Jon Dee Graham – The hard balance of real life renders Jon Dee Graham’s body of work all the more impressive
“We had a visit right before Christmas where the doctor points, there’s this little white thread coming up through the middle of the femur, starting to branch out at the top. New bone. It’s not rare, but it’s uncommon at this stage of his disease to be regrowing new bone. Of course the doctor backpedaled: ‘Now this may die, too, it doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods.’
“But, you know what? I’ll take it. I’ll take it. And it’s just a sense of something greater than ourselves at work.”
Full, which was released April 18 on Freedom, comes armed with one of the great lines of mature love: “I prefer that we remain.” Graham’s new album contains nothing like the uplifting joy of his best-known song, “Big Sweet Life” (from Summerland). It lacks the imprimatur of big-name session collaboration that drummer Jim Keltner gave Hooray For The Moon. Rising star Charlie Sexton didn’t produce, as he did on The Great Battle.
No. This just has Jon Dee Graham and his trusty band: bassist Andrew DuPlantis, drummer John Chipman, and multi-instrumentalist Mark Hardwick, with odd bits of help from his other mates in the Resentments. In some ways, Full has the same desperation of self-discovery that underpins Graham’s debut, Escape From Monster Island, the suite of songs he wrote after his first wife left, taking their son with her. At a minimum, it is his most private public work.
“These were intended to be demos at the least and an adventure at the most,” Graham e-mailed (we talked about God and life that morning in his backyard and I forgot why I was supposed to be there). “My band has rehearsed only twice in six years — songs are presented and worked up onstage Wednesday nights — so they were fit and savvy about playing songs of mine they had never heard.”
Producer Mike Stewart (who had been in charge of that Terry Garland album, and had known Graham a long time even in 1992) was in town from Amsterdam. “[He] suggested we informally throw down some songs…two days later when the chips had settled we had Full,” Graham wrote, though the CD booklet admits to a third day of work. “He has been some part or another of my career for so long that he was able to ‘facilitate’ and ‘handle’ me through the insane process of recording a two-day record. I know sonically it is full of corners and splinters and ragged ends, but it is the closest to what I hear from me — maybe ever.”
It sounds like four in the morning.
Almost nothing good can happen at four in the morning. Most places you can’t buy more booze; the children might wake up crying, or your spouse. There’s bound to be explaining to do, later. There is a terrible mirror, and one is surrounded by spectacular silence.
It is an unholy hour frequented by musicians and seekers, by those desperately lost and alone.
I do not miss it.
No, actually, I do. Just a little bit, now and again.
But I no longer seek it.
Except in music, and there my appetite remains unabated.
Full is an aching, seeking record, filled with apologies and regret and hope, but not so much hope. The music has been scaled back, simplified, until there is no mistaking the words, and their import. The opening “Jubilee” riffs off “Swing And Turn Jubilee” (recorded by Carolyn Hester and by Doc Watson and Jean Ritchie in the early 1960s), only Graham sings it “spin and turn jubilee” and supplies his own weary verses, converting a song of hope to a meditation on the waning years: “Time should be ashamed/Time should pack its shabby bag of tricks/And go away,” he sings.
The night before we spoke, he introduced “Swept Away” from the Whisky Bar stage with a question to the crowd. “Show of hands,” he said. “How many of you have planned your own disappearance?” Very few hands moved. “You’re all lying,” he growled happily, and let his guitar silence nervous laughter.
The song opens with a seductive guitar phrase, placid and caressing, and Jon Dee sings all too calmly, musing: “Well if you find my car/At a low water crossing/With the doors wide open/And the keys still inside/Just say so long, don’t say goodbye/I was swept away…”
It is not, entirely, about a man’s physical disappearance, though that, too, proves to be a matter to which Graham has given careful thought.
“Clearly, I’ve got a pretty nice life,” he says. “I’ve got a beautiful wife, a gorgeous son, a nice house. I do well at my work. But there’s always that…mmmm, you know? There’s always that. And when things get particularly hard, in the business, or you’re having a bad day…drive by that low water crossing and think, you know, I just might get away with it.
“You divest yourself of your complete personality,” he counsels, Willie now safely inside watching TV with his puppy. “That means you drop everything. You walk away with what you’re wearing on your body and then you go straight to the most rural, backwards, the most primitive-ass place you can find. And start over again. Because if you drop your phone, drop your wallet, take cash only, when you get there…that’s why that song is [set in] Mexico. First of all, it’s because that’s my spiritual home. But there’s nothing more irresistible in a small town than a stranger.”