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On meeting Billy Faier and SXSW

I was a few months from a difficult birth the last time I saw Billy Faier, which makes it 47 years ago, in Berkeley, California. His is not exactly a well-known name, though the two albums he cut for Riverside in 1957 and '58 -- The Art of the Five String Banjo and Travelin' Man -- have as much to do with how I turned out as Ferdinand the Bull and Thoreau. Mother spun records while doing the weekly ironing (and she ironed everything) when I was little, and as much as I liked Mozart's "Figaro" aria I was fascinated by Travelin' Man, and, especially, its final song, a cowboy morality tale called "The Hellbound Train."

Everybody has a white whale they chase, an excuse (in this case) to walk into every used record store stumbled upon in 30 years of seeking and ask the clerk if ever they've heard of Billy Faier.

Nobody ever has, save for close listeners to Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who has a long song about running around Bourbon Street with Faier and other free spirits.

"Hellbound Train" kept me off drink (and such) until I was 18. Scared me to death and entranced me every time I played it. Still does. Just his voice and one mean-ass banjo. He found it (as, I believe, others have) as lyrics preserved in one of those 19th century folklorist collections; I know only one other version, a Love & Rockets b-side Courtney Miller once was kind enough to tape for me, though it's long lost in the box of cassettes in the back closet.

In the very early days of ND we used to run a little "has anybody seen?" box on the letters page. In ND #7 -- the one with my faux constructivist Waco Brothers cover -- I took the desperate step of asking if anybody'd heard of Billy Faier. A few days after publication the phone rang and a writer I don't know well gave me his phone number in upstate New York. I asked how they could possibly be acquainted, and she explained calmly that she'd been having an affair with the husband while he'd been enjoying a dalliance with the wife.

It took a couple days to work up the nerve to dial that phone number, but he answered right off, probably warned of my coming and properly gruff when I asked what he'd been doing all those years: "Well, living!" he said. He'd transferred those two Riverside LPs to cassette, and had another title available, cut with John Sebastian, so I sent him $20, passed the address on to my big brother, and told him that, in our house, he was bigger than Earl Scruggs. He laughed, and I like to think I added a little delight to his day.

That was it until about six months ago, when Billy found me online and sent word that he'd moved to Marathon, Texas, and was working on his autobiography. We've talked and corresponded some since (which is how he came to write a book review in #62), mostly me trying to figure out how to get my hands on that drafted autobiography, for not simply am I fascinated by his music, my hunch is he had a fascinating life that drifted through the folk revival into the 1960s and all kinds of mess. A drive across country with Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack. That kind of stuff. I want to know what he did, what he saw, what he remembers, what he makes of it all. I hope it's a good book, and I hope it finds a publisher. I suppose I wish that having my name in some fashion attached to the thing might help it see the light of day, but my name doesn't exactly sell books, so...

So Billy has a new record label, an enterprise called Tompkins Square, and they had a showcase on the Friday of SXSW. It happened to conflict with ND's evening showcase. I'd semi-seriously asked my partners to let me book Billy Faier onto our stage, but even I knew it was an unreasonable request. And, anyway, he already had a gig. (Tompkins Square, incidentally, has just signed Charlie Louvin, who is apparently about to make a record with Mark Nevers.)

I left a hamburger unfinished and dashed up 5th Street to the Hideout on Congress in time to join a half-dozen other people in a small theater space (the last person I'd seen there was Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster). To see Billy Faier.

To see him play.

He is now 75 with long white hair and glasses, not precisely the vigorous (and, mother said, somewhat truculent) young man of his album covers, but still quite a force. After, he explained that one eye had been rendered blind by botched lens surgery, which ended his juggling career a few years back, and that he's spent much of the last 25 years learning to play classical piano. And that he's finished a book on juggling which promotes his tablature for the art, and, he says, a pornographic novel with well-rendered characters.

