The band behind one of my favorite CDs of 2002, Dick Smith, is back. Woozy, their third release, finds the Illinois-based trio becoming a quartet, and still making delirious acoustic music about life on the fringes.
The addition to the band is Scott Stevenson, whose keyboards and accordion round out Dick Smith’s sound in interesting ways. We’ve still got Bob Kuhn and Dave Nelson doing most of the lead singing (both with lots of twang and drawl) with Nelson on resonator guitars, Kuhn on mandolin, and Dave Ramont on banjo, and all occasionally throwing in together for harmonies — sometimes sweet and sometimes raucous. Altogether, Woozy is sonically more adventurous than their previous effort, Smoke Damage, but not so’s it ever gets in the way of the shambling songs, the down-home music or the clever lyrics.
It’s a strong set of 15 songs. Right out of the gate, the first three are written one each by Kuhn, Nelson and Ramont. Kuhn’s “Threadbear” is a slow shuffle with some Cajun-like accordion and lots of clever wordplay about the role entropy plays in a person’s appearance over time: “Evolution stole our coats, hair by hair, but not the bear . . .” Nelson’s “Show Me a Door,” sung in his craggy drawl, is a menacing hillbilly parable on the Cain and Abel theme, with lines like “Don’t give a damn about forgiveness, I’d rather char eternally,” and yowls punctuating the instrumental breaks. And Ramont’s “Shinola” is a languid but dark meditation on love, accented by Chris Walke’s moaning lap steel.
“Maple Bun,” an uptempo shuffling trucker song, has a zydeco feel thanks to Stevenson’s accordion work. “Peewee Valley” is a fast polka about a guy in love with a girl who’s in prison, with a slow waltz in the middle-eight section. Dobro and organ give a soulful sexy sound to “Afternoon,” a romantic ode to the post-meridian tryst. The hillbilly shuffle of “Head Hands Feet” evokes a children’s game in what is either a redneck love song or an ode to Sunday dinner, or maybe both.
The Dicks love to sing about booze and its effects. Stevenson’s “Death and Liquor” is a slow, sad-comic ballad of a drunk thrown out of the house by his girlfriend, with the mournful refrain, “There’s only two things that could keep me from you, and death and liquor are both of the two.” “Henry Clay” is the ballad of a mule that develops a fondness for moonshine and goes looking for love: “Henry Clay, Henry Clay, he’s an ass when he’s drunk, you better stay away.” And the final track, “Likker Pilla” paints a minimalist picture of a camping trip in which alcohol plays a big role.
My favorite is the outlaw ballad “John Wesley Hardin,” a fully orchestrated song, dark and ominous, about the toll of violence and the consequences of prison, with a moral of sorts in the last verse: “A man’s reputation, it flies on ahead, just to land on a poster with a price on your head, when a bullet leaves your gun, you can’t never take it back, a black rider a day behind you, following your track.”
It’s obvious from the photos in the CD booklet that the Dicks love their kitsch, but thankfully they usually stop just short of it in their music. I’m beginning to suspect that Dick is a direct descendant of Harry Smith, the original proponent of “weird old American” music. At any rate, Woozy continues Dick Smith’s tradition of superb home-made twisted Americana.
(Clay Head, 2005)
