Looking for the West:
An Open Letter to Freddie Steady

By Ray A. March

The road to Elko from my starting point is through the high desert sage south of Surprise Valley and north of Gerlach. Through a tawny mid-winter landscape pelted by rain after a heavy snowfall. Through the slurring sound of slush under 18-inch truck tires. Through hours of dashboard cowboy music. With the exception of the sage sea, all self-imposed.

Elko is ahead of me, off in the vague Great Basin distance waiting in its lair like a mythic siren, so here I am at 70 miles per with seven hours of music ahead of me. It’s a crash course, Freddie. I load six at a time, no shuffling, play’em as they come. I’m looking for the west in the music that it spawns. The search is on.

First, it’s Borderline and the Oklahoma Company Cowboys. I’m a sucker for “Cowboy Sweetheart,” and then they cross over the divide, that fine line between traditional and experimental, with “San Angelo” (Freddie, don’t confuse it with Marty Robbins’ song by the same name). This piece starts with a few enticing strings of a vaquero guitar and then midway turns electric, the amps sizzling and the beat shifts as if to say “traditional is okay, but what do you think of this, man?”

Freddie Steady, what do you think, man? Is there more to this cowboy music than campfire ballads?

I don’t expect you to remember, Freddie, because you do so many gigs, but we met in Cachagua the year you and Bob Livingston were playing with Jerry Jeff Walker, trying to keep the beat going with one hand and Jerry on the road to recovery with the other. God, it was hot that afternoon, the air conditioner in our blue Mercedes didn’t work and you guys admonished me, “If Jerry wants you to hit the bars with him later, don’t do it.” I didn’t, but Jerry hired himself a limousine and split right after the Galante Vineyard gig. No overnight in a double wide trailer for him. Remember? Later you sent me your Shakin’ Apostles’Tucson with a note saying, ”Howdy from Austin! Thanks again for all your help. Keep in touch.” We didn’t, but I didn’t forget.

Freddie, help me here. As my mind filters back through a haze of good times, tell me if my memory is fresh. It’s maybe 1972. Livingston skips Lubbocktown and is banging around somewhere, maybe southern California. Along the way he meets up with Michael Martin Murphey. Maybe I’m off a few years. Anyway, turns out there’s this counter culture deal in Austin. Murphey does “Cosmic Cowboy” and about that time Chris LeDeaux writes “The Cowboy and the Hippie,” and a weird wedding of musical genres is in the making. LeDeaux sees there’s a connection between the rodeo cowboy who is always on the open road riding a self-imposed lifeline that separates him from the main stream and the hippie who is also out there alone on the road, both separate from the straights. Outcasts in common unwilling to give an inch, rodeo rider and hippy have the open road to themselves.

Somehow, cosmic slips in between country and rock but is neither of the two. So what happened? Lots of time goes by for one thing. Livingston eventually goes off to India and a bunch of state department tours, comes back with Cowboys and Indians. Murphey, taking on open range environmental issues, passes out flyers at his own performances and pisses off half his conservative audience. And you, Freddie, you become a Gonzo Compadre, catching on with Jerry Jeff Walker and his country rock sound. You guys even played the Elko gathering one year, proving once again, I suppose, that if the rhythm’s good anything goes. Then you take a twirl with that punk stuff and eventually come back to Tucson. Man, it’s a rut-filled, twisty road that merges rock-n-roll with folk and somewhere along the way the Cosmic Cowboy Movement is so far ahead of itself it’s way down stream. Tucson comes up and out comes your version of electric western folk music with the Shakin’ Apostles hanging it all out.

Wet sagebrush flashes past.

Now I’m listening to Ian Tyson’s Live at Longview. He opens with “Navajo Rug,” certainly not old; Tom Russell co-wrote it, but traditional to my ear. And then Tyson lets loose with “Jerry Ambler,” originally a poem written by Paul Zarzyski but Tyson calls his arrangement “cowboy rap, 1950s and 60s style.” It’s driven by brushes over drums and another breakthrough in western music has been scored.

