DEATH VALLEY DAYS: Lost Songs and Rarities, 1985-1995

Track Listing

Liner Notes

This album is not a "best of," but a chronicle of the experiments and the lesser numbers that didn't fit into the scheme of things at any one time. It is not a comprehensive collection, but a series of snapshots, leaving plenty of room for a second collection to plug the gaps and tell the same story from a different angle yet again. It is also fragmentary because of the long hiatuses between record labels at different parts of their career.

It's a surprise (to me at least) to find how all the official albums are coherent in sound and don't have outtakes associated with them. This is similar to the way that the Byrds always saw their albums, as annual aural magazine, each one being a document of where they were at a particular point in time. "On the Beach" for instance would have no place on any of the albums recorded immediately before or after it. If you think of the Walkabouts story as being documented by their albums, then this album of lost songs presents us with totally different viewpoint on their story, in places even you could say that it is a totally different story.

Here, we first meet the fledgling group with three tracks recorded in 1985/86.

"Drunk On A Civilized Rule" -- at the stage of writing these notes, I don't know if this will get included in the collection or not--I hope it does, because it is something left field and weird in the Walkabouts' canon. The "Weights and Rivers" mix curiously disjointed, the group and engineer busy exploring the big studio possibilities leave the instruments sounding blown apart from each other giving it an eerie emptiness as though this were their equivalent of Skip Spence's "Oar". The song itself is constructed in blocks, a nod to the sequential form of Brian Wilson's "Cabinessence". Chris Eckman said at one point, "It's always important both to love what you do and then later to be critical about what you've done. It was really important to us to dislike 'Weights and Rivers'." But that's not to say that there aren't some fine and overlooked songs there. Two excellent tracks, "Linda Evans" and "Cyclone" slipped out as a single on Necessity Records in the summer of 1987 and these two plus the instrumental, "Mai Tai Time" and their cover of Love's "Gather Round" surfaced again as extra tracks on the CD version of "Rattlesnake Gardens". Still unreleased is the song that gives this collection its title, "Death Valley Days" is their out and out Love tribute, Chris singing soft and smooth like "Deja Vu" Arthur Lee with John Echolls lead guitar lines and the words a cauldron of unrelated snippets - like most Love songs, I have no idea what it's all about, chronicling lowlife, barstool drunks and an air of unease: is Charlie still in jail?

"1 + 1"-- a track that first appeared on "Monkey Business," a compilation tape of Seattle bands put out by Green Monkey Records alongside a track, 'Fiasco', by Melting Fish, a duo featuring Glenn Slater and his brother Mike on keyboards and guitar playing jagged and wooshy, or Red Crayola when they're pop. "1+1" is a song that shows how quickly and easily they were able to shake off the new wave traces that they began with. It uses a definable element of their early sound, the sense of empty spaces. Spaces where the lonesome slowslide guitar solos and the harmonica wails. Indeed "1+1" launches itself into space as does "Barnstorming," which originally appeared in 1986 on "Lowlife," a compilation album of Seattle bands on Ironwood Records. It is a track where Carla's cello and Juanita Homes' violin play early John Cale riffs in a square dance setting, which is a musical pathway nobody to my knowledge has ever explored. It shows early in the tale where the tag of Velvet Underground at Big Pink would be coming from.

The second batch of tracks were recorded in 1989.

"Chain Gang" came to life in a rehearsal space, and was the first recording with Glenn Slater on keyboards. The band play an instrumental over a backing tape of an old Alan Lomax field recording from the 1940s, but what is strange is that the field recording has all the power and the band drift as in laudanum dream--the tension comes out to the chain gang prisoners' driving repetition keeping them at working pace and the 1989 impression of the gang lying exhausted back in the state prison farm at the end of the day. [How strange that they haven't tied this in with 'Got No Chains', a 1988 Walkabouts song that appeared on the 'Sub Pop 200' compilation; a song that catches them at their most folk rock ever, but not folk rock together, rather the one follows the other as the rock explodes exuberantly out of the folk]. This is yet another example of alleys not explored which at a time looked like they had potential for the group, thinking of the use of taped sound on "Robert McFarlane Blues" on ''Rattlesnake Gardens".

