Desert Bloom

Victoria Williams and Mark Olson nurture their muses at Joshua Tree

by Grant Alden

And while we spoke of many things,
Fools and kings,
This he said to me:
The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.

– "Nature Boy", Victoria Williams

The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers live simply in a refurbished late-1950s cabin, tucked amid the high desert and surrounded by sand and sky, hearty herbs and huge, shy, loving dogs.

Mark Olson is in the kitchen, heating an early November lunch of leftover turkey, fresh-plucked arugula salad and squaw tea. Victoria Williams is in the bathroom, taking a quick bath before an afternoon encounter with the camera.

Out on the front porch an ex-Navy sonar man named Dave Royer is converting surplus ammo boxes into preamps for his handmade studio microphones, and one of the three dogs is sprawled the length of a shady couch. Royer is sundried, shirtless, more skittish than the dogs of strangers.

A recording console is cloaked and tucked into one corner of the living room, next to the stone hearth Mark and Victoria built, on the other side of the small concrete fault – a reminder of frequent earthquakes – which separates that room from the kitchen and the small, four-burner electric stove Victoria found in a junk shop. An upright piano next to the front door is the only instrument visible.

Born here, then, are the songs of Victoria’s latest Atlantic release, Musings Of A Creek Dipper (due in stores Jan. 13), and the full flowering of Mark’s first post-Jayhawks outing, The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers (available only from his P.O. box here in the California desert town of Joshua Tree). And if it sounds like Victoria sang her parts in the kitchen while doing dishes, she probably was.

Highway 10 east from Los Angeles, that long drive Hunter S. Thompson roared across 25 years ago toward the ruination of fame and the gaudy conflagration of Las Vegas, forks a few miles past the last outlet mall before darting through the unflinching Mojave. A well-tended spur to the right winds into Palm Springs, where the streets are enclosed by lavishly irrigated lawns and named for prominent Republicans. To the left, rising toward the high desert where wind and rock and patient Joshua trees remind of a peace and endurance that politics can never fashion, up that road, not far from where Gram Parsons’ ashes were once spread, is where Victoria and Mark live.

Damp-haired Victoria offers a short prayer before lunch, a reminder to their secular guest that religion need not be a caricature of itself. She speaks and laughs and sings in such a way that her surroundings are decorated with exquisite grace. Though she is 38 now, Victoria’s voice, her eyes, her smile, they all retain a gloriously childlike charm. She sings high and sometimes uncertain ("wobbly," she’s called it) in a register that links her to occasional duet partner Julie Miller; mostly, though, it’s an exceptional mix of innocence and wisdom that radiates through her songs: Peace.

Those sounds, and the spirit behind them, are Victoria Williams’ blessing. It is a small curse that she is still, perhaps, better known for having multiple sclerosis, the disease she has battled since 1992, than for the rare joy of her songs.

VICTORIA WILLIAMS & MARK OLSON. Photograph by Grant Alden

Victoria Williams was 19 when she came to Los Angeles in the early ’80s, a hippie chick from Shreveport, Louisiana, probably a wild child – striking enough a weed even then that Mark well remembers watching her open for punk rock bands, just a gal and that voice and her guitar. She was married to somebody else part of that time (singer-songwriter Peter Case), but things have a way of working out.

"The not shady part of Victoria’s past," Mark says with a warm glance, gently cutting her off before she reveals too much about leaving Louisiana to the tape recorder, "is that she learned…she has a unique rhythm style. She can play many different instruments, and she learned that in Louisiana, playing with a lot of different people. When I first saw her, that’s one of the things that I just went, ‘Wow, she can really play rhythm guitar, lead guitar, piano, in her own style, that kind of harks back to that part of the country.’ On this Creek Dippers thing, I’ve always wanted her to be playing, not just singing, and that’s why we did it that way, just her, Mike [Russell], and me."

The name that connects their two albums links Victoria to Mark as well. "I was out opening for the Jayhawks years ago," Victoria says. "Mark left the tour bus and rode with us and we’d go creek dipping every day. We came to this one place, it was called Harmony Ridge, and we creek dipped there." (They also adopted a revised version of the name, Rollin’ Creek Dippers, for a European tour last year with Buddy and Julie Miller and Jim Lauderdale.)

