Morells – Many happy returns
With the momentum from that recording project, Whitney and Thompson decided to call on Gremp and Terry — working out the logistics between the Morells/Daredevils/Dave Alvin schedules can be torturous, but they managed — and the Morells were once again in business.
Talking privately with Whitney after the others have gone home, you get the sense this is a band that is back together again for precisely the right reasons –music and friendship.
“You know, in my opinion, Donnie Thompson — well, I know it for a fact — he’s one of the top five guitarists on planet Earth,” Whitney says. “He doesn’t make it a habit to show you what he can do every time he does something. I think what I like most about him as a musician and as a friend — he’s my best friend as well — is that he can do so much. But he only does what’s necessary to make a song happen.
“Same with Joe and Wrongo. You get these guys involved in a groove or a feel, they just go right to the place it needs to go to. I bet I notice it more than most people notice it, because I work with so many bands. When you see somebody who has what it takes, you recognize it.”
We adjourn for the evening to go watch the news, to catch the latest on the election struggle, which that morning had erupted into near violence as a crowd of angry white men in shirts and ties managed to bully the Miami-Dade canvassing board into stopping their hand recount of votes for president. Whitney, whose hobby is politics — he’s perhaps rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest C-SPAN junkie — is visibly riled by the topic.
“I’ll tell you something, man, this wacky bunch — these civil disobedient CPAs — this pales when you compare it to anything of note. It really does.”
Suddenly the wiseguy is gone, and what Whitney says from there on out is simply wise. “Josea Williams, the civil rights activist, who stood at the side of Martin Luther King when he was assassinated, was buried in Atlanta yesterday. He was in Montgomery, he was in Selma, he was at the front of the civil rights movement. And you know, this thought came to me this morning, when I saw that rabble in there, yelling and screaming ‘cheater’ and ‘ballot thief.’ I thought of pictures I have in my memory, of the people — a woman being carried out, arms and legs, from the lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Montgomery, Alabama, because she dared to sit at the counter where white people only sat. And see the young college students that dared to ride a bus and were stopped in South Carolina and were pulled off the bus and had their head banged on the steps of the bus. When I think of that, and then I think of that rabble, that bunch of fucking CPAs all upset because their guy’s not gonna be elected prom king — my first thought is this: Give me a goddamn break.”
Of course, don’t look for that kind of deep thought to ever wind its way into a Morells song. Whitney knows better than to try and turn a fun and funny rock ‘n’ roll show into edutainment. “I used to think you could do that,” he says. “But now I’m of the school that if you’ve got something really important to say, buy some time on a cable access channel. Get a real tight close-up on your face, speak very clearly, and don’t pay someone to play drums while you’re talking, you know? This is entertainment. If you can slip something in that’s thought-provoking, fine, but the minute you start thinking about all that, you’re off on another tangent. In the music business today, there’s plenty of seriousness. There’s not very much entertainment. We’re here to do what we can about that.”
Daniel Durchholz is a charter member of the Morell Majority.