Coal Fever
Fort Worth’s James Michael Taylor goes and tells it on Slaughter Mountain.
By ANTHONY MARIANI
In
James Michael Taylor’s new album, Slaughter Mountain, the
singer-songwriter persuades us to walk a country mile — and then some —
in his scuffed work boots; through coal mines, rivers, and cotton
fields; alongside ghosts, crippled miners, and living saints; and in
the shadow of Slaughter Mountain itself, a cursed heap you won’t find
on any map but that looms over every fruited plain and amber wave of
grain. The blue collar, as we see, is a kind of noose. The people who
wear it like to think they’ve chosen the humble, simple, virtuous life,
but we all know differently.
The
cover of Slaughter Mountain is a black-and-white photograph of two men
in coveralls and lamp-lit hard hats, seated in a cross-legged position.
They appear to hover slightly above train tracks. Each man has one hand
on a pail, the other on the other man’s shoulder. One of the men,
according to the liner notes, is Taylor’s grandfather, Fred Teeters, a
coal miner in Oram, Tenn., where the photo was taken in 1925. A closer
look reveals that the men aren’t floating but sitting on rail saddles,
tiny, torturous conveyances used to ferry workers in and out of the
mines. Like Teeters and the other man in the picture, passengers held
on to each other for balance.
People
born in hell share the common enemy of despair. Instinctively they know
to stick together. Their peculiar dignity forms the thick of Slaughter
Mountain. Taylor, who has lived and performed in Fort Worth for about
30 years, was raised poor farther West. Not 1925 Oram poor, but poor
enough to be tattooed by family doctrine. “It wasn’t how many quail you
killed, it was all about the bang,” Taylor sings on “California
Christmas Memories,” one of several biographical songs on the album.
“And once the presents opened, and living room’s all clean / The
wrapping’s what it’s all about in that desert Christmas scene.” After
unwrapping a can of pork and beans, the singer exclaims, “Holy cow!”
When “John” opens a gift containing an old bow tie, Dad tries to stifle
a snigger.
Slaughter
Mountain inverts last year’s overly produced Counter Clockwise, a
record credited to Jasper James and the Cowtown Boners. Reeking of piss
and vinegar, and digitized to death, Counter Clockwise leaves no stone
un-thrown. Stupid teenagers, ugly Americans, oppressive authority
figures, politicos, corrupt states of mind — Taylor neutralizes them
all. Slaughter Mountain is markedly less rabid, and better. Taylor
wisely replaces his sermons with campfire reverie and trades in the
plastic beats for the pounding of his own heart. The intimate music
assumes the solidity of space. The listener’s left in a pickle, not
knowing whether to wrestle free or surrender.
The
album’s first two, weird tracks, “Big Fat Horse” and “Hoedown,” sound
friendly and familiar, but, in lockstep with the rest of the album,
they’re extremely toxic. Unlike folk music giants Woodie Guthrie and
Pete Seeger, and descendants Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Taylor
embraces novelty. To him, it’s a great way to make the shit easier to
swallow. “Hoedown” openly harks to Appalachian tradition and Aaron
Copland ... as interpreted by Kenny Rogers in a rhinestone jumpsuit.
However, the “hoedown” here is the placement of the common farming tool
to the row:
Pick one bale, and I make three dollars
Oh, oh, bless my soul
Bolls hurt my fingers, and it makes
me holler
You got a june bug on your collar
I look at all the hungry people
I’m so hungry it makes me swaller
Hang it on the fence, it’ll dry by evenin’
Gotta get to town now
Bathin’ in the creek, and I think
I’m freezin’
“Big
Fat Horse” churns to the methodical rhythm of a single, dissonant note
banged on acoustic guitar. Taylor’s fresh voice, multi-tracked to
approximate a small chorus, circles the song’s steady pulse. As sung in
eerie unison, the melody achieves the incantatory momentum of a tribal
chant. The suggestion of transcendence, though, is undercut by the
sheer, wanton intensity of earthly desire. Along with a big fat horse,
the singer also fancies: a pretty girl, a mountaintop, a buffalo, corn
to feed his kin, and “a big fat frog” to fry in a pan. “Open up some
pork and beans,” Taylor goes on, selling the hunger. “Eat ’em from the
can.”
