Tom Russell’s ‘Folk Hotel’ a lively haunt
TOM Russell had a dream about Hank Williams and wrote a song about it. “I asked him, did he need a drink?” he sings. “He said, ‘Son, you can take that to the bank.’ ”
But the song is only a bit about the great country songwriter. The rest focuses on Russell’s family and history. There’s a funny verse that’s based on the true story of a beer bottle flying through the air and smashing through Russell’s car windshield when he was attending a George Jones concert in the early 1980s. And there’s a poignant verse about Russell’s mother, who died young in the ’70s: At one point, Russell left her hospital room and returned again to find a rose on her forehead. “I didn’t know what to think — whether it was a nurse that did that or a miracle,” recalls the prolific folk and country singersongwriter in a phone interview.
The most poignant verse in “The Last Time I Saw Hank,” from Russell’s new album “Folk Hotel,” deals with his father. He was a “pretty high-up dude” who raised his family outside Los Angeles, owned horses, played poker with baseball stars Don Zimmer and Johnny Podres, and drove a 1956 Coupe de Ville. “(Life) is going really fast. In fact, it’s going too fast. We’re in private schools,” Russell recalls, from one of his two homes, outside Bern, Switzerland. “He overinvested. He won’t cop a plea and winds up in L.A. County Jail.
“One day, we had a Hollywood swimming pool,” Russell continues. “The next we had nothing, and moved in with our grandfather.”
Russell, who refuses to confirm his age, laughing that “you gotta do some digging, it may be on wiki, or it may be a bunch of (nonsense),” is what you might call a singersongwriter’s singer-songwriter. His name appears on dozens of great songs, from Dave Alvin’s “Haley’s Comet” to Johnny Cash’s “Veteran’s Day” to his own classics “Navajo Rug” and “Tonight We Ride.” (He’s also a novelist, beginning with 1995’s “Bloodsport,” and a painter who specializes in cartoonish, colorful water buffaloes, ravens, trucks and buildings.) Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti once called him “Johnny Cash, Jim Morrison and Charles Bukowski rolled into one” and “the wounded heart of America.”
Russell has applied his deepvoiced, no-frills California accent to collections of plainspoken folk songs (2006’s “Love & Fear” is one of his best) and elaborate concept albums (like 1999’s 25-song, guest-filled
“The Man From God Knows Where,” which also deals with his father and his family, and 2015’s 50-song “The Rose of Roscrae,” a folk opera that Russell has referred to as “‘Les Miserables’ with cowboy hats”).
After “Roscrae,” a project he’d been contemplating for decades, Russell simplified this year, putting out a collection of songs by the Canadian duo Ian & Sylvia (who happen to be his longtime friends), then the (mostly) original album “Folk Hotel.”
“I wanted to go back to one man and one guitar, singing and playing really good songs,” says Russell, who, with his psychologist wife, Nadine, splits his time between Switzerland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I went back to the basics. I’m starting over, in a way, but I’ve got it right.”
“Folk Hotel” is a dreamy album full of stories about Russell’s favorite subject — colorful characters down on their luck. He builds lyrics on a foundation of gorgeous details like “our clothes came back smelling of cheap perfume and Muscatel” (from “Up In the Old Hotel,” about New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel) and the late blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “scars on his ankles where the chain I wanted to go back to one man and one guitar, singing and playing really good songs. I went back to the basics. from the chain gang cut his skin.”
Early on, Russell earned a master’s degree in criminology and worked with a well-known sociologist, the late William Chambliss, in Nigeria during the Biafran War. Then he tired of the academic life, quit the field and landed in western Canada.
“I walked into a bar one day and thought, ‘I’m going to start a band and start at the bottom,’ ” he recalls. “I never really regretted it, but it took me about 30 years until I was making a pretty good living.”
He has since spent his career writing and singing about “people that were real to me,” he says. Ian Tyson of Ian & Sylvia once told Russell not to “try to be Tolstoy every time,” and Russell frequently heeds this advice — although he occasionally comes out with a complex political song like 2007’s “Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall?,” a plea for tolerance regarding Mexican immigrants, which took on new resonance during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last year.
“I try to write about people without pulling out an easy punch line to satisfy a group of people living in a box on either side of the spectrum,” says Russell, who is working on a country album he hopes to release in the next year or two. “I play cowboy songs and, believe me, some of those people
(at cowboy festivals) are pretty conservative. I don’t try to go up there and get in trouble. I try to sing honest songs.”