The Curmudgeon: Rock Bands Unafraid of the Past

The Wood Brothers began as a kind of family reunion. Chris Wood, based in New York City, was nationally famous as one third of the jazz trio Medeski Martin Wood. Oliver Wood, based in Atlanta, was regionally respected as the chief singer-songwriter-guitarist for the Southern-rock quintet King Johnson. At first the Wood Brothers were just a side project, but the combination of Chris’s muscular, adventurous bottom and Oliver’s fable-like rock hymns proved irresistible, and the group started drawing crowds too large to ignore.

With multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix making the band a trio, the Wood Brothers hit that sweet spot of linking the past to the future—avoiding both retro nostalgia and rootless novelty. Such roots-rock acts satisfy our hunger for art that moves through time. We are all influenced by those who came before us; we can’t deny that past any more than we can stay there. We need to take what we’ve inherited and refashion it into something new that adds ourselves to the mix. The Wood Brothers have done that as well as anyone.

Oliver, though, has evolved into a prolific composer who has written songs for more material than the Wood Brothers can record. Some of those songs have been recorded by Shemekia Copeland, Kathy Mattea and Seth Walker, and some have surfaced on Oliver’s two solo albums: 2021’s pandemic effort, Always Smilin’, and this summer’s Fat Cat Silhouette. Chris doesn’t appear on the new disc, but Rix is involved as a percussionist, writer and producer. No one can replace Chris’s one-of-a-kind bass playing, but Ted Pecchio does a respectable job as the sub. And Oliver gets to try out a lot of arrangement ideas—more experimental, less groove-oriented, less fleshed-out—that wouldn’t fit the Wood Brothers M.O.

The result is further evidence that Oliver is one of our best rock ‘n’ roll songwriters, setting quirky, John Prine-like aphorisms to gospel-soul singalongs. On the opening track, “Light and Sweet,” he contemplates a sparrow outside his window and imagines that it’s on the phone to a divorce lawyer. This sets up a catchy chorus of oohs and a choir of gossips who “say anything they want.” The album takes its title from “Little Worries,” which starts with another animal in a window and muses about the ways our good moods always seem to curdle, just as the song’s relaxed tune falls apart into discordant piano chords.

Between 2008 and 2020, the original line-up of X (singers John Doe and Exene Cervenka, guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake) reunited for occasional tours that revisited the songs they’d released on their five historic albums from 1980 through 1985. It was an odd situation, playing oldies for aging punk fans, but the songs held up and they still played ferociously. The shows were successful, and they financed the members’ solo projects—most notably Doe’s explorations of Americana and Bonebrake’s jazz ventures.

Then, in 2020, X surprised everyone by releasing Alphabetland, their first studio album in 23 years (and their first with Zoom in 35 years). Now they’ve released what they’re calling their final album of new songs: Smoke & Fiction. The first two songs on the new disc are full-tilt punk stampedes with Doe’s and Cervenka’s beat-poet lyrics carried on the wave of Zoom’s guitar and Bonebrake’s drums. In the next few songs, however, the quartet’s long-standing roots in rockabilly, folk-rock and British Invasion classicism surface through the staccato beats.

It was that tension between pop-music history and punk-rock anti-history that made X the most interesting of the post-Ramones bands. That same push-and-pull makes Smoke & Fiction one of the year’s best roots-rock albums. The stomping, nightmarish tale of a relationship that waxes and wanes like the “Face in the Moon” benefits from Doe’s chorus hook. Zoom’s slashing guitar riff on “Baby & All” is set off by the nursery-rhyme singalong by Doe and Cervenka. Best of all is “The Way It Is,” a brooding, garage-rock ballad about reluctantly accepting the end of an affair.

Dave Alvin, who briefly joined X in 1986, has just released Texicali, his second album with fellow singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The two men can be equally effective as acoustic folk singers and as members of loud, electric bands. The duo’s first album, 2018’s Downey to Lubbock, reflected the acoustic tour they’d just done. Since then, they’ve been touring with Alvin’s band, the Guilty Ones, and the new record echoes the roots-rock nature of those shows. If the first focused on the singers’ way with words, the new one showcases how those words give and take with the amps behind them.

