Real Animal
Alejandro Escovedo doesn’t stumble through the past
By Chris Morris
I first laid eyes on Alejandro Escovedo Jan. 14, 1978, at Winterland in San Francisco; Escovedo’s local punk band the Nuns was opening for the Sex Pistols. I would see him perform many times after that legendarily chaotic show 30 years ago, in a variety of incarnations. His new album Real Animal (Back Porch/Manhattan), out June 24, reaches back for sober reflection on that long-ago epoch in his career.
The Austin-based singer-songwriter-guitarist’s last album, 2006’s The Boxing Mirror, had a similar feel to it: It was a somber yet hard-rocking contemplation of a narrowly averted death, penned in the wake of a life-threatening bout with hepatitis C that sidelined Escovedo for four years. Real Animal finds him in a similar state of mind. Its album-closing ballad “Slow Down” notes, reflecting the musician’s Buddhist beliefs, “I can’t live in this moment/When I’m stumbling through the past.”
To reach that “now,” Escovedo has written what’s best described as a song cycle that recalls, and exorcises, memories of his Southern California boyhood, his days as a San Francisco punker, his time in the New York demimonde, and his epoch with the New York-to-Austin-via-L.A. cowpunk band Rank & File.
None of Escovedo’s previous albums has been so time- and place-specific. The songs – co-authored by San Francisco musician Chuck Prophet, who is also featured in the band – are like snapshots, some with the corners torn off or the faces obscured. “Nuns Song” is a portrait of Jennifer Miro, the Nuns’ chilly, deadpan lead singer, with whom Escovedo apparently had a tumultuous relationship. (Another Nun, the ill-fated Richie Dietrich, turns up in “Smoke.”) “Chip N’ Tony” of course refers to the Kinman brothers, with whom Escovedo was briefly partnered in Rank & File.
The landscape these real-life characters live in is just as carefully defined: “Chelsea Hotel” is written from the perspective of a youthful resident of the New York artist dive, who remembers seeing Sid Vicious led away in handcuffs, while “Golden Bear” is an oblique recollection of the long-defunct Huntington Beach club. “Hollywood Hills” is a restless farewell to a punk-era paramour, while “Swallows of San Juan” ruefully recalls a day when the musician
Had a blonde TV special
And an English half-stack
I lost them both in a deal
But someday, someday I’ll get them back.
It would be easy for Escovedo to look back in anger or even up old scores on an album like this. But the writing is measured, almost reportorial. He’s making peace with himself by writing about his past from the dry but not humorless perspective of the present. Escovedo realized a few years back that he is extremely mortal; thus the most telling, and most explanatory, song on Real Animal – a knowing nod at the follies of a complicated, high-velocity, often casually misspent youth – contains the lyric, “We’re only gonna live so long
We’ve still got time/But never quite as much as we need.”
Though it contains Escovedo’s customary lyricism, the album wallops pretty hard for most of its playing time; Prophet adds punch to the unique string-based front line of violinist Susan Voelz and cellist Brian Standefer. Even the choice of a producer is a spasm of retrospection: Tony Visconti – whose ’70s work with David Bowie and T. Rex had a marked impact on Escovedo’s glammy ’80s Austin band Buick MacKane – picks up where John Cale left off on The Boxing Mirror. (The album cover was shot by Mick Rock, the photographer responsible for iconic images of Bowie, Iggy Pop, and many other early glamsters.)
Old fans will find a rewarding and beautiful dissertation on the roots of Alejandro Escovedo’s rewarding catalog. If you’re not familiar with his stuff – and you should be – start here and work your way back.
Chris Morris hosts Watusi Rodeo on Indie 103.1 every Sunday at 9 a.m.
Published: 06/11/2008
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