Their next step was to cover Neil Young's "On The Beach" live in the studio and given away to completely gobsmacked Unhinged magazine and released as a flexi. It is a track that spans the gap between their early and later styles. There is still space so vast and guitar that's simple and clear though fuzzing at the edges. The backing instruments hold back like jazz musicians leaving just the two instruments to focus at the fore, Carla's voice awash with rich harmonics and that long sustaining guitar. The rest of the instruments make like the shuffle of the waves on the shore rising a couple of times behind the solo to crash like breakers on the beach.

In 1991 they recorded three cover songs in what were probably the best examples of a briefly popular fad of various bands recording tracks by "legendary" artists for release on tribute albums dedicated to those artists. The Walkabouts avoided the pitfalls and managed to retain the feel of the original songs while at the same time making the results definitely their own. They make much more sense here as three songs from the same session than the tribute albums ever did.

They are three songs that they couldn't have written themselves (but isn't that the finest part of the folk tradition hearing how people deal with such songs?). "Big Black Car" is an Alex Chilton song that he recorded in 1974 for Big Star's "Sister Lovers" album. To some it may seem like images of bleak isolation, but to me it's always sounded like a Sunday afternoon song, more a product of being at a loose end than being in despair. "Cello Song" is a Nick Drake song that mixes middle eastern riffs and an English folk song structure and then gets rockier: the whole sounding as psychedelic as early Pink Floyd building strange walls of sound (another missed path). "Maggie's Farm" is Bobby Dylan from "Bringing It All Back Home" in 1965 and The Walkabouts reveling in folk punk again with train rhythms and a rave up guitar solo.

Then comes a grouping of songs with a political slant:

"Break It Down Gently" is an acoustic demo from 1990 of a song that eventually surfaced on "New West Motel." The song follows a little acoustic guitar figure towards an apocalyptic vision of the U.S.A.. The aftermath is punctuated by a moaning harmonica. "Train To Mercy (Italia version)" is the track that the "Scavenger" album turned upon, the ballad that worked, but if you take it from its political slant did it work--do political ballads ever work? The Walkabouts' politics has always been more of a social politicking than being specifically political in the way that classic calypso music was. The song works better here in its stripped down form than did on "Scavenger," but lyrically it's hard not to see it as the end of their use of abstraction, a final accumulation that inevitably led to a reaction towards singing fictional story songs.

There are two songs that were included on the double LP of "New West Motel" and the CD single "Jack Candy." They are both covers. "Prisoner Of Texas" is a traditional song set in isolated space, Bruce Wirth's lap steel and Glenn's accordion playing long hollow notes to Terri's rattlesnake shaker and lone beat drums, the rhythm maintained by Bruce's plucked violin chords as a ghost voice sings, looking back at the gallows where she was hanged. "Yesterday Is Here" is a Tom Waits song, long and slow and with a chorus, "Today's grey skies are tomorrow's tears" that brings to mind how all The Walkabouts' music seems to have rain in it, sometimes explicitly (the line "black rain will come" in "Break It Down Gently"), sometimes just with an overcast atmosphere of clouds. Maybe it comes from Seattle being so close to mountain areas where, to quote Ken Kesey's "Sometimes A Great Notion," the rain never stops falling. "Inauguration Day" a track from Spring 1993, is one of the explicitly rain filled tracks, the singer sings up to his head in mud, the road is washed out and everything else is washed away. It is sparsely recorded with acoustic guitar and violin and such a feel of bleakness that it is one of the few times they sound like any of their contemporaries, on this song plumbing depths only American Music Club have submerged in before.

Next, a couple of tracks recorded during the April 1994 European tour.

