Roots Rockers Know How to Age

It’s not surprising that roots rockers are better than their indie rock peers at making music about getting old—and at making music while getting old themselves. Indie rockers are so intensely focused on the present (with often powerful results) that they seem to exist outside time. Roots rockers, by contrast, have spent their whole careers absorbing the past—in the form of Merle Haggard, Aretha Franklin and/or Roger McGuinn—into their music. So when their personal past lengthens behind them, they’re better prepared to handle it.

Steve Dawson, for example, was weaving the influences of honky-tonk, troubadour folk and old-school soul into the rock’n’roll of his Chicago band Dolly Varden back in the ‘90s. The group was lumped in with such alt-country bands as Son Volt and Wilco, though Dawson was more original than his Illinois brethren. But Dawson has made his best records as a solo artist in this decade.

He celebrated his 59th birthday this year with a new album, Ghosts, which includes one of the best-ever rock songs about getting old. The title, “Sooner Than Expected,” sums up our bewildered reaction as we cross each boundary: 40, 50, 60, as we watch those around us fall away. “I thought I was going to have a little more time,” Dawson sings plaintively over a subdued acoustic guitar and an exhausted accordion.

The music is the quiet confession of a secular slow hymn, and that intimacy sets up the chorus kicker: “Here it comes, sooner than expected, sooner than expected.” If that doesn’t get you, the final verse will: “I still get the stab in the center of my chest when I remember your laughing face. Loss by loss, year by year, try to keep up, try to keep pace.”

Only a rock ‘n’ roller marinated in the deep history of country music and the blues, with those decades of songs about death and loss, could sing about those topics so well. Brian Wilkie’s keening steel guitar underlines the regrets of Dawson’s “Walking Cane,” a hillbilly ballad about the way the world grinds us down till we’re nothing but “a dog in a raincoat, a goat screaming like a man.” Alton Smith’s Wurlitzer organ greases the way for the 6/8 R&B ballad, “It Was a Mistake,” the story of a house burning to the ground.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The album begins with the buoyant, mid-tempo rocker, “Time to Let Some Light In,” which asks a lover to pull back the curtains, because “the past is gone…. It’s a choice and the choice is clear.” Midway through the album, he declares, “I Am Glad to Be Alive,” over a jangly guitar figure. He’s not being naïve; he acknowledges that the volcano is rumbling nearby, but nonetheless he’s grateful to feel the wind on his face one more day.

On the title track from The In Between, Kevin Gordon’s first album in six years, he declares that he’s “55, still alive,” married 30 years, with two kids out the door and on their own, as if that’s accomplishment enough in a world like ours. And who’s to say it’s not? Like most of us who reach that mark, he’s neither a big success or a big failure, neither a paragon of virtue nor an unredeemed scoundrel; instead he’s “drifting in the in-between.”

That territory is crowded by a majority of the population, but it’s rarely described in popular song, which prefers heroes and villains. Most songwriters shy away from the challenge of describing this gray area, knowing how hard it is to make an impression without going to extremes. But Gordon, one of Nashville’s most gifted songwriters, pulls it off. Over five-and-a-half minutes of slow blues reminiscent of late-period Dylan, Gordon reports on the in-between from the inside, scrupulously avoiding the temptation to romanticize or patronize it, filling it not with types but with real people.

Much of the rest of the album riffs on that concept. A twitchy rockabilly romp describes teenage fumbling in a parked car as a sincere effort to get “Love Right,” and then takes a multiple-decade leap to admit that marriage negotiations are just a continuation of the same effort. “Tammy Cecile” describes one of those adolescent Louisiana girls, set to a fiddle-laced Cajun tune. “Destiny” describes another thumping rock ‘n’ roll. The whole thing ends with “You Can’t Hurt Me No More,” a slow rocker co-written with Kim Richey, that informs Gordon’s ghosts that he’ll never forget them but he’s beyond their grasp now.

