The Lonesome Picker Rides Again

On the Santa Monica Freeway in Los Angeles there is an interchange where two ramps take off from opposite sides of the road and soar two hundred feet in the air, curving so close together at their peak that a man could jump from one ramp to the other. I think that it's the most beautiful place in the world.

Every summer day thousands of high school kids pass under these ramps on the way to the beach, locked into the smooth turn of the freeway by the sound of their AM radios. In the afternoon they return with sand on the carpeting and the radio still playing.

Here in Cambridge few students drive; there are few freeways and few good reasons for going to the beach. And rock has faded in importance along with the car radio.

Few rock artists have the power to penetrate the circumscribed purposefulness of college to provide the kind of universal focus of experience that is expressed in phrases like "the summer that Sgt. Pepper was out." Even such ideas may make us uncomfortable. Surely we have better things to think about.

In the past year, perhaps only Carol King's album Tapestry was good enough to join the vernacular despite such obstacles, and for a few months she had most of the country under her thumb. Unfortunately it seems that now only geniuses have a chance of becoming commonplace.

In a society without such culturally enshrined music, however, a great variety of individual talents can flourish. Many recent albums have been self-contained masterpieces, capable of providing private enjoyment for the same reasons that they lack collective appeal.

John Stewart's album of last year, Willard, was one such little-known success. Ironically Stewart, a former member of the Kingston Trio, has always been extremely sensitive to the fine details of his AM-oriented boyhood in Los Angeles. Because he chooses to describe those details, instead of reproducing them. Willard is probably inherently unsuited for AM play.

The best songs on Willard are largely nostalgic views of a past to which he doesn't really want to return. He is almost academically concerned with the mundane activities which absorbed the peaks and depressions of most people's lives at the time of the Kingston Trio...back-seat loving, pumping gas, truck driving, horse driving, driving.

In Willard, as well as his first solo album California Bloodlines, the concreteness of Stewart's lyrics and the simple instrumentation keep any tinge of romanticism from Stewart's blunt descriptions. For example. "Big Joe":

Well he's a big wheel driver, mama

Workin for the Trucking Co.,

Drivin them big old semi rigs down the roads in Ohio.

Thought that you should know.

Big Joe he ain't ever comin home.

James Taylor plays guitar and sings backup on much of Willard, but because of Stewart's refusal to embellish his powerful songs with either violins or vague emotional symbols, Willard maintains a hard-edged integrity missing on Taylor's own albums. Stewart even managed to write a sensible rock song about Jesus Christ, making the simple claim. "I do believe I'd of been a friend of Jesus in his time."

Willard especially gains in integrity in comparison with Stewart's latest album, entitled The Lonesome Picker Rides Again. Stewart's tunes are good enough; the big differences are the lyrics and the production. Where Willard was knowledgeable, Picker uses exaggerated symbolism. Where Stewart used to rely on his gravelly honest voice, he now feels compelled to call in batallions of strings. The mushy production spoils two of the best songs on the album, "Touch of the Sun" and "Just an Old Love Song." But the strings are only a symptom of a deeper disease.

The entire album is in the painful tradition of cute observations and ambiguous political positions which rock audiences have been rewarding with applause for years. Stewart certainly takes his messages seriously enough--if he didn't, he might let us ignore them and enjoy the music.

As it is, Stewart's concern with the lost past turns, in Picker, into a vague, if not reactionary, romanticization of "kids everywhere, gettin' on in the back seat of the car." He sums up his disaffection with American life with the parable "Shoot all the brave horses and how will we ride," which is repeated for a tiring three minutes at the end of the album.

Another cut, after describing the dangers facing women hitchhikers, cryptically warns, "Wake up the child, there's wolves in the kitchen," Stewart is no wolf, but the conventional male-oriented situations which he evokes uncritically throughout the album is perhaps an indication that we should be on the lookout for enemies more insidious than wolves. The album thrives on swayback women walking by Stewart's side, faithful "women of the road." Stewart has not transcended the "kick-em-out-of-bed and hit-the-road" version of human independence that perhaps many of us accept, too, at least in our music.

The back cover of the album features the traditionally obnoxious picture of Stewart's doting girl friend clinging to his arm. Given the modest musical dynamics of the album, many listeners will probably see little reason to spend time unravelling Stewart's subtle brand of chauvinism.

If the rock on both Willard and Picker is already stripped of its popular form by the inherent limitations of its appeal, Willard at least deserves a wider audience on the basis of its musical content alone. In Picker, however, Stewart hasn't added much to the drifting times that will probably last until Carol King's next album comes out.