An unscheduled interlude with Dave Stamey and his If I had a Horse. Stamey and I have traveled some paths together, but not at the same time. I am drawn to his song of Joaquin Murrieta as I am drawn to my own Mexican bandit-hero Tuburcio Vasquez. And I think back to my childhood infatuation with Billy the Kid as I listen to “The Skies of Lincoln County,” Stamey’s equal time for that homely little bastard Bill Bonney. And finally, I drift away in mental dance with my wife Barbara as we listen to “Campfire Waltz.” Some day I’ll send Stamey an e-mail. That’s not the cowboy way, I know, but it’s one way.

From my window I see I’m halfway to nowhere and putting reverie aside I take on Whit Smith and Hot Club of Cowtown, another Austin-influenced-by-way-of-Paris-in-the-30s band that hit Elko a few years ago like a runaway smoldering freight train and then flared out in a bust up. Still, Smith’s “tumbleweed jazz” as one writer called Hot Club’s music, has been a wake up call that change in cowboy music, -- or at least acceptable change in some loose knit quarters -- has arrived. I can’t get “Throwing a Party for Myself” out of my mind, but can’t be sure Smith ever recorded it, if that’s actually the name of the song he sang at Elko a few years back.

What say Freddie?

Ah, the rain lets up and the opening ripples of David Wilkie’s mandolin and spring is here in the clear, pure voice of Denise Withnell and Cowboy Celtic takes me to Amulree and the old Irish cattle trail and the very foundation of American traditional cowboy music. Wilkie’s ride is not on an electric expressway to the future, possibly, of modern cowboy music, but retracing its family tree. His repertoire is the basis of the folk music of the Old West. It links Scottish and Irish origins to our cowboy music and as I listen I learn I can’t go forward without going backwards in looking for the west in the music I listen to.

Time to reload and Don Edwards sings “Springtime in the Rockies” from his Songs of the West and I listen with skepticism to his cowboy protest that “The Campfire Has Gone Out.” But, in a fit of contagious nostalgia I follow with another Edwards disk. This one a tribute to Marty Robbins called Kin to the Wind. Edwards is so smooth, I forget for the moment my purpose to find the west in its musical reincarnation -- that is if there is life after the campfire has gone out. But the Stamey, Wilkie, Edwards interludes actually help because without them there would be no sane foundation for departure.

Elko‘s up. Both discs. It‘s final stretch time before I-80 and my emotions run high, laughing, crying, a guffaw. By Gerlach I’m intense and worn out from so much cowboy lore, and I hold to my personal tradition with a pit stop at Bruno’s before I beeline south to I-80 where I‘ll make an abrupt left turn. Outside, nothing has changed and why should it? It’s late January. The drive by desert is in its winter tan, prickly tumbleweeds are mashed-welded in barbwire, white-capped mountains to the east and low clouds curve across a sky that goes from bright to dim lit. By Fernley I am submerged in the music, an unfulfilled but saturated disciple. I make my left turn and head east and into the west. On this straight stretch of I-80 Tom Russell is the only singer to approach the slim edge where cowboy story falls off and his mix of border, urban and ill fate picks up. And the sage brush disappears to a corridor of cheat grass heading for the hills. Enough for now, I push a Lefty Frizzell into the dash, satisfied to sit back and daydream of my summers on the banks of the Pecos just outside Carlsbad, New Mexico.

What’s happened so far, Freddie?

Correct me if you will, Freddie, but in virtually every “cowboy” song there is a story. I would think that is the standard, that a story must begin and end. Just like your Tucson, wouldn’t you say? That’s the written word, the lyrics, but what about the music? No limits there, huh Freddie? Music to me is like math. There are unlimited combinations, unlimited directions and unlimited sum totals. Great music walks the underside of the understated. And when it does this successfully it also deliciously teases the senses. That’s the deal I make with the music I listen to.

So, now I’m in Elko front row, looking, listening for that understatement, that teasing of the senses. And, as I listen I keep my pledge to look for the west.

