James McMurtry has a great deal to talk about. The Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter has a long history of being critical, cynical, and extraordinarily honest about whatever the current political situation might be in these United States. And he hasn’t changed his mind.
When I spoke with him by phone on Tuesday, he was sitting in Macon, Georgia, ready to head north to Athens.
A traveling musician, he wanders all over the U.S., but all points lead, eventually, back to Austin, or thereabouts, which has been his home for several decades. He’s a constant at the Continental Club there, appearing on-stage most Tuesday nights all by his lonesome self with an acoustic set, and then again on Wednesday with his band.
That’s where I saw him first, accidentally, a long time ago. I only just now realized that fact. It was 1999, I think, and probably at the Continental. I was on a weeks-long motorcycle tour, and the details tend to get blurry.
The last time I saw McMurtry was at what used to be Benny’s Boom-Boom Room, right here in downtown Hattiesburg. I told him so, and he said he has no recollection of being here. But let’s be fair: A musician who does between 150 and 200 shows a year, not including those on his own turf, isn’t going to remember every stop along the way. Again, the details tend to blur.
Back to the present, or the soon-to-be. McMurtry has an album coming out soon, and he’s not exactly forthcoming about it.
I do not understand the recording business. But McMurtry says the soon-to-be album isn’t ready.
“It’s still in the works, definitely,” he said. “We have to add some background vocals, and probably some B-3. The Hammond organ, B-3. Then I have to get some harmony vocalists come in, and do a session with them, to support my vocals in a couple of places.”
No, he won’t divulge the title of the album. And no, he doesn’t want to talk about the subject matter.
“There is a title, but I’m not letting it out right now,” he said.
Asked about a release date, McMurtry laughed. “Chuckled” might be a better word.
“There is never such a thing as a release date, until it’s released,” he said. “My second album was finished in 1990 and was released on Columbia in 1992. A ‘firm release date’ is kind of like a Bigfoot sighting – very rare, and very hard to prove.”
That said, he added, “I expect it will be out this year sometime, but I don’t know.”
It’s extraordinarily hard to pin this man down. But I, for one, wouldn’t want to.
For starters, his producer is in the middle of an Edgar Winter project. I didn’t even know Winter (one-half of the albino Winter brothers, with the other half being Johnny) was still here on Earth.
“Oh, Edgar’s still around, for sure. I hear his voice on the speaker-phone on a regular basis,” McMurtry said.
Beyond that, the album simply isn’t done. When it’s complete, I think we’ll know.
Most of McMurtry’s albums are a combination of social and political commentary, with some just-for-fun songs thrown in, for good measure.
The man has that in his blood. His father is Larry McMurtry, the renowned author of Lonesome Dove and the sequels. James showed up in the TV mini-series based on that book, in a bit-character role, for just a few seconds. That was a long time ago. The elder McMurtry also had a flair for the comedic, mixed with “oh-my-god, who’s gonna die this chapter?” seriousness.
McMurtry still has family in East Tennessee, my part of the country, he told me, but they’re mostly second cousins, and he hasn’t seen them in a while. Some of them, he’s never met. But the family stretches from Tennessee to Texas, and all areas in-between. It’s the American family, writ large.
So, the new album, I asked: Is it thematic, political, or a mixture of what you’ve done before, the country-blues flat-land prairie Texas thing with a little politics thrown in there?
“There’s a little politics thrown in, but it’s mostly a rock record, I think,” McMurtry said.
Time will tell. Either way, his music will be what it is. Sometimes sparse, with an almost audible nothingness between notes. It’s the pauses that matter.
(When McMurtry speaks or plays, even the pauses are deliberate.)
On the current tour, he said, he is usually accompanied by Daren Hess on drums, a dude named Cornbread on bass, and “Tim Holt on a couple of instruments that he plays, including accordion, lead guitar at some points, and backing guitar on others.”
Lead guitar, according to McMurtry, is on-again, off-again.
“I trade leads with Tim,” he said. “We usually start off [a show] as a trio, for a few songs, then Tim comes up and plays guitar, then he goes to accordion.”
Almost all of the music you’re likely to hear at a James McMurtry show will be his own songs, but there are some exceptions, some cover songs. Those are rare.
“I used to do some covers,” he said. “For a while there, I put one cover song on every record. I used to cover Kinky Friedman’s ‘Wild Man From Borneo’, and for a while there I did Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Rex’s Blues’, and we did a pretty good take on that one.”
Yes, they did. It’s on the “Live in Aught-Three” album, and it’s wonderful. The whole album happens to be one of my favorites, period. That particular song was done so well that I’d forgotten it was one of Townes’s, and that takes some serious forgetting.
