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The unfairness of things (4) Marlin Wallace

"THE TRUTH THAT MUST BE TOLD" begins the text on the plain black and white cover of what is apparently a single disc (31-track) summary of the work of a Springfield, Missouri, eccentric named Marlin Wallace. "My mother was against communism, but she was badly deceived by the concealed communists around her. When she died of heart trouble in 1977, I attributed her death to the red conspiracy. For two years while I stayed at her house, the reds had tortured me with invisible radiation attacks. There was nothing to prevent the reds from using lasers and microwaves on my mother."

Caricature of madness? Oddly enough, I just finished reading Haynes Johnson's Age of Anxiety, which may be why this particular curiosity surfaces again this morning. A quick Google search answers little enough about Mr. Wallace -- least of all whether this is some elaborate hustle, though I think not. Mr. Whitney (Lou, I presume) is among the trio thanked at the end of the liner notes, but I do not imagine even he has time to amass such a body of work simply as a provocation.

Wallace's biographical paragraph says, "Music has always been part of my life. I was born in Springfield, Missouri on August 12, 1937. At an early age I learned to play the violin; later I took up the guitar and soon, began writing songs. I established "The Corillions Music Publishing And Recording Company" in Springfield, Missouri on November 9, 1973. He also mentions a three-month stay in a red asylum and shock therapy that a stepfather authorized when he was 15, and claims a number of his songs have been plagiarized.

So presumably he is among the lesser-known outsider musicians, spiritual kin to Hasil Adkins and Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis, all of whom occupy no small amount of shelf space here. But little of that is audible among the recordings, for there is no edge here. Really, he sounds like an aspiring country songwriter from the early 1970s, and some of the numbers here might have been good enough to get a cut here or there. Perhaps. Wallace has a pleasant voice, shaded somewhere between Burl Ives and Tennesse Ernie Ford, and his songs are pretty well-recorded and played. Clearly he has been able to involve other competent musicians in his vision, though they are uncredited here (and it's possible, I suppose, that he's playing everything)...and speaking of credits, each song has a name attached to it but it's far from clear what that names mean (are they the songwriters? I think not).

The material seems to draw largely upon an easy variety of traditions, from the flying saucer rock 'n' roll of "The Planet Mars" (though Wallace's song is hardly rockabilly) to the topical "Mekon" to the country "Georgia Corn Liquor Man" to a Chuck Berry answer, "Wildcat Mabellene" that does have a little rockabilly twang. Despite four-pages of anti-communist text, the songs Wallace offers here rarely hint at his politics (with the exception of track 28, "The Russian Bear"). Snippets of familiar riffs woven occasionally through his work, which I suppose is part of the fun. And the URL for this release, www.rasslinrecords.com, leads to some kind of web security firm whose mysteries I lack the patience to seek to penetrate this morning.

Marlin Wallace is, apparently, famous in the same obscure way that Jandek is famous. But his music isn't, well, weird enough, I guess, to make him anything more than one of those obscurities that collectors and nattering critics gossip about.

Posted by grant on January 7, 2006 12:23 PM | Permalink