James McMurtry scalpels his way across Middle America, etching portraits of pain you can dance to.
On “Just Us Kids,” the Austin singer/songwriter’s latest release, he tackles shattered relationships, addiction, sexual abuse and his continuing rage against a government twisted out of control. McMurtry and his band, the Heartless Bastards, will perform at 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Santa Fe Brewing Company.
The songwriter took his first political stance with 2004’s “We Can’t Make It Here,” his scathing indictment of the economic abandonment wrought by outsourcing of war veterans, small businesses and the working class. Released as a free download before the presidential election, the seven-minute-plus diatribe echoed across the Internet and the airwaves, igniting legions of new fans.
As of this writing, fanmade videos of the song have been viewed more than 150,000 times on YouTube. Horror-meister Stephen King, the owner of a Bangor, Maine, classic rock station, put the song on heavy rotation. Featuring an uncensored version of the tune, 2005’s “Childish Things” spent six weeks at No. 1 on R&R’s Americana Music Radio Chart in 2005-06. Both the song and CD earned Best Song and Best Album awards from the Fifth Annual Americana Music Association Honors and Awards.
With his latest release, McMurtry adds a series’ worth of blatantly political venom with “Cheney’s Toy” and “God Bless America,” the latter bearing no relation to the Irving Berlin flagwaver.
“Politics dominates my thinking more than it used to,” the musician said in a telephone interview from his Austin home. “It’s a matter of life and death now.”
“Cheney’s Toy” amounts to an anti-Bush rant, although it has sometimes been mis- takenly assumed to refer to U.S. soldiers. Released as another free download, the song hasn’t yet garnered as much attention as its cyber predecessor.
“It’s not going to be that popular of a song,” McMurtry said. “It’s a good song. But it doesn’t have that mass appeal. The popular song is more about the listener, not the writer.”
McMurtry is known for his searing litanies of American despair, sketched in winceinducing couplets. There’s the meth addict of “Fireline Road,” the graying boomers of the title song, the painfully unraveling bond between “Ruby and Carlos,” all buckling under overwhelming odds, usually walled out by those with power and money. The characters unfurl within McMurtry’s clenchedteeth growl as he harpoons authority with his quiver of sarcasm.
He usually writes at home under the gun of last-minute deadlines.
“If I can sing it without cringing, it works,” he said. “When it’s work to sing, it’s work to listen to, then it has to go.”
His eye for literary detail might be genetic. He’s the son of Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning writer Larry McMurtry (“Lonesome Dove,” “Brokeback Mountain”). Born in Fort Worth, McMurtry was raised mostly in Virginia, but his parents split up when he was a toddler. He attended his first concert — Johnny Cash — in Richmond at age 7. His father gave him his first guitar; his mother Josephine (a retired English professor) taught him three chords. He started out wanting to become a Nashville songwriter like his heroes Cash and Kris Kristofferson.
“John Mellencamp saved me from all that,” he said.
Mellencamp gave the budding songwriter his first big break after Larry McMurtry handed the rock star a tape while they were both working on the movie “Falling From Grace.” Mellencamp produced McMurtry’s Columbia debut, 1989’s “Too Long in the Wasteland.” Early acclaim and business-side disappointments followed. Then came “We Can’t Make It Here,” a seminal work King called the best protest song since Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.”
The songs often evolve from a thread of an idea or a couple of lines. McMurtry wrote “Ruby and Carlos” because he wanted to use “below the Mason dumb-ass line.” His sound man uttered the phrase after a less-thanstellar dining experience at a southern Waffle House.
“I was trying to come up with a character that would say that, and that turned out to be Ruby,” McMurtry said. “Traveling helps. In my mind, I set that somewhere in the Teton Valley in Idaho between the potato farms and the aspen trees.”
He delves into addiction and abuse through “Fire Line Road’s” haunted drifter. He calls them twin sides of the same coin.
“Out here in the middle of the country, meth is rampant,” McMurtry said. “It’s torn up a lot of people and a lot of my family —some of my cousins. And I run into a lot of people that were victims of sexual abuse.
“A lot of the holes that get knocked into us as children come back as addictions.”
“The rural America I see is rife with all that stuff,” he added.
On “Hurricane Party,” he weaves Katrina imagery around an old man reflecting on his life as he “breaks old glass insulators with my old .22/Off the telephone poles.”
“The seed line for that didn’t make the song,” McMurtry said. “I had a friend who played in a strip joint on Myrtle Beach. They had a hurricane party while he was playing.”
McMurtry’s 18-year-old son Curtis plays sax on the swamp-rocking opener “Bayou Tortous.” Already in two bands, he wants to become a film composer. He writes every day, a discipline his father has yet to master.
“He says, ‘You ought to do this, Dad. You might get your songs done before it’s time to cut them,’” McMurtry said.
The youngest McMurtry also provided the inspiration for the rousing title track “Just Us Kids,” about boomers moving from parking-lot slackers to dot-com refuse to divorced graybeards wondering where the time flew.
You can almost visualize McMurtry’s searing gaze focused on a country awash in Obamamania.
“I don’t care for it much,” he said. “It’s kind of become a high school popularity contest. It’s not about who would do the better job. I still think (Hillary Clinton) would do a better job. She’s tougher and mean. That’s why people don’t like her.”
If You Go
WHO: James McMurtry and the Heartless Bastards
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. tonight
WHERE: Santa Fe Brewing Company, 27 Fire Place
TICKETS: $18/advance; $23/door
CONTACT: 988-1234 or www.ticketssantafe.com