Victoria was touring with Neil Young in 1992 when her hands became unexpectedly reluctant partners in the playing of her guitar and piano. A handful of doctors later, she had that unhappy diagnosis – MS is a non-lethal disease that attacks the body’s immune system and damages the myelin sheath which surrounds nerves in the brain and spinal cord – and $20,000 in unpaid medical bills.

At the time, Victoria had no record label. 1987’s Happy Come Home began and ended a relationship with Geffen; 1990’s Swing The Statue! appeared on the ill-fated Rough Trade, a label/distributor whose bankruptcy all but destroyed indie rock that season. The response to her plight by friends and fellow artists sparked creation of the Sweet Relief organization.

Williams remains on the steering committee of Sweet Relief, which by her count has raised and disbursed some $350,000 to uninsured musicians, most of that funding coming from all-star tribute albums saluting her songs, and those of Vic Chesnutt.

"It’s not going exactly like I would like it to go," she says, almost a parent speaking patiently of a wayward child. "We’re broke right now. We gave away $350,000, which was good, but there’s still people waiting. They’ve cooked up some sort of fund-raiser, and they want me to come play. So I’ll do that. I’ll do anything I can, you know. But my dream for the original, the original dream for Sweet Relief, was that people in every town would do at least one concert a year and give the proceeds to this fund."

Sweet Relief has been her principal concession to the disease. Her artistic response was 1994’s Loose, a thoroughly engaging celebration of life and death. City living insulates us from that cycle, detaches death behind walls and hospital gowns, and thereby devalues life. Both city and country, gripping one with each hand, Victoria spun songs as direct and honest as anything the Carter Family mined from their hills.

This Moment in Toronto With Victoria Williams And The Loose Band followed a year later. Though she was careful to pace her touring schedule (fatigue and stress are contributing factors with MS) in support of those releases, Musings Of A Creek Dipper, the first new material in four years, bears as few traces of that battle as she can manage.

Well. The cabin on the desert is hardly a concession, for it seems a place where Mark and Victoria are truly and happily at home. And yet she moved from Laurel Canyon out to the desert in part to escape the city’s pollution and its impact on her health, the kitchen table is filled with pill bottles from health food stores, and, later, walking around the property, she notices that the bees – one experimental therapy for MS is to be stung many times each day – have abandoned their hive.

"Ever since I’ve been given the opportunity to record, since the very first record, I always prayed, ‘Lord, let me do something that will be good for people,’" Victoria says. "And that’s probably one of the reasons I haven’t put out some of my more dour moments. Maybe I just don’t want to shower people with that, too much. I suppose I could just put out a really black album," but even at the thought she begins to laugh that laugh.

Later, Mark digs up a tape and plays one of those songs, but they won’t release it because the story’s true and the names haven’t been changed. A notebook in the living room holds another 90-odd unrecorded songs, much of that the archiving work of her frequent bandmate Andrew Williams, who came out to the desert and sifted through work tapes and put them in some order.

"She has a lot of wonderful songs," Mark begins.

"Oh, I do not," but her eyes dart shyly toward his anyway. "There’s some songs that I haven’t recorded that I…you really have to be in the right place to record a song, where you can really share the song the way it was given to you. And sometimes…maybe I don’t want to go to some song’s place. And sometimes I’d rather write something new."

Victoria’s records and concerts are like one imagines church should be. They are open and honest and celebratory, full of delight and respect, able to sweep black clouds to the side with a soft breath. In this way, in occasional gospel flavorings, and in her singular word choices (the first new song is called "Periwinkle Sky"), Victoria Williams’ music retains the unique character of her Southern upbringing.

A lot of wonderful songs, and yet, if Loose was in part a meditation on the endless cycles of life and death – from "Harry Went To Heaven" to "Happy To Have Known Pappy" even to the unexpected cover of Spirit’s "Nature’s Way" – Musings Of A Creek Dipper is just a trace sadder. Weary, in spots, but no less wise.

"I wonder…" Victoria says, squinting. "It’s not as perky as some of my records are."

Well, as we head into middle age we probably aren’t going to be all that perky.

"Exactly. Exactly! That is what Danny said, my manager said. This record is mature, it’s mature. It looks at a lot of life-death issues."

But Loose kind of did, too.

"Yeah, it did, didn’t it? I’m sort of prepared, I suppose. God’s been good to me. I was prepared, I think. To deal with this, whatever. You know. The shortest prayer: Whatever." And then she breaks into a vintage Victoria Williams laugh.