But, man, can he still play that banjo. His voice isn't what it once was, but those fingers remain incredibly agile, delicate, almost inexplicable as they calmly attack anc caress those five strings. Gatemouth Brown was the only other player I've seen whose hands were so magical. Faier is a unique stylist, so far as I can tell, fusing guitar technique with the Scruggs roll and the occasional clawhammer attack, all of that at once and entirely natural. And no wonder the banjo never sounded like that when I tried, all those years back when "Deliverance" was big.

He's a New York guy, one of a generation of musicians who took seriously the ethical and aesthetic conflicts implicit in the study of folk music, and one of many generations of musicians who were transformed by the Beatles.

When my parents were in college, Billy Faier had a radio show on KPFA in the Bay Area and WBAI in New York. He still has tapes of those shows (archived, now, happily), which air nightly at 7:30 pm CST on Basin Radio, 101.1 FM (basinradio.net), and maybe some day I'll figure out how to listen on this contraption.

Much of this year's SXSW amounted to that kind of ancestor worship, though that hadn't been my plan. An awful lot of the shows I saw featured musicians of my vintage, or older, and an audience to match. It is argued that only the young are an important audience, a commercially viable audience, an audience worth attracting, but I'm not sure I buy it. Actually, I'm sure that I don't buy it.

Saturday afternoon, when we meant to see Imaad Wasif (oops, that party was Friday) we ended up at the Ponderosa Stomp party, which featured Barbara Lynn and an amazing guitar player whose name I'm about to misspell because I haven't a clue where to find him (and couldn't guess which of his five self-released CDs to pick up, and so returned empty-handed): Classie Ballou. Thurday night I saw a lot of Jon Dee Graham (which has become an annual pilgrimage for me) and Marty Stuart, who (with Kenny Vaughan) put on an understated guitar clinic at Antone's. Tom Gillam, standing with me, just threw up his hands and threatened to make his band rehearse.

But maybe the best thing I saw, in the dim exhaustion of Saturday night, was Sam (of Sam and Dave) Moore. It helped that it was in a park and I was able to see little kids dancing everywhere, and, thus, to miss my daughter even more. It really helped that he had a sparkling band that included Bekka Bramlett and another woman whose name I lost on backup vocals, and an exquisitely tight horn section. Moore is still a surprisingly powerful shouter, and there's a new album (a duets tribute I suspect) coming through Rhino.

But the treat of the whole thing -- and I type this knowing that even my collaborators here at ND will be shocked by how terminally unhip I've become -- was Travis Tritt, who proved an exceptional southern soul belter for two brilliant songs.

I have a soft spot for Tritt. Not long after I moved to Nashville, Ernest Tubb's celebrated their 50th anniversary with an outdoor concert. It was cold and bleak and not a lot of people came down to Broadway, which had been blocked off for the evening. Bill Anderson presided, and, as the headliner, Tritt came out and sang. I remember "Where Corn Don't Grow" being his hit of the moment, though that could be wrong and it doesn't matter. Travis Tritt didn't have to do that, especially not at a time when country music was actively seeking to distance itself from its roots. But he did. And he did it graciously.

I came home to find that he'd signed to a new label, Category 5, which, I guess, means that the money making machine in Nashville doesn't think he can feed that beast anymore. Maybe he can't. But he's still got some great music in him. And that's the part I care about. That's what I go to Austin each year to hear.

I'm sure there are blogs and newspaper columns and such all over the web extolling the virtues of dozens of young bands I didn't make time to see. Maybe next year I'll see them, and maybe I won't. I turn 47 in a few weeks, and I find it increasingly important to be reminded by those of my generation (and beyond) that one's best work isn't necessarily done in the first flush of youth.

A post-script. Wednesday night I slipped into the Austin Music Hall to see Kris Kristofferson sing with Jessi Colter. I hadn't counted on there being chairs on the floor, and so ended up talking to Jagmo about posters while they sang. But in the interim I caught what must have been a short version of Kinky Friedman's stump speech. He is, of course, a gadfly candidate for governor of Texas. Or is he? Granted, he was addressing an audience receptive to every punchline. But he's good out there. If he has any real populist policies to go with his cigar and black hat, if he's actually serious about doing this and winning...he might. He just might.

Posted by grant on March 21, 2006 9:04 AM | Permalink