I’ve stopped idealizing world travel. Sure, I’d love to believe that some day I’ll set foot on every continent. I’ve even overcome an odd, inherited prejudice against the Deep South, and started fantasizing about a road trip through the cornbread belt. Still, more and more, lately, I realize the place for me is my own couch, nodding off with the Twins at home-run volume and a can of cheap local brew tipping into my lap. The sunsets are pretty, the folks are agreeable, the politics are relatively progressive. It’s not much, but it’s home.
I think we Midwesterners are predisposed to this inner struggle—a desire to travel to more glamorous places, but a suspicion that where we really belong is at home, right here among the cornfields and pig farms. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we have moved, years ago, like everyone else, to L.A. or New York? We may lust after the big city and the open road, but we have instincts for home. There is no shame in this. In fact, there may even be some art in it.
Two wonderful new disc sets illustrate this; they feature new albums by two of our very best singer-songwriters, along with a documentary film about each. Greg Brown’s If I Had Known: Essential Recordings 1980-1996 comes with a DVD of the 1993 documentary Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown. Paul Westerberg’s Come and Feel Me Tremble is both a new album and a separately sold DVD documentary of his most recent tour and studio sessions.
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Greg Brown, but time is beginning to confess it. If there’s an artist who needs no other explanation than his own recordings, it’s the Iowan musician. And yet this is precisely the kind of person you want to see at the center of a documentary. Brown would surely chafe to hear it, but he represents a modern romantic ideal—the poet philosopher as farmer and folkie.
Hacklebarney Tunes confirms most of what you know and believe about the artist. Greg Brown has a home, or at least a spiritual home base, and it’s everything you’d expect: a seedy little brush farm in the rolling driftless of Iowa, nestled next to a trout stream and a blackberry patch. His actual life is considerably more complicated than this suggests, of course; he collects art, he travels and tours incessantly, he hangs with folks like Garrison Keillor, he’s in Europe as often as Iowa, and he runs a record label, if not a new-folk revolution. Whether he likes it or not, though, his music and his person evince a simple American ideal: The love of a humble home in the heartland, and all that implies—baking bread, walking beans, singing along.
Brown may never be a rock star like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison—or even Paul Westerberg, for that matter. Even so, you can feel a slow process of grassroots lionization going on, almost in spite of him. It began, especially, with Going Driftless, last year’s album that was touted as “an artists’ tribute to the songs of Greg Brown.” That disc featured a dozen women from the A-list of folk and roots playing his greatest hits; Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Iris DeMent, and so on. (Yes, all women. Proceeds were donated to the Breast Cancer Fund.) To my mind, that CD left little doubt that a song like “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home” will outlive its author as folk standards. And the documentary, though made a decade ago, has grown into its clothes as a biopic of Someone Who Really Matters.
Judged by his own standards, though, I’d guess the albums Brown himself loves best are Dream Café and Poet Game—his most personal, least folkie records from the latter period. These are urbane albums that get inside the head of a modern man who has played through the clichés of folk music long enough to get itchy for new turf. Yet he’s too smart to abandon his roots. Brown knows that the folk idiom is full of sleeping dogs, rusty trucks, and swimming holes because these homey icons point beyond themselves to transcendental things.
Still, I am convinced that the best recording of a Greg Brown song isn’t by Greg Brown. It’s by his three daughters, singing “Ella Mae” on Going Driftless. What a haunting, spare, and gorgeous tribute to their father’s grandmother. Dad’s only recorded version, included here on If I Had Known, and originally appearing on the 1983 album One Night, is oddly perfunctory. But in the mouths of his daughters, it is a thing of intense beauty that makes my throat catch every time I hear it. “Ella Mae” captures the essence of what makes Brown so compelling—a folkie modest and timeless. He’s a man whose music grounds generations in their common humanity. For reasons that I’m sure are connected to deep spiritual things, the daughters are the best evidence of what the father is.
Paul Westerberg doesn’t have a home, artistically speaking. He’s not even comfortable in his own skin. Which is, in its own way, fitting for his area of specialization. Midtempo garage rock never had a better agoraphobic champion, and fans of the older, trashier Replacements catalog have been gratified to learn that, even though you can’t go home again, you can dial up something new on your CD player that sounds pretty damn familiar.
Most American punk rock was disingenuous, and it remains so. To the extent that punk was an urban form of folk music, produced by and for regular people who happened to live in flophouses instead of farmhouses, its American version has come mostly from artless, well-off suburban kids whose idea of alienation was no more complicated than it ever was for the leisure class: Dad worked too much, Mom was imperious, and there were never enough ski trips to Colorado. In other words, the overwhelming injustice of life in these privileged precincts could only be that it’s so frickin’ boring.
Luckily, we bumpkins in flyover country were chronically, genetically earnest when we got punk. The Suburbs were prep-school new-wavers who never pretended to be anything else, and they rocked the harder for it. The ’Mats, though, were as close to the genuine homegrown article as we’d ever have—city kids, working class if you like, smart enough to know they weren’t that smart, and they didn’t mind. Tommy Stinson will still tell anyone who’ll listen: They honestly were never aiming any higher than the next show, never more forward-looking than last week’s City Pages. In a sense, they accidentally embodied the bleeding edge of what became a whole argot and morality of “the genuine”—jeans and flannel shirts, Converse high-tops, bed-heads, too drunk to play, I hate music, got too many notes. Some people say that’s what killed Kurt Cobain. But punk-rock credibility doesn’t kill people. Guns kill people.
Like Westerberg’s previous record, Tremble is willfully ragged, presumably recorded live off the studio floor. For the better part of this album, he’s turned the amps up and the vocals down. It’s “Answering Machine” guitars with “Hootenanny” vocals; he’s mixed himself, self-effacingly, almost off the record—and where you can hear him, he sounds astonishingly unconfident and vulnerable, for all his accolades as a “critics’ darling.” There is plenty of succor, though: Other tunes are cut from the melancholy fabric of “Here Comes a Regular” (“Meet Me Down the Alley”) and the twisted, Brill Building chintz of “Swinging Party” (“Knockin’ Em Back”).
Over the years, Westerberg has sounded as if he believes what’s written about him. This may be why he prudently stopped talking to people. And it may have given him the space and the perspective to give it up a little bit with this new DVD. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s said to be a real revelation, a doorway into the headspace he’s been occupying for the last five or six years, which about ten thousand rabid fans are dying to see. If the last thing he read was that he didn’t rock hard enough, and that he worried too much about getting his hall-of-fame reservations
right next to Alex Chilton’s, and that he should just be himself, then we hope he’s still not reading. If he is reading, though, we hope he skipped to the end: You used to live at home, Paul, and now you stay at the house. We wouldn’t have it any other way.