MERMAID AVENUE journey to the Past

Rip It Up, Issue 251, 1 July 1998, Page 11

MERMAID AVENUE journey to the Past

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Take a look at that picture. Remind you of anyone? "You know why we chose that picture?" Billy Bragg asked from LA, inbetween going to the movies and watching the World Cup. "Because in it he looks like Joe Strummer. And do you know what Joe Strommer's nickname was at school? Woody!" There's a note of triumph in Billy's voice as he says this, as though he's found one more reason to feel vindicated for completing this project.

He surely doesn't need one. As he says, you can trace a direct line from Woody Guthrie's songs, which articulated both the personal and the political so clearly, to the music of The Clash and from there on to the latest incarnations of punk. From Woody to Rancid suddenly seems no great leap. "He was a punk rocker in the strictest sense," says Bragg, "writing antifascist slogans on his guitar 30 years before The Clash."

Guthrie's songs, played on an acoustic guitar inscribed This Machine Kills Fascists', chronicled his travels around the USA of the 30's. Songs as familiar as This Land is Your Land', 'Pastures of Plenty', 'Do Re Mi' and hundreds more describing the poverty, devastation and unbreakable human spirit he encountered.

Ever restless, he moved to New York and became a minor celebrity and a hit on the folk circuit until Huntington's Chorea, the incurable hereditary condition that killed him, set in. A self-confessed Guthrie imitator called Bob Dylan showed up and took his place.

Between the onset of the disease in 1954 and his death in 1967 Woody Guthrie lived on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn and never stopped writing songs, estimated now to number more than 2,500. In 1995 his daughter Nora offered this previously unheard material to Billy Bragg. Though at first it might seem strange that

a bloke from the East End of London who was first fired up by The Clash and The Jam would take on the songs of this quintessential American folk singer, both wrote from a leftwing standpoint and injected their powerful rhetoric into the music industry without for-

getting to entertain. Bragg himself admits he first thought the idea a bad one until Nora Guthrie showed him the archive of songs. "I'll tell you what did it. I came across a song about a flying saucer, which is not what you expect from Woody Guthrie, and there was a note in the corner

that said two words: 'Supersonic boogie'. It was kinda like Woody kicking me, going: 'Do it. I dare you.' That's what the whole project was like."

The result is Mermaid Avenue, 15 original Woody Guthrie songs performed and co-written with Wilco and aided by Natalie Merchant. Bragg took the lyrics and, with Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, attached them to simple, melodic frameworks. But it was'nt meant to be a tribute album. "There have been some good ones, but this project was always going to be something different. We were just taking something that was already there and putting it into a form that felt right. We never changed any lyrics, though we dropped a few that didn't seem relevant. Mainly we wanted to be as true as possible to Woody's songs." Not a tribute album, but a genuine collaboration between artists. It just happens that one of them is dead.

You get the feeling that Bragg's passion for this project may carry him a long way yet. When asked about things other than this record he doesn't take long to steer back toward it, while allowing himself a laugh at the memory of his last visit here. "It was pissing down with rain. Lucky I was in a tent, ha ha." Luckier than most of us at that particular Big Day Out.

Back in the present, Bragg is careful not to

put too much weight on the past. He consciously didn't read Guthrie's autobiographical Bound for Glory until he'd written most of the songs.

What he does do is take care to put these songs in today's context. "He's much more rock'n'roll than we give him credit for. I get the feeling that now might be Woody's time." That may be true: these songs of an American folk singer, put to music by a East London Marxist, talk about the same issues you'll find in the songs of the punk bands they in some way inspired. They tie together a lot of things which are hugely relevant right now. Bragg has obviously thought about it, particularly in light of an economic crisis that could

(in some ways) echo the Great Depression. 'The market is more dangerous than Marxism," he says, but with a laugh. Luckily he also has another more positive image in mind. "I imagine Mermaid Avenue as the kind of thing you can listen to as you're driving out to Piha." With luck, plenty of people will be doing that. It doesn't look like there's a new Billy Bragg album coming anytime soon. By his reckoning there are over 2000 more sets of complete lyrics to be put to music. "Imagine that! I could be doing this for another twenty years."

David Glynn