"Pass Me On Over" is a live radio session recorded for Studio Brussels. The track is an acoustic version of a song from the "Setting The Woods On Fire" album. The difference is immense. Electric, the song is loud and well...electric, but acoustic, the song and the emotion comes through instead of being hidden. There is also the matter of the density of sound. Comparing the sound with the acoustic track from "Setting The Woods On Fire," "Up In The Graveyard," there's a freer and easier approach to "Pass Me On Over" recorded ever so quickly in an unfamiliar studio. It makes me wonder how much of this whole progression from a new wave band in 1983 to now has been one not so much of style, but of studio technology. The new wave sound being as much the overlay of a particular era of studio culture on inexperienced bands of the time. The changes in The Walkabouts' sound since all led from the studio equipment--certainly the changes in the band have been ones of sound rather than in patterns of notes that are played --indeed, the short almost Wire-like note groupings that are played especially by Chris and Michael are intrinsically the same as they were10 years before.

"Like A Hurricane" was recorded live with Larry Barrett on acoustic guitar for a T.V. show in the Netherlands--Neil Young's songs are so well suited to being raved up, like a Chuck Berry or a Bo Diddley for the 90's: the songs are simple and open all ways, which make them ideal to cover and stamp identity on. The Walkabouts pull this one out rockin'. Chris Eckman's is not a finger flasher guitarist, he knows the tone is the thing--get the tone and the notes come after. As the years pass his tone has lost that clear sustain and become dirtier, fuzzed up and crackling at the edges with noise--probably the inevitable result of touring and the need to quickly impress a fresh audience every night--the downside being that the range of tones he wants to use have become reduced. And yet somewhere along the line, maybe even as a result of that noise, my awareness of his guitar playing has changed from seeing him as an ideal ensemble player to hearing him as one of the few easily recognizable stylists now playing--simple enough to have a memorable character and to seem deceptively effortless.

Finally, there is a brace of songs from various recent sources.

"House Of The Rising Sun," recorded for the soundtrack of Tim Hines' independent feature film, "House Of The Rising" recreates this old traditional, not like Dylan, nor in the jazzy r'n'b swing of the Animals, but as an energetic rocker that celebrates a great tune that shouldn't be forgot simply because the trendy fear it to be a chestnut--rocking it does however make it hard to get the meaning across, you get the words, but not the danger and the drama of the situation. "Loswerden," is a cover in German of a song by Tilman Rossmy, the singer from a now gone band from Hamburg called Die Regierung (that means the Government in German)--the song is a love song saying goodbye, "I think I'll let you go...we don't talk much anymore," a song of regret. The guitar, piano and accordion backing would normally sound like country music, but here it comes closer to cabaret (in the German sense) and I wonder if it is something intrinsic in music derived from such a spiky and long worded language to sound like the ghost of Kurt Weil haunts the score. This runs on into the closing track, "Sand And Gravel Strings," Bruce Wirth's multi-tracked violin instrumental that ended "Sand And Gravel" on "Setting The Woods On Fire" and here it winds the listener out of the album like the music ushers you out of the cinema, both as an ending and maybe also as a key reminding you how cinematic the Walkabouts' music has always been and how that could well be the direction to which they are best suited.

Lost songs and rarities. Maybe that should have been lost paths and possibilities and what you've heard here has shown you not one group called The Walkabouts, but eight or nine. And yet all the way from the beginning of the story to the end the central core of the group's music has lain in tug and tension between the quieter guitar and the louder, so who can say for sure which has turned the day more, the gentle teasing of the former or the white water flow of the latter? Around these the other musicians have gone and come, catching the music on different tides, and also swept on those tides have been the songs. Songs with strange subject matter for rock music, strong on narrative whether in snapshots or lengthened into tales of death, drunkenness, despair and sex. Stories such as these are common currency in folk and country music, but rock has usually preferred candyfloss for lyrics, all the way from the obvious saccharine lust of bubblegum to the drama queens of rock literati: where else would the throwing of tantrums be classed as signs of wildness and living on the edge. The Walkabouts songs have always been simple and subtle; too subtle, too simple to appeal to a wider audience in their home country, too unfamiliar for those that crave candyfloss. As a result, their's is an underground music, not unrecognized, but not widely known, steadily reproving its worth rather than the rapid leap into stardom and just as quick a fading, of most of the media's darlings. The question now is whether they'll find a level like such other great ignored groups as the Flamin' Groovies, NRBQ, Trespassers W, Giant Sand, or Sir Douglas Quintet, or will that slowly but surely increasing audience in Europe lift them to a place in everybody's record collection?

