Lucinda Williams part 2
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Lucinda Williams performed live for the first time as a folk singer in Mexico City in 1970, introduced herself as Cindy Williams & Clark Jones along with a schoolmate who was playing the banjo . The "turning point" of his career, however, was in New Orleans where Lu was on vacation. He was engaged in a bar in Bourbon Street as folk singer to perform three or four nights a week, was the end of his adventure and the beginning of a busy school musical career. From New Orleans reached San Francisco where it seemed that the world had to change from day to day but the summer of love came when it was closed for a while and circulated by the drug burned more minds ideas. Disappointed, in 1974, took refuge in the quieter Austin. "It was all magical and wonderful in Austin, maybe it was like San Francisco in the sixties but more bluesy. We lived with so little, it was cheap and comfortable, lived with the boys I am staying at home, drank milk, ate natural foods, smoked marijuana and taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. We were playing for pennies on the street corner and then worked as a waitress in a bar. A band called Uncle Walt's Band took me under his protection and gave me the opportunity to open up for them. I could stay there forever but then the scene changed in Austin what was called cosmic cowboy sound. Were fashionable for bands and songwriters choice was to move to Houston where people like Lyle Lovett, Nancy Griffith, Eric Taylor and Vince Bell were creating something new. They were folk singers very hippy chic and it was not easy to fit into their lap. I had trouble finding a record deal because my music was more rough, is torn between country and rock chic and it was not like them. " In 1978 Lu
still moves and goes to Jackson, Mississippi where he recorded his first album at last for the famed folk label Smithsonian / Folkways, later renamed simply Ramblin'On My Mind Ramblin 'which followed three years later, Happy Woman Blues .
The adventure looks set to Lu that distinguishes the epic story of the unnamed many (good and losers) aka Dylan Americans when something happens. After eight years of false starts and a host of small exhibitions in 1984, the artist finds himself in the right place at the right time or Los Angeles fully Paisley Underground. Bands like Lonesome Strangers, Rain Parade, Dream Syndicate and Rank & File take kindly to a cowgirl southern open their concerts with an acoustic guitar and a lot of anger. The name of Lucinda Williams began to go around the city and nation and in 1988 the British label Rough Trade punk guidance offers the opportunity to record a new album. The namesake Lucinda Williams does not make havoc but gives "a first class ticket to Nashville" as Patty Loveless brings in the top twenty of the country charts The Night's Too Long and Mary Chapin Carpenter takes a Grammy with the version of Passionate Kisses, two songs that album. A few years later Emmylou Harris "cover" Crescent City "and" Sweet Old World and the rock seminole Tom Petty will provide a robust reading of Changed The Locks, aggressive song on the end of a love affair that in the original version allowed Williams to get into heavy rotation national radio.
By the way downhill, but Lu does not think in any way to smooth his stormy temperament and non-conformist and do not come to terms with the world record. Too rock for country and too country to be chosen an indie rock, the Chameleon to publish Sweet Old World, kind of sad and not at Nashville, with meditations on death, the regret and the end of relationships. Topics to be always dear to his emotional and cultural baggage, but in the early nineties screeched in hardened rock landscapes of the country and in the sugar world. Basically the same content that will give soul to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, appreciated that record in their sentimental sincerity also due to a marked improvement in voice and music, with songs that speak of dark beauty of ordinary people who do things but ordinary make these extraordinary moments.
The album received great praise from critics and was awarded a Grammy for best folk album contemprary 1998, reissued today in a stylish deluxe edition is widely regarded as the masterpiece of the artist.
By 2001, Lu introspective Essence gives the depths of his lyrical approach minimalist looking for the 'essence' of the song in a simple melody that leaves overwhelmed. Inner disk and leaden, the Spartan in the sounds and arrangements, Essence is permeated by the moods of the deep south and a religion that sees God and the devil meet on a misery underclass subculture straight out from the pages of the Bible and Fucile lucido libro di Joe Bageant che mette a nudo le miserie e la desolazione dell’America profonda.
Decisamente più elettrico dal punto di vista del sound è invece World Without Tears del 2003, un disco in cui ancora abbondano le sue intense e crepuscolari ballate ( Ventura, Fruits of My Labor, Overtime, Minneapolis) ma in più ci sono chitarre degne dei Rolling Stones (Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings), battute boogie alla John Lee Hooker (Atonement), distorsioni elettriche e un talking blues che suona come una recitazione da poeta della Beat generation (American Dream ) anche se sono in molti a confonderlo in un rap.
Live @The Fillmore del 2005 è un doppio album live di quelli che si facevano in the 70 guitars or a ball, sounds and a voice that is raw anger and sweetness, ecstasy and fury, determination and abandonment. Spectacular guitarist Doug Pettibone, an animal capable of the six strings to give Williams a rock sound worthy of the best Rolling Stones, Williams intense singing as if it were a matter of life or death. But Williams is not the end of the trip on the historic stage at the Fillmore because emotions and other revelations are contained in West perhaps his most innovative album to sound level. West was born from the disappointment of a love gone downhill, an important report and grief over the death of his mother. Dark events that metabolizes the artist in a job that someone could be called if not cathartic even liberating. There are harmonies bucolic, flash visionary worthy of Neil Young's most desert (Unsuffer Me), the hypnotic rhythms (Wrap My Head Around That) built around the coil of the eclectic guitar Bill Frisell, brooding melodies that wander around to become an obsession (Rescue) , rarefied and ethereal sounds (What If) that seem to come out of a Daniel Lanois production, there is Hal Willner (Costello, Lou Reed) as a producer and there are songs that have a melancholy beauty with no escape. The following
Little Honey in 2009 with the new producer Eric Liljestrand steer toward roots-rock and free disenchanted, less elegant than the previous work but spartan and direct, with decisive point hard-rocking style that recall the no-frills, World Without Tears. Emerges the sound of a band that is the quintessence of those dusty roads of the south by the much vaunted Williams, unused to the sophisticated but in line with that mixture of folk, blues and rock that form the roots of the artist: Bob Dylan and Lightin Hopkins , the Cream and the Rolling Stones, Robert Johnson and Memphis Minnie.
For the first time, Williams seems to have left by those dark introspection of his ballads that made it famous, to reach out to the topics of human relationships with an optimism and love never felt before As the same author, Little Honey is brighter than its other work and its blues here radiates a different light. The fact remains that introspection and the ballads are in the DNA of his music, just wait to find them in that Blessed is the work of the artist's more balanced, yet another confirmation of a writer and rocker worthy to sit next to Dylan , Springsteen, Young, Petty, Mellencamp and Steve Earle. MAURO
ZAMBELLINI