Still, there is a pervasive sense of looking backward throughout Musings. The prayer is implicit within "Let It Be So": "Rejoice in this moment/And any hereafter/Sweet and holy/Be the sounds of your laughter." Early in "Last Word" she sings, "Who’s going to bury the last man when he dies? All the money in the world can’t help you if the world’s on fire." The penultimate "Grandpa In The Cornpatch" plays almost as a prayer to her own life, with its elegant refrain: "Chores, chores, chores," during which Victoria’s voice manages to age twenty years each time the word is repeated.

"In a way," she chuckles, perhaps delighted with that assessment, "it’s a life. It’s about a life. You know? There’s a lot of chores in life."

"And I know that she was singing that song around here a lot," Mark adds. "And I got accustomed to hearing that. The song has been put into practice, definitely."

Musings was cut during June and August, first in the calm of the desert night at a local studio ("Fred’s place"), then down in Oxnard, Calif., at a theater. In between, Victoria and Mark joined the Lilith tour, and found other reasons to hide from the excruciating heat of the desert; that heat, too, is a problem for people with MS.

"I had a lot of health problems the last year," Victoria says, earlier on and without prompting. "Even when we started on this, my hands had gotten weird, and I was like, I can’t stop this. People were coming [to play] and everything, and I just had to have faith that it would come back and there were a lot of great musicians anyway, and they’re such great players that it all worked out. Later on I could put stuff on, but it was backwards from the way I did Loose because Loose started with just my vocal and guitar. But this one, I had to play my own stuff later when my hands would work."

Are they better now?

"Uh, yeah, they’re better, but…"

"She’s moving a hell of a lot more," Mark says. "She went into the record – MS goes up and down – she went into it on a little bit of a down swing, but she just did it, you know? She just went ahead and did it."

"It’s funny, though," she says, "because a lot of the pictures taken from the session at Fred’s, I’m always sitting on the floor. Surprise, I’m sitting on the floor!"

And her smile is still radiant; so are the looks she and Mark exchange, and the tenderness with which they prod and protect each other.

Mark Olson is somewhat more circumspect about his record, but The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers wasn’t initially meant for the public. It is tempting to ask Mark about the Jayhawks, and his leaving, but one need simply compare the rough-hewn glory of his solo debut to the pop sheen of the Jayhawks’ new Sound Of Lies for the only answer that matters.

It’s just the three of them – Mark, Victoria (er, "Mabel Allbright," as she’s listed on the liner notes), and Mike "Razz" Russell – recording through Dave Royer’s microphones in that wood-paneled living room. It is a rare, beautiful, utterly genuine set of songs, everything Will Oldham has tried so hard to manifest throughout Palace’s many incarnations and, in that hard trying, failed.

Indeed, there are several phone calls later as husband and wife try to decide who exactly produced the album, each deferring to the other. It is that seamless and organic a work, and unmistakably anchored to that place.

"For me, this place is a place where I really get into a project, or doing something like I’ve never experienced before, for some reason," Mark says. "I don’t think either of us even thought we were going to put it out. We were just trying to record some songs and stuff. We both were kind of scared of even what we were doing."

Later, Mark admits, laughing softly, that it’s all Victoria’s doing. "Vic initiated the home studio," he says. "I dragged my heels for quite a while, saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, here we are musicians and we’re going to be in studios enough, why do we want to come home to work?’ And then, boy, once we got going on it, I realized that she was right! It was a real good thing. Generally, if I listen to her, things work out pretty good."

Mark’s first impulse was simply to hand out tapes to friends and fans. "I called two people that I knew, that I’ve known for years, and checked out what I thought their interest would be," he says. "And I had the idea of doing it ourselves. When I talked to them and played it for them I became sure that, yes, this is the right thing to do with it, try to establish our own little thing from the house.

"And then we went on the Lilith tour, and that was eye-opening to me in a lot of ways because we talked to people after we played, and we mentioned, ‘Oh, well, we’ve recorded some stuff at home,’ and they seemed very genuinely excited about that. I kinda realized I’m going to have to make a CD if I’m going to do this, because the cassettes really didn’t sound that good, compared to the DAT."

Both releases share the co-written "Hummingbird", a lilting, glorious song, almost a hoedown. Mark’s take is soft and gentle, barely brushing against the still night air, while Victoria’s more fully orchestrated version darts confident into the world, but without once disturbing the fragility of the song.

