Tony Gilkyson – Goodbye Guitar
Tony Gilkyson’s solo work and side projects have always led in directions away from X, the scene-setting Los Angeles punk band with which he is so closely identified. Goodbye Guitar sends the needle darting all over the musical compass, with Gilkyson traveling effortlessly across the borders of country-rock, honky-tonk, folk and blues.
From the rocking opener “Mojave High” through a macabre gypsy cafe version of his father’s “Man About Town”, a jumping honky-tonk shuffle interpretation of Woody Guthrie’s “Old Cracked Looking Glass”, and a handful of tracks in the Gram Parsons country-rock vein, Gilkyson delivers with total California-cool aplomb, a gentle, leathery voice, and the precise licks of a master session player.
The album is essentially a journeyman’s vision. With Charlie McGovern, Randy Weeks, Kip Boardman, Van Dyke Parks, and Don Heffington involved, there is an endearing dry humor about the proceedings, best exemplified by a loving cover of C. Carson Parks’ sad-eyed trucker’s lament “Donut And A Dream” and the title track, which checklists all the reasons a picker can have for doubting the wisdom of ever having learned that first chord.
Flipping that idea upside down, however, Gilkyson’s autobiographical “Gypsies In My Backyard” is a loose history of folks who came to his folk-singer father’s home (“Rose and Fred, Lefty and Merle”) to pick and sing in the backyard, by osmosis influencing Gilkyson (and probably sister Eliza) to take the musician’s hard road. No doubt his father would be quite proud of this gypsy’s latest effort.