Sitting in the orchestra pit converted to folding chairs on a raised platform for the press as timing would have it, I am face to face with Cowboy Celtic. Wilkie explains, as he has many times to many audiences, that his music is a retracing of the roots of cowboy music back to their beginnings in Scotland and Ireland. I have heard Cowboy Celtic live a number of times and it never occurred to me until now that Wilkie has taken on a hell of a responsibility -- he has assumed the leadership role of not just informing his audience but of educating them. No wonder he goes to Arizona and the Giants spring training each year for relief. Lucky for the now-educated audience, he and the band are the first to play this set because Celtic is followed by three teenage harmonizing sisters, playing retro fiddles and sounding amazingly like the Andrews Sisters or was it the McGuire Sisters taking me back to the three-part harmony of “Sincerely.” But they’re cute, they try hard and they get a big friendly hand. And then the main act.

Guests from Brazil, headliners there, we professional doubters are told, but after only a few fingerings of the button accordion, we become convert believers. Renato Borghetti, backed by two guitars and flute/sax knocks the pro-cowboy audience for a loop and he isn’t even wearing boots. Instead he’s wearing tan espidrils, black gaucho pants that taper tight at the ankles, a multi-colored woven belt, black T-shirt and a round, tan flat brim hat of Brazilian folk tradition, He’s drama, theater, suspense and a superb talent that has taken the accordion out of its polka-at-the-parish hall to an orchestration of jazz, classics and a South American beat that is always on the edge of breaching the understated, teasing hell out of the senses. Sensually romancing his band one musician at a time, Borghetti moves like a Mick Jagger with polish, a direct-in-line descendent of Marcel Marceau and a carbon of Jacques Tati, all wrapped into one angular accordion player, Borghetti teases, drives and challenges his sidemen in a series of inter-related pieces with quick accordion riffs back to Astor Piazzolla. And what do cowboys know of Piazzolla‘s “The New Tango” or this guy called Borghetti except they loved it. When Borghetti takes it all to a cresendo-pause-cresendo-finale they’re standing and stomping for more.

Back stage with Wilkie and Denise Withnell in the men’s anteroom where the two leaders of Cowboy Celtic are accommodating the questions of a Toronto reporter in black vest and boots who had never heard of Cowboy Celtic or the Poetry Gathering until one day when he was rummaging through the Internet. David and Denise tell him they live in Canada but most of their performances are in the U.S. because that’s where their agent is. And they politely go through the A, B Cs of Wilkie’s educational spiel while band members from Whit Smith’s Hot Jazz Caravan come and go stashing their instruments under the coat rack. The interview is one of those fill me in as we go sessions with David and Denise leading the way. Eventually, the Toronto reporter, ready to graduate to the next level, asks “Just what is cowboy music?” Ah, hah. The timing is perfect. Denise calmly quotes the late cowboy poet Buck Ramsey. “Cowboy music,” she says leaning back under her wide brimmed hat, “is whatever the cowboy likes.”

That could be the easy answer, but I think it’s more complicated than that. That‘s a time-constraint brush-off response because whatever music the cowboy likes doesn’t necessarily mean it fits comfortably with our broad preconception of cowboy music.

But, hell where do you go from there? Back to Toronto, I guess. Interview’s over. Everyone’s apparently satisfied.

But it wasn’t really over, it was just downhill from Borghetti. I’m sidetracked and it’s a good thing. No dead end spur on a railroad to nowhere, but a Rolling Stone article written thirty-five years ago by Grover Lewis. I am catching up on my reading. The article is “Hopping and Grimacing with Jethro Tull” and I come across this quote by Ian Anderson:

“People claim that drugs make music easier to comprehend. My reaction to that is I don’t think music should be easy to listen to. There’s an unhealthy tendency afoot nowadays to make rock music easy to absorb. That’s exactly the opposite of what I want to do musically. I think music of all kinds should require an effort from everyone involved. Both musicians and audience should be struggling toward something, even if it’s not necessarily the same thing. To be getting somewhere toward communication, they should both be growing and climbing toward something -- making an effort. And probably not getting there…”

Anderson makes my point for me, supporting my own argument and making a tribute to Grover Lewis, born the same year as I but gone from this side more than ten years now. I hope Jann Wenner doesn’t get pissed and sue me.