Much of the constancy between the two discs is not simply the unspoken, unintended collaboration of husband and wife, but the presence of John Convertino and Joey Burns (Giant Sand, Calexico; they know a thing or two about desert rhythms) at the core of several songs on Victoria’s record. They bestow a gentle, rhythmic grace to everything they touch. It is the same grace with which Olson proceeds, just framed differently by production.

Therein lies the salient difference between the two records. Mark seems to have pulled back from the glossy production of a major-label career like a child recovering from his first encounter with a hot stove. (Incidentally, he is not to be confused with Marc Olsen, late of Seattle band Sage, who has also embarked upon a solo career.) Victoria, more certain for the moment, and long accustomed to being the center of her songs, is bent on trying as many new things as possible.

This will explain "Train Song (Demise Of The Caboose)", Wendy & Lisa (ex-Prince Wendy & Lisa; really), and the presence of a drum loop. "It’s the oddest thing I’ve ever… have you ever heard that song without the drum beat?" Victoria asks, fishing for a book on herbs to explain the chemical properties that make squaw tea such an engaging caffeine-free stimulant.

"We’ll probably put it out from our home-baked records, the way it goes without that. But it was Brian’s idea, and I was really game to try this," she explains, referring to Brian Blade, who played drums on several of the album’s tracks. "The first run-through, I felt very…pestered by it. I, um, basically just ruined the song. And so when I got to Oxnard, I took everything off but the loop and started over again. And rewrote the song so it would go with it. It’s different for me. I kinda like it. I can dance to it."

Mark, sitting next to her at the table, seems to be holding his tongue. "No, I’m not at all," he says, innocent as a child on an illicit sugar rush, and then they both laugh. "No, nope, nope, I’m not. I’m glad that it’s on the record like that. Because the thing is that she expressed an interest to work with some kind of patterns and loops, and she was able to do that."

"Well, with that particular song, it’s not 4/4 all the way through it," Victoria says. "It goes to 6/4 a lot, and so when you’ve got a loop going around in 4/4 and all the sudden it’s turning on me, it’s wanting me to do this but I can’t, ’cause the song doesn’t go there yet."

"I think recording your record in Oxnard, that was pretty neat," Mark adds. "They did it in an old theater. I think that recording at home’s real great, too, but when she has the opportunity to record in some very nice studios with some real good people, and she’s taking that opportunity, and that’s great."

"Trina [Shoemaker, co-producer] was great," Victoria adds. "Years ago, I had started to make Loose with Trina, actually, down there in New Orleans, and it didn’t work out. We’d always wanted to work with each other, and so she called…I said I’d love to work with a gal. She’s great."

It’s all great, and yet time is almost certainly not on Victoria Williams’ side. Multiple sclerosis charts an uncertain path through each patient’s life, and it is as possible that she will go into remission as it is that she will have another prolonged attack, or that she will lose the fine motor skills which help make her such a gifted musician.

One has the sense, seeing Mark and Victoria together, that he is less certain of his own muse than he is of hers, and that he has made – or has been tempted to make – a conscious choice to facilitate her work, rather than to pursue his own.

And that could all be nothing more than a visitor’s misconception.

Still, the home studio, Royer’s microphones, and the desert, they all make it possible for Victoria to work at home when and as she wishes. Should it come to that.

Meanwhile, she’s got better things to contemplate. New projects. "I’d like to do a children’s record. I think that would be really fun," she says. "And then I’d like to do a musical. Yes, I’d like to do a musical. I’ve thought about doing a musical; I actually started writing a musical, which is ‘Blackbirds Rise’ [from Musings], just from when I first started writing this musical, so it’s an older song. It’s on This Moment in Toronto, but it’s called ‘Graveyard’."

Neither of those notions can be a surprise. Children, she notes, instantly respond to her music. And there’s a great deal of Tin Pan Alley in some of her songs, not to mention that she covered "What A Wonderful World" on Loose (and, yes, you did hear that version on a television commercial).

But mostly it comes to this: "I like playing shows. I like playing for people, so I can’t work out of the home then. And I like traveling; I like meeting people and traveling around, seeing different locations, springs, hot springs, just I like to see places."

The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers may be ordered from P.O. Box 342, Joshua Tree, CA 92252.

No Depression co-editor Grant Alden is still trying to figure out how to get squaw tea in Tennessee, in the unexpected absence of a Nashville Starbucks franchise.