Hammond and Waits Get Behind the Mule

Wicked Grin review, 2001

I took a hiatus from writing about music in 1994 when I joined the food staff at Newsday/New York Newsday. My first assignment, and it was my elevator pitch to the food editor, was interviewing the Great Chefs of New York (and a separate set of interviews of Long Island chefs for a divided editions) about what they'd cook at home for a Super Bowl party. It was venison chili instead of nachos, for sure.

I kept writing about food for the New York Daily News ("Thoughts on Food") column, and the Newark Star-Ledger ("In Season").

I was drawn back into music around 1999 when I saw a magazine on my local newsstand edited in Boulder with my old Colorado buddy Leland Rucker on the masthead: Blues Access. Leland gave me the oldies reissues column, with a title like "New Again/Blue Again" or something. What a great gig: reissues of decades of blues and R&B on CD for the first time, many in box sets. I was hooked again writing about music.

While I was doing food columns in NJ and NYC newspapers, I started doing album reviews for music editor Matt Ashare at the Boston Phoenix (and its sister paper in Providence, RI). This review of John Hammond's album of Tom Waits' songs, "Wicked Grin," ran in the March 30, 2001 issue. I hadn't played it in years, but I've been listening to it the last few days, and it's even better than I remembered it. Inside the review (below) I'm adding some current notes in italics on some songs I like more now than I did then. Go get it!

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John Hammond recording an album of Tom Waits songs (produced by Waits) would be an ingenious, if suspicious stroke of cross-marketing, if either of them had a market. But Hammond's Wicked Grin (Virgin) isn't exactly Justin Timberlake teaming up with OutKast--about as sure a shot as gold chains at a hip-hop awards show. So you can take it on good faith that this collaboration is pretty much what the players say it is: A connection between longtime mutual admirers whose paths first crossed back in the 1970s when they appeared as a double-bill at a club in Arizona. Hammond headlined.

Hammond, son of the late legendary A&R man and talent scout John Hammond, has pleased his muse and paid his bills by paying his dues for almost 40 years, combining flexibility and authenticity in creating a niche for himself as the Prince of the Delta Blues.

Waits, of course, rode the boxcars of his imagination from the seedy L.A. motel where he, Rickie Lee Jones, Chuck E. Weiss, and other fellow travelers created a new SoCal bohemian club, adding an artful, emphatic rock-biz layer to the boozy bellicosity of their poet patron saint, Charles Bukowski.

Hammond's relentless touring and recording and single-minded devotion to the blues have afforded him a stature denied to many white blues guys who drew the reverse race card. But he's never been trendy, any more than Carson Daly could identify a John the Conqueror root.

Waits, by contrast, has achieved a steady upward mobility, attaining a Sundance Kid stature in the indie film world thanks to his roles in the films of Jim Jarmusch, and bringing some hipster cachet to the contemporary art-music scene by collaborating with the likes of composer Robert Wilson. The blues have always been the shivs in Waits' musical arsenal, though. Since around 1980 his already desperately scorched vocal instrument has sounded more like an audio vérité recording of ambient sounds from an emphysema ward, than a slanted, enchanted Howlin' Wolf homage.

So on Wicked Grin, it's a win-win that these Waits songs emanate from Hammond's more supple, subtle and well-tuned vox box. And after so many roads of reverence to Muddy, Skip, Elmore, Blind Willie and company, it is enthralling to hear Hammond sing, play, and think outside of his own traditional blues box.

It's said that Hammond and Waits got serious about this project when the bluesman joined the boho on stage a few years ago for a version of "Get Behind the Mule" on Waits' Mule Variations tour. Which makes sense, since "Get Behind the Mule," as heard here, is an evocative slog through familiar Delta mud.

Get Behind the Mule, Bremen, Germany, 2002

"Jockey Full of Bourbon" is another standout: Hammond captures the drunken eloquence Waits buried in his own version, a homesick-sounding subterranean pub crawl on 1985's Rain Dogs. Hammond adds a veneer of tenderness, and the organ and other keyboards of Augie Meyers (of the Sir Douglas Quintet and the Texas Tornados, and a brilliant compadre for Hammond) adds both a soothing texture and a brightening melody. Meyers' distinctive San Antonio keyboard  swing elevates every song on which he appears, which may be all of them. Waits plays guitar and a little piano; Larry Taylor, bass; Stephen Hodges, drums; and Charlie Musselwhite, harmonica.

There's much more to appreciate from this throbbing symbiosis. "16 Shells from a 30.06" (pronounced "30 ought six") features some of Waits's most typical yet inspired beat blues hallucinations. Waits' version from his 1983 Swordfishtrombones sounds like Maurice Sendak's "Max" (from Where the Wild Things Are): He roars his piteous roars, and howls his piteous howls. It's full of a child's rage. Hammond kicks it home with the kind of cheer and menace he must have learned channeling Muddy Waters.

The Waits/Hammond dynamics aren't always felicitious. Waits and his wife and longtior the album, "Fannin Street" whose sentimentality doesn't hit here. I know what they're driving at, but the soulful sadness sounds less like Hank Williams than Andy Williams. (I take that back; it sounds more like Ferlin Husky. And "Fannin Street" was named after a Lead Belly song, set in a bad part of Shreveport, La., and released on an album called Negro Sinful Songs, a 1939 anthology. Lead Belly now gets co-writing credit with Waits and Brennan; not sure if he did in 2001).

Some tunes, like Waits' now-dowdy "Heart Attack and Vine" are too nonsensical for Hammond's nuances to achieve anything beyond just hanging around the corner in question.

(I underestimated this song. Now it sounds brazen and very true to the gutter vibe of runaways and pimps of Hollywood and Vine.)

And though Hammond tries to take "Clap Hands" on its own terms, there's not much to scratch beyond the surface: it's like Captain Beefheart for Earthlings, Blue Man Group instead of the blues.

(Here again, the author recants. I think I liked the blues/Blue Man phrase too much, so I picked a random song, like a crooked cop trying to cajole a witness to frame a certain guy in a police lineup.)

All of which makes you wonder how much Hammond might be able to accomplish if he were set up with another singer and songwriter who sometimes benefits from better singers. I'm thinking of a Southerner with a more refined bluesy sensibility who also knows his way around L.A. If they haven't yet met, someone should introduce John Hammond to Randy Newman.