My back-roads affair with the Frizzell brothers
The truth of my headline is this: Neither my wife, nor my daughter, can stand the sound of twang. Not a bit, except Maggie can maybe tolerate Johnny Cash every once in a while and Susan can listen to the Dixie Chicks when not provoked. And since I no longer make my living writing about music, opportunities to listen methodically to what I wish to hear are typically limited to those twenty-minute runs I make each day out to the garden, and back.
But I do still get a bit of mail, and sometimes I make time even to open it. A week or so back I stumbled on a new Varese Serabande compilation, The Very Best of David Frizzell & Shelly West. The first track, inevitably, is “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” and at that moment I felt the need to hear that song, so into the little red truck it went. I couldn’t place the year of the song (it went #1 on the country charts in 1981, as it turned out), nor did I know until reading Laurence Zwisohn’s liners that Shelly (daughter of Dot) was married to Allen Frizzell (the youngest, and David was 13 years behind Lefty), much less remember that it was David who sang “I’m Gonna Hire a Wino to Decorate Our House” and Shelly who sang “Jose Cuervo,” which in my mind still segues into a Courtney & Western song from the first Diesel Only compilation, but I digress.
The Frizzell/West producer was a chap named Snuff Garrett, who had also produced Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee (and Julie London!) and Cher’s “Gypsies Tramps & Thieves,” which production in a lower case way most of the succeeding 15 songs echo. Which is to say that these two fine voices are shrouded in a very dated plastic keyboard sound, and swaddled in what sound to be fake strings even if there were real people playing them. One is also struck by how very, very carefully “You’re the Reason” is sung, on both sides of the mike (mice crawl around the floor, hence my abbreviation phobia). And by how strikingly muscular both voices are, by how very much I’d love to hear these songs without the garbage accompanying them. Midway through “Please Surrender,” to pick an egregious example, the snare drum takes a rat-a-tat martial turn, which might have seemed high concept at the time, but smacks of a singular absence of creativity.
I can imagine few weights as crippling as knowing one’s brother was Lefty Frizzell, a hall of famer, or that one’s mother was Dottie West, another hall of famer, and wishing to compete in the same arena at which they had so spectacularly succeeded.
So I dug up a Raven compilation of Lefty’s hits, not remembering that it was he who’d written Hank’s “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time,” nor that his was the first cut on “The Long Black Veil,” nor, even, that his last big hit was “Saginaw, Michigan,” which is now stuck on replay in my imagination, for which nobody else in my family has a shred of sympathy. I haven’t gotten round to hunting for Dottie West, as it’s in a different cabinet and I ended up stuck on Lefty, anyhow.
Not the first one to be stuck there. I associate Lefty with the honky-tonkers, with Hank and Ernest Tubb and maybe even Johnny Paycheck, except that it is David who ends up sounding more like Paycheck because Lefty was really a crooner, no matter what his songs were about nor how many jukeboxes played them. Once he found his voice, Lefty had a magnificently gentle way of singing, generally surrounded by a very small and understated combo, and carefully miked. At moments one hears where Merle Haggard came from, and Randy Travis, and many others.
By contrast, David is a full-throated singer (as is Shelly West). But the odd thing is how easily Lefty sings, how casually he finds his phrasing, contrasted against the great care with which these Frizzell/West duets are pieced together. And I’ve no idea how much tape editing was done, nor what the circumstances in the studio were…David had kicked around a good bit before this first duet hit, in which the labels were so uninterested that it was initially released on Clint Eastwood’s imprint, through Warner Bros. How anybody listening could have missed that this was a hit, I dunno. But, on the other hand, how anybody could have though the balance of these tracks could be hits (and some were, if of more modest stature), well, I dunno that, either.
The upshot being that when I put these two discs away in a moment, I’ll trouble to see if I have anything of David Frizzell singing on his own, with maybe a different producer, and maybe no keyboards tossed in to tart up the proceedings.
And then I shall have to find something else to play in the truck. Maybe, finally, I’ll listen to that new Wilco album. Nah. Probably not. Ah. Guy Clark’s new one, Someday the Song Writes You. That’s probably worth the trouble, eh? Although I note with some sadness (or prejudice) that they’re all co-writes, save Townes’ “If I Needed You.” And the opening track tells me right off that Mr. Clark is no longer a young man. Well, let’s see, then, what he does with that, because he surely knows it better than do I.