James McMurtry – Musical verite
“I have gotten better as an electric guitarist, definitely,” he continues. “I started out pretty good with the acoustic, but an electric’s a different animal, with a different touch. I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve come a long way. You have to understand electrons and how tubes compress. And I don’t know that I’ll ever understand that, but I’m getting a feel for it.
“I was a big fan of Neil Young in the Rust Never Sleeps era, which a lot of people didn’t like, because he got out of his Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young mode and had kind of gone punk rock. But I thought it was cool. It had this edge to it, an edge and a drive. But I really got into this power-trio thing because that’s about as big as you can get on two axles. Just the way the economics of the things worked out, we tour in a van and we’ve got room for us and our gear. Any more than that, and you’re going to have to get a trailer, and I hate trailers.”
Once known primarily as a wordsmith, McMurtry now feels confident enough to let the music carry the weight, as the new release’s instrumental “Brief Intermission” attests. (He shares compositional credit with his powerhouse rhythm section of bassist Ronnie Johnson and drummer Daren Hess.)
Whether from aesthetic or economic considerations, as his music has changed, so have his demographics. His audience has gotten younger and larger, more collegiate than the coffeehouse literates he once drew. In his mid-20s, he played to a lot of fans in their 30s and 40s. In his mid-40s, he now gets a lot of partiers who are half his age.
“I lose fans, I gain new ones,” he says. “There was a while where it seemed like the whole audience was male. It was really freaky. And they were all prematurely balding, mid-30s guys. We called those guys ‘Johnnys,’ because they seemed to identify with that kid in ‘Where’s Johnny.’ That’s a song I don’t play anymore, and we don’t see as many of those guys.
“But then about five years ago, some of their grown daughters started showing up, so that got interesting. The whole trick in the music business now is that it’s all splintered into various niches. And if you’re gonna be viable, you have to bundle as many of those niches together as you possibly can. So I’m getting more frat kids and the young nuevo hippie types. I can do the troubadour singer-songwriter thing, I can do the power-rock trio thing, and the rock band really helps because it gives you more options of who you can open for.”
On Just Us Kids, the title track would have been beyond the experience of the younger McMurtry. Its verses chronicle the aging of generations of kids hanging out, from the seemingly endless days of killing time to the dwindling days of wondering where the time went, realizing that it’s “a damn short movie.” “Ruby And Carlos” has the literary depth of a short story, while “Ruins Of The Realm” finds the singer stretching into a higher register the younger McMurtry never explored.
In “Fire Line Road”, he even changes gender, opening the song with, “My name is Alice Walker and they never told me why.” Regarding the narrative personae he adopts, McMurtry says that usually, the germination of the lyrics precedes any understanding of what sort of character might be singing the song: “You get a couple of lines and you say, ‘Who said that?,'” he explains. “Sometimes you can hear a voice in your head and have some semblance of a character before you start writing, but it’s mainly just how the lines fall together, the lines and the groove. And if it goes far enough and keeps me up at night, then I finish the song. Or else it’s a scrap, goes into the scrap pile for years.”
Sometimes the songs take years to write themselves. The title cut of Just Us Kids is a song McMurtry began around the turn of the millennium, with the same chorus but completely different verses. The passage of time crucial to the song wasn’t a part of the initial version; maybe McMurtry himself had to live a little longer and gain some perspective before he could see it through.
“The first verse was about the kids and the next verse was about the adults, the adversaries at the time, but I didn’t portray that very well,” he says. “It just didn’t work, so I threw it back in the scrap pile. And then a couple of years later I understood it.”
At a point where most artists are repeating themselves or going through the motions, few have continued to progress so impressively for so long. In every facet — as a songwriter, as a bandleader, as a guitarist, as a vocalist — McMurtry continues to grow.
“The only people who can keep doing it without growing musically are ones who were huge at one time and can coast on that,” he figures. “They can fill arenas on that memory. I can’t fill a club on that memory; there’s no memory to fill it on.
“So I have to keep growing, keep evolving. Not very many musicians make it big enough to retire, and I didn’t want to think about having to do something else. I was happy to draw any crowd. I still am. I didn’t want to go to trucker school. If you’re lucky, you get to do this for the rest of your life.”
Though Just Us Kids holds together as a cohesive album, McMurtry is shedding no tears of nostalgia as the era of the album disappears. After his experience with downloads, he prefers the immediacy of writing a song, recording it quickly, sharing it while it’s fresh.
“I’m actually looking forward to the passing of the album as an art form, ’cause if you can come in and do one song and really have a good time with it, it shows,” he says. “I was gonna call this one The Last Record Album, but my son says, ‘Yeah, that’ll get you out from under Grandpa’s shadow real quick.'”
ND senior editor Don McLeese believes that James McMurtry long ago outdistanced the shadow of his dad, whose classics include The Last Picture Show.