Alvin, who first emerged as a member of the Blasters from Downey, California, and Gilmore, who first made his name as a member of the Flatlanders from Lubbock, Texas, are used to working with rhythm sections schooled in blues and country. They’re not afraid to test the strength of their stories against the rumble of blues guitars and honky-tonk drums. The instruments back these story songs from the two principals as well as Big Bill Broonzy, Terry Allen and Brownie McGhee the same way cinematography supports actors in a movie.

Gilmore has a twangy tenor that can flutter high and sweet before it breaks with a nasal sidestep as if to remind us that life’s not as simple as a song. Alvin’s vocal instrument is more modest, but he knows how to sing/talk the verses and belt out the choruses. And his lead-guitar riffs and solos can be as personal as Gilmore’s warbling. Alvin pays tribute to such colleagues as folk singer Bill Morrissey and Canned Heat’s Al Wilson. The latter song, “Blind Owl,” also appears on Canned Heat’s new album, Final Vinyl.

Gilmore’s bandmates in the Flatlanders were Butch Hancock and Joe Ely. Hancock wrote one song, the hillbilly Buddhist number “Roll Around,” for the Alvin/Gilmore album and another, “Watchin’ Them Semis Roll,” for Ely’s new release, Driven To Drive. This album is a collection of home studio recordings Ely made over the decades each time he got back from a tour. The dozen tracks are loosely organized around the concept of life on the road; cut quickly with one or two accompanists—usually accordionist Joel Guzman or guitarist Jeff Plankenhorn.

Ely has been struggling with health issues lately, so it’s good to have these nuggets from his vault. Except for “For Your Love,” these songs aren’t familiar. “Nashville Is a Catfish” is a rewrite of Gilmore’s “Dallas”; “Didn’t We Robbie” is a piano-driven rocker, a tribute to Flatlanders guitarist Robbie Gersoe. “Slave to the Western Wind” is the story of an ill-fated romance from Ciudad Juarez to Las Vegas set to lilting Tex-Mex music.

Ely’s album includes a duet with Bruce Springsteen on “Odds of the Blues.” Springsteen sings another with Zach Bryan on the latter’s new album, The Great American Bar Scene. That song, “Sandpaper,” uses a complicated metaphor—the way sandpaper bunches up when it catches on something—to describe a romance that just won’t work. Springsteen uses the confessional low tenor from “My Hometown” over a similarly minimalist rock track to echo Bryan’s mix of desire and despair.

Bryan has been marketed as a country singer, but he has that mix of Woody Guthrie harmonica, John Fogerty swamp guitar and Dylanesque imagery that Springsteen rode to glory. Many have walked this path, but few have done it as well as Bryan, who has gone from street-corner busker to stadium headliner in an astonishingly short time. As on previous efforts, this one begins with a spoken-word poem, as if to prove his verbal skills, and then carries over into 18 songs that marry that beat poetry to punchy music that varies from the acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica of the title track to the rock-guitar freak-out of “Oak Island.”

It’s no coincidence that Bryan knows his musical history; that past informs everything he does. The album’s best song, a duet with John Moreland called “Memphis: The Blues,” squeezes in references to B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Otis Redding within three minutes. Like the other acts in this essay, Bryan isn’t afraid of the past, but he’s not afraid to mess with it either.

It’s no surprise that Springsteen has long been a co-writer, producer and duet-singer with Joe Grushecky. Both men are rock ‘n’ roll classicists who champion the blue-collar lives of the Northeast Rust Belt neighborhoods they grew up in—whether Springsteen’s New Jersey or Grushecky’s Pittsburgh. Both men use muscular bar-band music to describe those tough-luck lives and offer a glimmer of hope as well. Houserocker: A Joe Grushecky Anthology documents the best of that work in 36 tracks spread out over two CDs.

Grushecky has also released his first album of new songs in seven years: Can’t Outrun a Memory. His son, Johnny Grushecky, is a guitarist and producer on the album, and his father is old enough to turn his songwriting attention to life’s endgame: reassessing the past and reordering priorities for the few days left. The title track–offered in two versions with slightly different lyrics—acknowledges the persistence of the past, whether it’s an old soul song or the romance it reminds you of. Joe Grushecky evokes that past in rich detail on “Living in Coal Country” and “Here in ’68.” Sometimes you just “want to kiss my kids goodnight,” he sings, but sometimes you need to get away from it all and “Just Drive.”

Watch the Wood Brothers’ Paste Session from 2020 below.