Mellencamp's Rough Harvest: Little Punk Houses

 

Little Punk Houses For You and Me
John Mellencamp
by Don Allred
September 1 - 7, 1999 Issue 36
Village Voice
Years later, the crows are still scared.

John Mellencamp
Rough Harvest
Mercury

The former Mr. Cougrat's latest offering, Rough Harvest, is a compatible
collection of big hits and personal chestnuts, energetically re-worked with his now mainly
fiddle-and-drum band, during rehearsals, gigs, and other moments gracefully
gleaned from the glimmering old gravytrain. 
However. Once I got used to jigging around RH's immediately engaging
hoedown, I started fretting the prominence of its folkie keep-on-truckin' farm fare,
good-taste-bound. Bumper crop of beats notwithstanding, the invitation to taste-test comparisons   with the hard-(Coug Age)-won, and even harder-(via Human
Wheels, Dance Naked, Mr. Happy Go Lucky, John Mellencamp)-established balance of
acoustic/electric, loud/soft, boy/girl "secret" alliances proved more insistent than expected.

 

Once, time and JM found a fine balance for 1982's "Jack and Diane."
Ever the astute collector, Mr. Camp copped one of this song's famous phrases
from Garland Jeffreys' Ghost Writer: The multiracial GJ's "Spanish Town" was as much limbo as ghetto, about a guy who's "gonna suck on a chili dog"— seems like that's all
his Hot Latin Heritage comes down to. Likewise, Jack and Diane (later mentioned by Mellencamp as an interracial couple) are about to see their chili dreams left on ice, down by the Tastee-Freez. The set-up: there's something almost luxurious in the way Mellencamp rasps, "Ohhh Yeahhh," and then positively flourishing is "Life! goes awn"— one hand's resting on the wheel, the other's magnanimously waving another driver by. So, " . . . long after the thrill/of livin' is gone" still is foreboding, cautionary, almost resigned, 

but ends up presuming it's got all the youngblood time in the world to be that way (and to take moody-broody satisfactions where it can)..

My favorite bits involve the guitars. Acoustic serenades for Jack and Diane; 

mushy stuff offset by a remarkable refrain: stern electric chords move in,

only to meet a little patch of finger-, gum-, and even
string-pops, not quite rhetorically spelling out, "So what?"

 (As in "What are you rebelling against?" "Whaddaya got?") 

 

The sucker punch: 1985's "Rain on the Scarecrow,"  where "Jack And Diane" 's "So what?"

became two notes endlessly repeated by a definitely rhetorical guitar:
"Dur-dur?" ("We good?")---like  a mechanical bird---automatically shredding a glare-ice storm over a farm being taken, in the reflected reality of massing foreclosures,
burying John's//maybe Jack's merely human, merely eloquent outrage. 

 RH's rendition is merely eloquent, period. It shuts out any sonic sense of life's arithmetic. And "Jackie Brown" 's new folkie purism dilutes
Jackie's possible solace, glimpsed in Human Wheels' more commercial string arrangement. 

 

 But the rest of it's a trade-off that gets better all the time.

Human Wheels' title song is now minus some of the studio version's catchiness, but also its arty-farty vocal filtration.  One or two other numbers do miss Kenny Aronoff
(he's with Melissa Etheridge now), but new drummer Dane Clark knows, for instance, how to ride with the return of Meshell Ndegéocello's bass and vocals, as they all keep a live "Wild Night" shoulderbopping by Van Morrison's relatively reverent Tupelo Honey original. And the traditional "In My Time of Dying" 's buoyantly celebratory momentum makes Led Zep's (copyrighted) 11-minute Physical Graffiti wankathon seem positively Spïnal Tap.

As for the appropriately smoother stuff, that Pied Piper glint in Dylan's
(Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3) "Farewell Angelina" ain't here, probably because Mellen
figures we'll never get out of this world alive, so rather than tease, he takes
us on a merry-go-round tour of the song.  But then what the heck: his self-writ "Minutes to Memories" currently spins the original track's global antsiness differently enough to float a few between-the-Earth-the-Moon-and-the-Greyhound suspensions into its title's process.
"Under the Boardwalk" 's harmonies have a cookout by the sea. Overall, Miriam

Sturm's violin plays off Janas Hoyt's vocals, as well as her own (and
everybody's rhythm): hazy one minute, prismatic the next. JM remains in 

good cig-tested voice as well.

When I told my Louisville art historian friend that I was writing this review, she said,

 "Oh, even I know who that is! He's a Hoosier Expressionist." Right awn. 

.

Oakley Hall's Wild Wld West

 Oakley Hall: I'll Follow You (Merge)

  (from Columbus UWeekly, Sept. 2007)     

        Like their namesake (a historical novelist who knows just how wild the real Wild West was, and is, in ways that still reach the modern world), the psychedelic-country-rock band called Oakley Hall keeps finding its own re-orientation, its own well-traveled road. Oakley Hall’s  modes, minor keys, drones, and eerie harmonies, the precarious alliances of male and female voices, surging through imagery and rhythm, force their way into the wilderness, at whatever cost---the how and why of it make up stories they tell themselves and other listeners on the fly, just as the people in their songs are always picking up the pieces of personal (and some musical) history, starting or continuing another expedition. The 2006 release Gypsum Strings was their tightest and yet boldest album, the sound of self-proclaimed “anti-romantics” challenging acceptable limits of realism.
           Oakley Hall’s brand-new I’ll Follow You builds on the breakthrough of  Gypsum Strings, but not with any sense of self-congratulation. As before, brooding verses can be pulled, by the very last syllable and note, into harmonies of up to four voices, when rattled by the mesh of three guitars, a lap steel, an organ, a fiddle, bass, and drums, any or all of which might be employing pedal effects at any given moment. But there’s always a sense of one voice among many, basically alone. The music brings release, but also tilts forward, into a new tension, among 12 songs in just over 49 minutes. Brave ’n’ sexy ballads like “All The Way Down” and “I’ll Follow You” lead eventually to encounters with “Alive Among Thieves” and “Rogue Revelator, “ where exotic sounds whirl menacingly around calm, plain-speaking voices of betrayal (there’s no “freak folk” whimsy in Oakley Hall’s music). The last song takes these misadventures into account, but ends with a line that’s the same as the title: “Take my hands, we’re free,” a woman mutters darkly, before raising her voice brightly, “Take my hands, we’re free!” Then she seems to vanish in the first second of sunlight.  Don Allred