The album doesn’t
truly start until the third track. More of a minor epiphany than a
proper tune, “Prologue” still establishes the mood, somewhere between
bemusement and regret. Over a gently picked progression, Taylor speaks
in relaxed, even tones, his voice crackling and distant, as if he’s
calling himself from the past on a pay phone. Taylor admits he remains
fascinated by Tennessee, “a strange place that got lost somewhere” over
time, the home of his mother and grandfather, and where family members
fought, divorced, and became alcoholics. Pairing background music with
speech also lends “Prologue” an intoxicating cinematic power. We can
easily envision Taylor’s eyes dancing skittishly around the camera as
he talks, with the faraway, twinkling score unfolding behind him.
Not
that Taylor would entertain the thought, but with a fresh coat of
paint, a few Slaughter Mountain tracks could cross over, into triple-A,
mainstream country, or rock, especially “Coal Fever.” A fiery,
tremulous allegory, the song distills Steve Earle down to just a gritty
timbre and an addict’s defiance. As an acoustic guitar plinks and
plunks, Taylor frantically spits: “I never told my mama I got the
disease / I hid the black scars on my elbows and knees / You try to
grab a boxcar when she’s starting to roll / And you miss the first
step, you get a fist full of coal.” The fun part is the forward tumble
of his mouth trying to catch up to the rhythm.
On
the family-friendly side, “Lisa Makes Appointments” is a bona fide
weeper. Taylor’s paean to a woman with a harrowing past who
nevertheless lets friends cry on her shoulder would have been treacle
in lesser hands. Instead, it’s a study in restraint. He manages to
generate sympathy for Lisa by stressing understatement, by deferring to
the words and music rather than gussying them up and ramming them into
our ears.
As a man with
an almost fetishistic preoccupation with destruction, Taylor indeed
locates room on Slaughter Mountain for gospel. “I’m Still Here” is
based on one of several recent cave-ins in the news. Like Springsteen’s
bluesy “Into the Fire,” a 9/11 lament delivered from the point of view
of a New York City firefighter on his way “up the stairs,” “I’m Still
Here” also conjures a cruel place, where praying — for survival and,
barring that, forgiveness — consumes every breath. The trapped miner’s
dying wish is to be taken home. In both songs, struggling upward is a
metaphor for ascending into heaven.
The
album ends like it began. The title track lays a soft, uncluttered
acoustic pattern over Taylor’s reminiscences. The speaker encounters
the Great Beyond at the foot of towering earth, where he “[comes] to
the end of that old dirt road ... and the trail wanders down to the
water’s edge / And the footprints of my old friends.”
Slaughter
Mountain has its fissures and crags. Maybe to stress the seriousness of
“Hickory Sticks,” a haunting ballad co-written by Lisa Aschmann, Taylor
sings through his nose, a gratuitous homage to (or imitation of?)
Dylan. A shame, ’cause old Bob might wish he’d written this song. Billy
Mac and Don McRay are two young men who work in a factory that produces
the lacquered handles for jugs and whatnot. The boys get high off the
polish. “They don’t smoke tobacco / They don’t need no fix,” a cranky
Taylor whines. “At night deep in their pillows, they dream about
hickory sticks.” Thankfully, when the singer yodels solemnly during the
chorus, he uses his own set of pipes, no one else’s.
Another
misstep, “Frustrated Artist” just flickers, all banjo and jaw harp but
no kick. The song, about Adolf Hitler and his failed painting career,
works better as flash doggerel: “He overcompensated for his lack of
compensation for the pictures that he drew / And he took out his
frustrations on the gypsies of the nation and the occasional Jew.”
And
what should have been a compelling yarn, “Someone’s Little
Brother/Help” is marred by Taylor’s moral superiority. As the singer
and other folks loiter by a river, a drowning boy cries out. The only
person to respond is Taylor, who at song’s end looks down on everyone
for “just standing there and talkin’ / On the shore / Just drinkin’
beer and gawkin’ / Smokin’ cigarettes and laughing / All the fun that
they were havin’ / He said, ‘Help.’” The hero’s tale of adventure isn’t
rendered any less gauche by his ticking off all he had to lose: “I got
sunflowers and tomatoes / Castor beans and summer squash / I got roses
piled with coffee grounds / But this summer is a wash.” Sorry to
inconvenience you, James.
A
last quibble: Taylor sometimes invites preciousness. By brusquely
rubbing soot on his rosy cheeks, the songwriter unknowingly commits one
of folksong’s cardinal sins: glorifying poverty and despair. In his
defense, it is an occupational hazard in an art form about, well,
occupational hazards. Some artists choose the right word over the
wrong, prettier one. Others don’t. On Slaughter Mountain, James Michael
Taylor gives in to the cute turn of phrase here and there. But when he
does, it still verges on tastefulness. It’s not anything that his
monumental opus can’t weather.
