The way to beat fundamentalism is to
find yourself interred at a fundamentalist drug rehabilitation facility
for eighteen months as a teenager. “I was only on pills for half as
long,” says John Murry about the pharmaceutical speed he was given as a
“slow” student at his Mississippi high school. “They gave me the pills
and then they locked me up when I took them. I trafficked in righteous
indignation when they let me out, but god damn it, it turned out they
were right.” Years later, dead from heroin, San Francisco’s first
responders showed him how Lazarus felt. A few times. Not born again, but
not dead either.
The way to Catholicism if you’re John Murry is through Graham Greene and
Walker Percy. Literature goes a long way for some people – the people
who read it without prejudice and don’t parade their reading list around
in place of personal substance. It’s in John Murry’s blood. He’s
William Faulkner’s grandson. Or nephew. “I got all the way to being his
son, once.” It depends whom you ask or who’s doing the talking. But John
Murry can tell you which of his cousins or uncles came to find himself
transmogrified into fictional characters in Faulkner’s novels. There’s
no separation of fiction and reality in John Murry’s lineage. It’s all
reality, just like Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote. When asked what he
liked to read, Faulkner always answered, “I read Don Quixote and The
Bible every year.” The quote is different if you read it in the
biographies. But that’s how it’s told in the Murry family and that’s how
John Murry remembers it and John Murry doesn’t ever forget anything.
Tupelo, Mississippi is John Murry’s hometown. He immigrated to Oakland,
California seven years ago for the Mexican Coca-Cola. “If you eat the
rust off the bottleneck, it keeps you healthy. I learned that in
England.” England because that’s where he goes to perform the death
ballads he writes and records with Bob Frank. Rolling Stone’s Senior
Editor David Fricke wrote of their World Without End “all bullets,
blades and guilt without end…. With his low, hanging-judge drawl, Murry
sounds as severe and modern as Leonard Cohen.... production here [Tim
Mooney and John Murry] is as antique as a sepia print — but also as
immediate as the anguish made elsewhere by the two.” Allan Jones of
UNCUT Magazine called it a “dazzling collection of blasted country folk
and grimly haunting murder ballads, shot through with harrowing images
of death, damnation and eternal suffering...” People like to talk about
what Jim Dickinson said. About John Murry’s records with Bob Frank, Jim
Dickinson said, “The lost cry out in song. Cold as an assassin's blade.
Burning with the heat of a pistol's breath. Dark and deep as the grave.
This recording is timeless as death. It will haunt your dreams and
follow you down the shadow-filled street just out of sight."
John Murry began recording The Graceless Age (produced by Murry, Tim
Mooney, and Kevin Cubbins) four years ago in San Francisco. From there,
he brought the tapes to Memphis and back again, adding layers of sound
as thick as, what? San Francisco fog? Mississippi mud? No. That’s
fucking ridiculous. As John Murry says, “No matter how many fuzz pedals I
use, no matter how many synths, they’re always going to say
‘Mississippi’ and ‘southern rock.’” Of course territory figures into the
songs of The Graceless Age, but good luck pigeonholing.
It’s a big sound at times – backup singers, panoramic guitar noise,
sweet piano melodies, an orchestra of strings, bells, horns… – but no
matter how ethereal or expansive, at the heart of each song is something
simple maybe written on an acoustic guitar or upright piano about loss
and solitude and bad fucking-up, not always with a guilty conscience.
Listen to “California” with its mechanical loops over a constant,
hypnotic guitar line. It’s pretty. It’s also easy to imagine riding
alone over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland, generally
disgusted with the scenery, as though it’s the scenery’s fault. Listen
to “Little Colored Balloons” – sparse with piano, cello, mournful backup
singing, and John Murry’s hoarse voice protesting too much. Drugs, bad
choices, melody and countermelody.
John Murry knows what it sounds like to be Elvis, alone in Memphis,
bloated with pills and mistakes, about to hit the floor. There’s a
gospel choir and backwards guitar.
--Creston Lea, Author of "Wild Punch"
Burlington, Vermont, October 2010
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