She walks alone along a lonely highway each day.
She dreams that one day a man will pull up in a car.
He’ll open up the door, she’ll climb in and he will say:
“Hey babe, whatcha know? I hope you’re ready to go,
’cause today is a perfect day for chasing tornadoes.”
Swampland gospel.
Country music has always had a wayward heart. It’s lonely and a little deranged, tremblingly hunkered down in the pew to atone for the previous night’s “incident.” This thorny truth – its hungry, desperate heart – is what might have convinced the genre to turn up the floodlights in the late ’70s, reinventing itself as the grotesquely sweet and earnest country cabaret strummed by the likes of Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and all those other bright-mouthed, can-canning folks, effectively turning the genre into a Honky Tonk Disneyland.
Said floodlights might have cast the shadows off stage, but it also amplified them, occasioning them to multiply in fertile periphery. The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, had of course always been around, to keep the dark and broken flame afire, but since the onslaught of mainstream candy-coated country most people are forgiven for thinking the genre begins and ends with airbrushed barn dances beneath a winking moon.
Nestled in an unlikely country music section – sticking out like a sore thumb between the smile-strained faces of Mister and Missus Country – Jim White’s quietly auspicious debut, 1997’s (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted) Wrong-Eyed Jesus! weirdly glows. The cover and booklet are strewn with offbeat and sinister biblical references; inside, the songs are disheveled by beauty.
Raised in Pensacola, Fla., White endured a childhood he acknowledges as having been wildly hypocritical, even schizophrenic. Bloody bar brawls and scripture and wife beatings and gospel choirs and hurricanes and drought and lung-belching alcoholics and molested children and “Revelations” and drugs and lynchings and crimson-faced Bible-thumping preachers all cluttered together in the same space, vying for breath.
The impact of this grotesquery on White’s sensitive consciousness seems to have been profound, bruising and transforming him into a roaming loner who toyed with and then dropped several unrelated fates. (White is said to have been, at various times, homeless, a fashion model, a professional surfer, a preacher, a boxer and a New York City cab driver.)
Then David Byrne’s funky indie label Luaka Bop offered him a friendly record deal – and the sun went down on the moon.
White’s debut arrived fully formed. Like his wild, mythologized childhood (the liner notes also contain a shocking, illuminating 12-page account of a string of brutishly dazzling and disturbing co-incidences from a season of his youth), (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted) Wrong-Eyed Jesus! entertains unlikely bedfellows.
There are suggestions of jazz; glinting, broken plucks of guitar; unexpected flashes of soul music; majestic flourishes; funky drum backdrops; ghosted vocals echoing themselves out of rhythm; a melancholy collection of devils and occasional, thrilling choruses from divine entities. The songs contain scatterlings and outcasts, beggars and rapists and innocents and killers and dreamers in its narrative menagerie.
It is a world to get lost in, and, thankfully, Jim White somehow succeeds in coating these often terrible scenes with a gorgeous musical sheen, so that one feels safe even while bathing in darkness and moonshine. At its essence, this array of stylistic influences aside, (The Mysterious Tale of How I Shouted) Wrong-Eyed Jesus! is country music. Honest, original, un-glossed country. Music from a haunted, broken Americana soil. Perverse and gifted and otherworldly.
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