At the Star where I once sat with star performers over a Basco dinner a few years ago, now I‘m standing around with the same stars waiting for a table. When was it, three years ago? Four? They were a happy bunch then, gnawing on jokes and steaks. Russell, Zarzyski, Tyson, McRae. Tonight they are a somber lot, all humor gone or lost. I don’t ask them the big question, “What is cowboy music and where‘s it going?” because the timing isn’t right. They’re numb, zombie like, bored with the world and the air among them is flat, off key. Three of them drift into the shadows of their own dry, monotonous circle and occasionally glance in my direction without seeing. There is no music in them. Who is this guy anyway? I wait around almost too long, almost to the point of no turning back. No one is talking because no one is sure who’s really in and who isn’t. They gravitate to each other and I decide fuck this and leave. But I wonder to myself, can they make the struggle, as Anderson says, toward something -- can they make an effort? Can they tease the senses? Can they approach the understated without violating its boundaries?

On stage Tom Russell, an L.A. ex-pat living somewhere outside nowhere El Paso, makes the struggle. Nowhere El Paso because I once traveled through there on a train and looking out on the outskirts of town I thought to myself this is a great place to drop out because no one would even want to look for you in this godforsaken hole. Russell alone this year at Elko among his dinner partners, not to exclude Borghetti, hits the makeshift stage and instantly sets up a challenge between himself and the audience. “See if you get this,” is his message as he sings to a half-filled room at a free performance. He takes off at a full sprint into a new one called “Stealing Electricity“ from his about-to-be-released Love & Fear CD. A social conscience writer and singer, Russell‘s new song is about desperate Mexicans stealing electricity off power lines along the border, men willing to risk frying themselves for a little light and heat at home. But this afternoon Russell is playing to himself, even his buddies off stage are numb to the challenge. By the applause it’s hard to say if this is “cowboy music.” Next he sings Joe Ely’s “Me and Billy the Kid Never Got Along,” an unscheduled antidote to Stamey’s tribute to Bill Bonney. And he closes with “All This Way for the Short Ride” and Zarzyski recites the opening lines to his own poem as Russell takes it for a ride of another kind and then everybody quietly files out into the grey winter sky hanging over Elko.

That night on the main stage Ian Tyson semi-perks up telling the full house, “When I first came to Elko I realized I could write new songs.” The implication, the stroking of the audience, was that Elko was accepting of new ideas and new music. In other words, cowboy music is whatever the cowboy likes. But this night Tyson is one dimensional, moody if not cranky and his performance is uninspired and lacks the struggle to get somewhere. Tyson’s fans forgive him and I think of something Wilkie said back stage “You have to be in the West to understand cowboy music.”

What do you think, Freddie? Do you agree with Wilkie when he says “You have to be in the West to understand cowboy music?” Or, are we still to define just what is cowboy music?

Driving home I thought back on all the music I’d heard the week before and I looked at the stash of CDs I’d played one after the other on the way to Elko. But this time I didn’t play any music. None at all. I was drained. I felt tried, worn out and short-changed. Something was off kilter. Only in isolated moments did I hear music remotely approaching the experimental and I wondered whatever became of the cosmic cowboy. My goal was to trace the music of the West to its present body, not knowing what I would find but assuming I would find something. This was not a grand idea on a large scale, but an honest search and questioning. What I found instead, was almost everybody at Elko had cashed their checks before they arrived. Now they were just standing around with their hands in their pockets. I was looking, hoping, to hear something new, something fresh. A piece that might hint at the direction cowboy music was taking, but it wasn’t there. Evidence may be found on old recordings, evidence that a singer-song-writer here and there felt the moment, felt a change, but that’s in the past.

At home I looked up Tom Russell’s web site and found this:

“All that remains is to define things in terms of your own personal ragged art, and struggle out on stage and stagger on though the night; away from anything trendy and programmed. Attempt something nova-honest and bone hard. Everything else is a lie …there is nothing new under the sun.”

What do you say, Freddie?