Paul Ricketts

Swindon, England

1996

Detailed Track Listing from Liner Notes

"1 + 1"---1985. Originally appeared on the "Monkey Business" compilation (Green Monkey Records). Produced by Tom Dyer & Tony Kroes at Tom Dyer's home studio. Grant: drums/ Michael: bass, harmonica/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar / Chris : vocals, guitars, lap steel. Written by Chris Eckman (Wolff Songs/ EMI publishing GMBH)

"Barnstorming"---1986. Originally appeared on the "Lowlife" compilation, (Ironwood Records). Produced by Jay Follette, Tony Kroes & The Walkabouts at Ironwood Studios. Juanita Holmes: violin/ Grant: drums/ Michael: bass/ Carla: cello/ Chris: vocals, guitars. "Chain Gang"---1989. Previously unreleased. Recorded by Tony Kroes, live in our rehearsal space. Background tape is from an Alan Lomax field recording from the 1940's. Glenn Slater: keyboards/ Grant: drums/Michael: bass/ Carla: acoustic guitar/ Chris: E-bow guitar. Written by Chris Eckman (Wolff Songs/ EMI publishing GMBH)

"On The Beach" --- 1989. Recorded live in the studio by Tony Kroes at Rubato Sound. First appeared as a flexi in "Unhinged" magazine. Later appeared in 1991 as a b-side for the "Where the Deepwater Goes" single (Sub Pop, 1991). Grant: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: organ/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar/ Chris: electric guitar. Written by Neil Young (Silver Fiddle Music, ASCAP)

"Big Black Car" --- 1991. Recorded for an abandoned Alex Chilton tribute album. Later appeared on the "Where the Deepwater Goes" single (Sub Pop, 1991). Produced by Ed Brooks, Tony Kroes & The Walkabouts at Rubato Sound. Grant: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: piano/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar/ Chris: vocals, guitars. Written by Alex Chilton & Christopher Gage (Ardent Productions Inc., ASCAP)

"Cello Song" ---1991. First appeared on the Nick Drake tribute album "Brittle Days" (Imaginary, 1992). Produced by Ed Brooks, Tony Kroes & The Walkabouts at Rubato Sound. Bruce Wirth: violin/ Johnny Rubato: talking drum/ Grant: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: keyboards/ Carla: vocal, cello/ Chris: guitars. Written by Nick Drake (Warlock Music Ltd., PRS)

"Maggie's Farm" ---1991. Overdubbed and mixed in 1992. Originally appeared on the Sub Pop compilation "Revolution Come And Gone" (1992). Produced by Ed Brooks, Tony Kroes & The Walkabouts at Rubato Sound. Terri Moeller: Tambourine/ Grant: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: organ/ Carla: vocals, guitars/ Chris: vocals, guitars. Written by Bob Dylan (Special Rider Music, SESAC)

"Break It Down Gently"--- 1990. Demo for "Scavenger" album. Appeared originally on an LP included in "Adventure" magazine (Denmark, 1992). Recorded by Ed Brooks at Steve Lawson Productions. Michael: harmonica/ Glenn: keyboard/ Carla: vocals/ Chris: vocals, acoustic guitar.

"Train To Mercy (Italia version)"----1992. Previously unreleased. Recorded as part of a "Two Meter Session," Radio Vara, The Netherlands. Produced by Jan Douwe Kroeske. Terri Moeller: drums /Bruce Wirth: violin/ Michel: bass/ Glenn: piano/ Carla: vocals, electric guitar/ Chris: vocals, acoustic guitar.

