is The Blue State Of Mind, not just the specific Blue States. And while I will have an eye out for songs with social and political content, I will also be hunting down those albums that evoke cherished Blue State characteristics like irreverence and having an off-kilter way of thinking. If you’re a Blue living in a Red State, there’s no need to feel left out. But if you have any Toby Keith CDs in your collection, you may want to stop reading now.

As with my previous column, I will be looking more at artists under the radar than ones who’ve been over it for years. I love Bob Dylan but he needs another review like Baghdad needs another bomb. My goal is to find people who may never be acceptable on reactionary Clear Channel’s play lists but can get heard on cool radio shows like Watusi Rodeo on Indie 103.1 in Los Angeles or The Radio Thrift Shop on WFMU in New Jersey. (I don’t want to brag but both those fine broadcasts emanate from Blue States.)

Anyway, you can call this Westbury fellow a roots rocker or a folk rocker. He sounds like he lives in Austin but he actually calls British Columbia home. In the opening title track, he muses, "There’s not a lot I can do/To filter what’s fake from the things that are true." This sets the stage for 11 thoughtful songs where every "t" is not crossed, every "i" is not dotted and every blank is not filled in.


In the haunting "Walking Tracks" and "Usual Everything," Westbury looks at two men at different points on the same downward spiral. The former is near the end of his road and the latter is getting to that point where whatever youthful success he had is getting harder to remember, let alone duplicate. Like cigarette smoke, these songs will linger with you. The next time you see some fellow clinging to a park bench like a life preserver or notice a drunk at your local watering hole who’s glued to his barstool, you may just sigh at a life that never got off the ground. What comes through in Westbury’s songs is real compassion, not the cut-rate GOP kind, which usually arrives in the form of a photo op and an un-funded mandate.
There’s an innocent, gently cosmic side to Westbury that surfaces in the elegant "Next Showing Of The Big Picture." In a series of simple statements, he reveals how tricky it can be to understand anything: "How many birds are in a flock?/Does a rock become a stone or a stone become a rock?/Is it the hands or the time that makes the clock?" While he repeatedly insists he doesn’t know, it’s clear Westbury is suggesting that sometimes life’s big answers are found in just asking the small questions. He also implies that one lifetime may not be enough time to figure all this stuff out.


Three tracks later is the album closer and that’s the one I most wanted to hear again. He sings a cappella for ten seconds and it seems as though Westbury’s brooding is over. I imagine him sitting in his Dad’s old comfy chair and slowly getting to his feet as the defiant spirit of the song washes over him: "I don’t have a bat to swing or one of those cat ‘o’ nine tail things/No broken bottle, no brass knuckle ring/But someday, some way, somehow/ We’re gonna knock the big man down." Fittingly, this track is called "Knockin’ The Big Man Down." If you’ve ever felt hopeless since the Bush posse rode into town, you need to hear to this song to get the starch that was knocked out of you knocked back into you. Westbury sings it with an understated
inevitability. On an album filled with shadows and doubt, it’s a stunning finish brimming with light and moxie. Leave it to a complete Canadian to write an all-American, anti-authoritarian


anthem.
In the spirit of bi-partisanship, that’s a Blue State theme song, so I have one to offer a Red State one to the Republicans. It comes from longtime Lone Star state resident Ray Wylie Hubbard, who made a name for himself years ago with another anthem, "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother." Although it only came out on Growl in 2003, The Austin Chronicle already called it one of the best songs ever written about Texas. It’s a corker with a pulsing rhythm that recalls Timbuk 3’s hit, "The Future’s So Bright (I’m Gonna Have To Wear Shades.)"



Can the mere title of a track possibly live up to this build-up? Uh, yeah. It’s called "Screw You, We’re From Texas." I’m surprised that Mark McKinnon, Dubya’s ace media director, didn’t use that song at some of his boss’s stump speeches. After all, back in the day, the music savvy McKinnon used to play in bands in Austin.

Speaking of Austin, one of my musical heroes is a guitar virtuoso and occasional solo artist who’s mostly known these days as the best producer in Texas --- or any other state of any color that you can think of. His name is Gurf Morlix and this won’t be the last time you hear him

mentioned in this space. Why am I bringing him up now? Well, Morlix produced Eric Westbury’s album, for one thing. For another, he also produced that Ray Wylie Hubbard album with "Screw You, We’re From Texas" on it. Lastly, when Morlix was a struggling musician in Austin, he was
in the bands Goats Of Arabia and Fork In The Road with … Mark McKinnon.

It’s a shame that McKinnon fell in with such a bad crowd. He got dragged into the gutter of GOP politics and has played a major role in helping Bush literally threaten the future of the world as we know it. That kind of carnage makes a little rock and roll self-destruction look positively healthy.
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