Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions

With the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations reviving interest in American protest music over the last six months, it seems inevitable that Woody Guthrie would enjoy a resurgence in popularity and relevance-- and just in time for what would have been his 100th birthday. The Okie folkie's example has guided many musicians as they set the 99% to song: Tom Morello wandered Zuccotti Park strumming "This Land Is Your Land", which won something called the Occupy Wall Street Award from MTV. Others, including Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen, have debuted starkly acoustic, highly rhetorical songs squarely in the Guthrie vein, suggesting that the OWS generation (or, more precisely, the pre-OWS generation with closer ties to the 1960s folkies like Dylan, who considered Woody a secular saint) equates Guthrie strictly with protest music and protest music strictly with Guthrie. On one level it might seem like a colossal failure of imagination: By devising a form of dissent music that relies exclusively on historical examples rather than on the leader-less ethos of OWS, these artists not only dilute their dissent but grasp only one facet of the multi-faceted Guthrie. If you weren't familiar with him, you might think Guthrie was some humorless scold who spoke only in grand pronouncements against The Man.

In fact, Guthrie was a complicated and contradictory artist who explored many subjects and displayed a ribald sense of humor to temper his guiding sense of outrage; in other words, he could be just as silly as he was serious. Crucially, he understood the effect of a constructed public persona, adopting a faux rural accent not only onstage but in his famed autobiography Bound for Glory as well. No other posthumous reconsideration has captured Guthrie in all his compelling contradictions as precisely or as affectionately as Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue did in 1998. At the behest of Guthrie's daughter Nora, the UK folk singer and the U.S. rock band, along with Natalie Merchant, took scribbles of lyrics and filled in the melodies, arrangements, performances and ultimately our understanding of the man himself. As Nora writes in the liners to this new anthology collecting the three instalments of Mermaid Avenue sessions, "The lyrics exposed him so absolutely it was like walking into a shower and finding him naked. Or like finding his little black book where every confession, every desire, every fantasy, every love, every pain, every hate, every hope poured out through purple and brown fountain pens…. Guess what. Turns out he's just the like the rest of us fools."

So the man who famously penned "This Land Is Your Land" and "Grand Coulee Dam" also waxed bawdy about Ingrid Bergman and Walt Whitman's niece (who reads aloud from Leaves of Grass in bed). He wrote nonsense verse for his kids and penned a sympathetic ode to exiled Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. He missed California and understood that a movement is only as good as it treats its womenfolk: "Women are equal and they may be ahead of the men," Bragg sings on "She Came Along to Me"-- and that Eisenhower-era proclamation remains remarkably relevant during an election that makes gender such a divisive issue.

The liveliness of Guthrie's lyrics precludes any deadening reverence, and Bragg and Wilco rise to the occasion with music that respects the source material but never sounds beholden to any particular conception of Woody Guthrie. The loping melody and longing vocals by Jeff Tweedy turn "California Stars" into an especially wistful West Coast reminiscence as well as one of Wilco's best songs. Opener "Walt Whitman's Niece" and "Hoodoo Voodoo" sound rambunctious and loose, while Bragg turns "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key", a duet with Merchant, into a bittersweet reverie about the boldness of youth. "Ain't nobody that can sing like me," Bragg boasts as Eliza Carthy's delicate fiddle colors in the years between adolescence and adulthood.

Mermaid Avenue was such a deeply nuanced and humanizing portrait of a larger-than-life character that it significantly shifted how listeners thought of Guthrie, especially at the end of the decade that produced the criminally reverent alt-country movement. It was almost impossible to follow up such a project, and Mermaid Avenue, Volume 2, arriving in 2000, lacked the impact and import of its predecessor. Musically, however, it might actually be more expansive, with the hootenanny country of "Joe DiMaggio Done it Again" and the somber doom folk of "Blood of the Lamb" jostling elbows against the proto-punk of "All You Fascists" and the spry rural blues of "Aginst th' Law" (sung by Corey Harris).

There's a sense of diminishing returns on Volume 2, as well as on the third volume that fills out the new Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions. But that's only natural: Of course you put your best material on the initial release. What's remarkable is the wealth of material available to these artists and the number of gems these sessions produced. Taken together, the collected, reissued Sessions may not have the same impact as Mermaid Avenue did 14 years ago, but they suggest a group of musicians emboldened and excited by their shared undertaking and their proximity to Guthrie himself (in reality, the sessions were rumored to be contentious).

And of course, there are a great many songs about the powers that be, about facing down the hypocrites and fascists, the totalitarians and even the Klan. In this context-- alongside so many songs about family, movies, baseball, sex, drugs, and other everyday concerns-- "All You Fascists" and "The Jolly Bankers" and the Swiftian "Christ for President" resonate more powerfully than they might on their own or even sung from a podium before likeminded citizens. By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.