Billy Bragg & Wilco
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (Elektra)
by Marc Hirsh
Billy Bragg & Wilco
Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (Elektra)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
One of the great strengths of Mermaid Avenue Vol. II, and something that I felt its predecessor lacked, is its willingness to let Billy Bragg be Billy Bragg and Wilco be Wilco (although its prevention of Natalie Merchant from being Natalie Merchant is still much appreciated). The original issue, possibly reeling from the musicological import of finally setting orphaned Woody Guthrie lyrics to music, felt a little distant and overly reverential. While a few of the songs were deeply affecting (most notably the slower, quieter ones like "Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key" and "Ingrid Bergman"), the majority seemed to wander down a path of studied restraint. It was as if the musicians were so determined to do up Guthrie right that they abandoned their own strengths, which were almost certainly why the project had been brought to them in the first place.
No longer. Where that one found Bragg and Wilco working around Guthrie, Vol. II sees them working with him, using him as a collaborator rather than an icon (which I'm guessing Guthrie would have preferred). Instead of asking What Would Woody Do?, Bragg and Wilco open up the arrangements wide, enjoying a more relaxed atmosphere and allowing textures that might not have even been imaginable in Guthrie's time. "Secret of the Sea" jangles and skims like latter-day Jayhawks, "Feed of Man" sounds as though it could be an outtake from Kiko and the gorgeous "Remember the Mountain Bed" intersects Blood On The Tracks with the White Album (with a touch of The River thrown in for good measure) in its portrait of the reverberation of one perfect moment over the span of years. Elsewhere, "Blood of the Lamb" simultaneously evokes both carnival and revival atmospheres, while "My Flying Saucer" is like Johnny Marr at his simplest and most playful.
That playfulness informs most of the album, and a bunch of nonsense songs come across with more conviction than Vol. I's "Hoodoo Voodoo," although maybe that's just because the nonsense of "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again," "Aginst Th' Law" and "I Was Born" is merely limited from line to line; taken as a whole, each captures a moment or defines a political stance or paints a picture, even if only in vague and fractured terms. "I Was Born," in particular, is surprisingly effective; a simple folk melody backed only by Bragg's acoustic guitar, it makes Merchant sound like a precocious (and possibly slow) 10-year old.
It's the cuts with non-nonsense lyrics that are the most substantial, of course. The cranky, Waitsish "Meanest Man" is a funny and perfect little song that seems to make the point that although civilizing forces such as love, family and friends may be all that prevents us from being sucked into a chasm of brutality and chaos, love, family and friends are enough. The narrator of "Hot Rod Hotel" opts for itinerant joblessness as conveying more dignity than cleaning up after an unspeakable orgy on his boss's orders, while "All You Fascists," representing something like the flip side, is easily the hardest-rocking song about unionization ever recorded. It's "Stetson Kennedy" that offers up the couplet that echoes through the decades, though. "I ain't the world's best writer nor the world's best speller/But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller," says both the dead man and the troubadour he inspired half a century later. Bragg's mouth may be forming the words, but it's Guthrie's voice coming through loud and clear. I honestly don't think you could ask for a better definition of collaboration than that.