"Yesterday is Here"---1992. Originally appeared as a bonus track on the "Jack Candy" CD-5 and on the vinyl version of "New West Motel" (Sub Pop 1993). Produced by Conrad Uno & Tony Kroes at Egg Studios. Terri: drums/ Bruce: violin/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: keyboards/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar/ Chris: electric guitar. Written by Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan (Jalma Music, admin. by Ackee Music Inc., ASCAP)

"Prisoner Of Texas" --1992. Originally appeared as a bonus track on the "Jack Candy" CD-5 (Sub Pop 1993) and on the vinyl version of "New West Motel." Produced by Conrad Uno & Tony Kroes at Egg Studios. Terri: trash can, percussion/ Bruce: lap steel/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: accordion, synthesizer/ Carla: vocals, radiator/ Chris: guitars. Traditional arranged by The Walkabouts. Adapted from the song "No More, My Lawd" recorded by Alan Lomax at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

"Inauguration Day"---1993. Originally appeared on the "Your Hope Shines" CD-5 and double 7" (Sub Pop 1993). Produced by The Walkabouts & Kevin Suggs. at Avast. Terri: drums, percussion/ Bruce: lap steel, violin/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: keyboards/ Carla: cello/ Chris: vocals, acoustic guitar.

"Pass Me On Over"---1994. Previously unreleased. Recorded live for a "Studio Brussels" session (Belgium). Chantel: DJ voice/ Larry Barrett: mandolin/ Terri: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: organ/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar/ Chris: vocals, acoustic guitar.

"Like A Hurricane "---1994. previously unreleased. Recorded live for a "Two Meter" session, Vara TV, The Netherlands. Produced by Jan Douwe Kroeske. Larry Barrett: acoustic guitar and backup vocals/ Terri: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: organ/ Carla: vocals, acoustic guitar/ Chris: vocals, electric guitar. Written by Neil Young (Silver Fiddle Music, ASCAP)

"House Of The Rising Sun" --1994. Previously unreleased. Commissioned as a track for the independent feature film "House Of The Rising" by Tim Hines. Produced by Ed Brooks and The Walkabouts at Ironwood and Hanzek Audio. Terri: drums/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: keyboards/ Carla: vocals, electric guitar/ Chris: electric guitar, lap steel. Traditional, arranged by The Walkabouts.

"Loswerden"---1995. Originally appeared on the limited edition Glitterhouse sampler "Out of The Blue Vol. II" (1996). Produced by Kevin Suggs and The Walkabouts at John & Stu's. Terri: percussion/ Michael: bass/ Glenn: accordion, piano/ Carla: vocals/ Chris: acoustic guitar. Written by Tilman Rossmy (Gold Musikverlag )

"Sand And Gravel Strings"---1994. Previously unreleased. The violins were arranged and played by Bruce Wirth. Produced by Ed Brooks and The Walkabouts at Hanzek Audio.

(Cover design: Ben Thompson; Cover Art: Tony Kroes: Still Life - 'Long Time Here', 1992)

H3>The strange things we never forget. We were an unschooled Tribe. Nomads from the rainy
north; crafting heirlooms out of our art and our clan. Dub
carrying us over the Siskiyou Range. Singing there near a
giant bonfire in the desert beneath Mount Whitney.
Sleeping with scorpions. Taking on the black ice of
Business and the dakota roads. A bunch of hayseeds in an
ambulance, blasting through mid-town Manhattan with
our air horn bellowing. Then from there, across the ocean
to the old world. We didn't know any better. We just
went. And yet ... invariably coming back to that always-perfect
returning - remember? - six weeks out and dropping
deep down into Vantage to cross the river at sunset, home
beyond that last pass.

A still life is a collection of artifacts, a watch, a book, a
postcard, a flag, that amplifies what is absent - the human,
Us. Our presence hangs, like music from over a hill, in the
motionless sublit air amidst those quiet objects. So take
this as just such an assembly. Gathered here by the best of
friends, a tribe from the north, and left
on a sandy shelf, mid-afternoon, before a
lonely road in this valley.

- T. Kroes; August 1996

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