Gordon co-wrote a song for Shemekia Copeland’s new album, Blame It on Eve, and plays guitar on it. “Cadillac Blue” is a rocking celebration of biracial romance belted out with authority by the 46-year-old daughter of blues legend Johnny Copeland. The daughter reinvented her career in 2009 by forging a fusion between the blues tradition she inherited and the Americana movement she admires. This new title isn’t the best of her seven albums in this new style—the material isn’t as consistent—but the combination of her powerhouse soprano and such guests as Gordon, Alejandro Escovedo, Luther Dickinson and Jerry Douglas is hard to resist.

Jerry Williams, the brilliant, unpredictable R&B legend known as Swamp Dogg (long before Snoop Dogg adopted a similar moniker), has had a connection to Americana since before the genre had a name. Now 82, he wrote a country hit for Johnny Paycheck in 1971, the same year he befriended John Prine and recorded Prine’s Viet-vet song, “Sam Stone,” turning it into a cult hit. Williams dedicates his new album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St, to Prine and highlights his life-long love of country music by backing his R&B vocals with such string-band musicians as Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull and Noam Pikelny.

It never sounds like a gimmick, because Williams has always written and sung out of the timeless Southern well where country and soul mix it up. Margo Price sings lead over banjo, mandolin and dobro on “To the Other Woman,” but it sounds soulful, because Williams originally wrote and produced the song as a #7 R&B hit for soul legend Doris Duke. Living Colour’s Vernon Reid adds psychedelic guitar to the bluegrass breakdown on “Rise Up.” Like Bobby Rush, Williams has a weakness for funny, bawdy lyrics, but he also has a gift for chorus hooks and quirky touches that may have hurt him commercially but have also helped him endure.

There’s no more searing indictment of the U.S. record industry in 1981 than the inability of the dBs to get an American deal. These four North Carolina musicians (singer-songwriter-guitarists Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple, bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby) were steeped in the Southern-eccentric tradition of Alex Chilton, Bobby Charles and Dan Penn which they filtered through Beatlesque craftsmanship. The dBs’ first two albums, both released in 1981, were nearly perfect specimens of new-wave power-pop, but Stands for Decibels and Repercussion, were released only in England by Albion Records, forcing U.S. fans to pay exorbitant import prices to hear the homegrown equivalent of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe.

Stands for Decibels has just been remastered and re-released by Propeller Sound Recordings, and it sounds better than ever. Meanwhile, the other band that the now-68-year-old Holsapple co-led, Continental Drifters, has released White Noise & Lightning: The Best of Continental Drifters, a helpful, single-CD overview/introduction to its charms. It was a sort of supergroup with Holsapple joining the Bangles’ Vicki Peterson, the Dream Syndicate’s Mark Walton and the Cowsills’ Susan Cowsill soon before the group moved from L.A. to New Orleans.

New Orleans is a great place to live, but it’s not a great site for launching a rock ‘n’ roll career, and the Drifters never got the recognition they deserved. Like Fleetwood Mac, they boasted both male and female knock-out singers, multiple major-league songwriters and a gift for marrying roots music to pop craft. This overview offers 13 songs from four different albums plus a rare single and an unreleased live track.

White Noise & Lightning is also the title of a new biography of the band by Sean Kelly. Completing the trifecta of this Continental Drifters revival is the two-CD We Are All Drifters: A Tribute to the Continental Drifters, which features 25 of the band’s songs redone by the likes of Marshall Crenshaw, Steve Wynn and members of R.E.M. Like most tribute albums, this one is hit and miss, and the Drifters’ original recordings are the best place to start.

Amy Rigby, the 65-year-old ex-wife of the dBs’ drummer, begins her latest album, Hang in There with Me, with the acoustic-rock stomper, “Hell-Oh Sixty,” a decade-by-decade review of her life that’s funny until the jokes start to bite. That’s followed by “Too Old To Be So Crazy,” in which she asks why she’s still sticking her neck on the block in the music biz. With music this witty and catchy, she’d be crazy not to, especially when her personal, folk-like observations are wrapped in—but never obscured by—swirling psychedelic-rock by her musical and personal partner, “Wreckless” Eric Goulden.