Regarding “Live in Aught-Three”. – “Most of that one was recorded in Salt Lake City, in a building that has since fallen through,” McMurtry said. “It’s a real shame.”
That said, “the best Mexican food in the world is at a place in Salt Lake called the Red Iguana. This has been a great week. We got to start off by eating at the Red Iguana, then we got to go to Wintzell’s Oyster House in Mobile, the original one on Dauphin Street. A friend of mine took us to Wintzell’s in about ’72, I guess, and I thought it was about the best food I’d ever had.”
He apparently hasn’t changed his mind, because he’s still rhapsodizing about Wintzell’s. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but this dude loves food.
“I was just on the Emerald Coast [the Florida Panhandle] for a day or two, and it’s scary, in this day and time, to go somewhere, to a convenience store, and not see Spanish signage,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. How can there not be any Mexican food down here? Then, heading toward Macon, we got off I-10, and I thought, man, I’m back in the world.”
We talked a little while about the politics of food, of language, of culture. I don’t know if he was serious or not when he said, regarding Mexican food: “I don’t think it’s a Southwestern thing anymore. This is America. Speak Spanish.”
With James McMurtry, it’s extremely difficult to know what’s sarcasm, what’s sardonic, what’s deadpan, and what’s really damn serious.
Me? I have no problem with that.
“I read recently that you said one reason for being in favor of open borders is that it has opened America’s food horizons,” I said.
“Yeah, definitely,” he replied. “But mostly, I think borders are a pain in the ass. Especially if you have to cross them for work. And the Canadian border is the worst I’ve ever had to deal with. That’s the only time I’ve ever been thrown in a holding tank with one-way mirrors.”
I wasn’t expecting that bit of information.
“That was 8 or 10 years ago,” McMurtry said. “We didn’t count our cash before coming back in. We didn’t make sure we didn’t have more than $10,000, which they can confiscate. And they wanted that money. That was coming out of Canada. Going into Canada was no problem. Coming back in can be a real drag, especially at those crossings where they have plenty of time to mess with you. They have nothing else to do, at some of those crossings, and they just can’t wait to catch you.”
There’s a great deal of back-story here, so let’s cut to the chase.
“It wasn’t a ‘Welcome back to the country you live in’. Banks of cameras. ‘What are you bringing in from Canada?’ And we said, we didn’t buy anything there. And they repeated, ‘what are you bringing in from Canada?’
“I’ve never had that happen in a foreign country. Only in the States.”
What about now?
“We don’t need a damn border,” McMurtry said, for starters. “And they certainly don’t need a wall.”
Repeat that, for those who weren’t listening.
“For one thing walls don’t work,” he said. “Even if it was a good idea, it wouldn’t work. A couple of years ago we were in England. We got on a train, and a little bit later we were in France. Miles and miles of solid rock under the English Channel, a couple of miles under the sea-bed. It took them one year with modern technology to get there. How long do you think it will take people to get under the Rio Grande?”
On to lighter subjects: What are you listening to right now?
“Nothing. We don’t listen to anything on the van” he said. “If anybody wants to listen to something, they just put it on headphones. The road is good for songwriting. The words can move around. Like hunting. It’s better in the fog. You can hear better, and the deer move better in the fog.
“Words feel safer when they can move around.”
I think that means words, or songs, shouldn’t be hunted or trapped before they’re ready.
One thing I’ve heard often about McMurtry is that his politically charged songs – and there are quite a few – is that they’re satirical. I questioned him about that, doubting that the songs are satire at all. Most of the songs are, to my ear, quite literal.
“Well, satire is as serious as it gets,” he said. “That’s how you do it. You can get around anything with satire, under the Constitution, without libel suits.”
McMurtry says of his songs, some of which sound intensely personal: “They’re all fictional, and I write from the point-of-view of fictional characters. I start from there. I hear a couple of lines of melody, and think, who said that? I kind of envision the character: Who might have said that? And then I can work backwards and get the story.”
Because my wife asked me to, I had to ask McMurtry about other musicians, especially country musicians, who have bucked the system with their questioning of authority.
For example, specifically, the Dixie Chicks, when they questioned George W. Bush: “Where do you stand on that issue?”
He had nothing to say about their music, but seemed happy to hear the question.
“I got a kick out of that, because they were laughing all the way to the bank,” McMurtry said. “That was back when everything was hard product, and somebody had to buy all those Dixie Chicks CDs the semi-trucks ran over. It’s just totally ridiculous, the idea that you should leave politics out of music.
“You know, because that takes out Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and Toby Keith. You have to be careful what you wish for. You never know. You just never know.”
Daniel Cloud is a Hattiesburg writer, photographer, and motorcycle enthusiast.
