The Dreamer & the Butterfly
Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer at The Rosendale Cafe
by Gary Alexander
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Scheduled to appear all three days of the
2001 Falcon Ridge Festival is
the extraordinary duo, Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer... The slippery path
between Discovery* and Sensation** glows with reflected starlight as two
pair of feet make their way into the future. (*"Discovery," in this
context, has its own sensations as collective delights and surprises are
tallied from individual exposures to prodigious, fresh talent and **
"Sensation" status arrives as voices of acclaim unite in widespread
recognition.) This may be the best new folk duo since Richard and Mimi
Farina...
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Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer at Falcon Ridge Festival 2000 |
Armed
with a home-recorded debut album which shockingly generated more
airplay in 1998 and '99 than many of the countless efforts pumped by
megacorporate overproduction and hypeglut, commanding a top ten position
on the National Folk DJ's poll for two years running, the
alternative-western-acoustic duo of
Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer
toeing the pathway through a multitudinous jungle of one-nighters with
their gaze fixed to the distant shine of a sunlit meadow, glimpsed
through the dark trunks of the forest. It's a meadow that an
incalculable number of would-be sensations never reach, bogged in the
shadows cast by the focused glare of the conglomerate global market, but
a not-unattainable destination for those with enough inspiration to
emanate their own light.
Also in that inspired arsenal mentioned above is a collection of
first place trophies in just about every songwriting competition they've
chanced into- not least of which was the Kerrville Folk Festival Award-
as well as a follow-up disk on an independent label of high repute which
seems like a shoo-in for this year's Album of the Year honors in that
category.
If you're still on the far side of that "Discovery" milestone,
Carter and Grammer will roll into the Rosendale Cafe for an 8pm concert
on Thursday, November 16th [2000] to offer you a first-hand opportunity to see
what all the fuss is about. But, let me give you a hint...
Dave Carter's lyrical brilliance contains the kind of poetry which
constantly keeps listeners off balance, tipping them this way and that
by avoiding the obvious, steering clear of the predictability of
contrived associations and rhymes. In the opening song of their second
album, Tanglewood Tree, he sings; "...shootin fools and starry gazers,
wizard hip and button-down/ I walk the occam razor way through priests
and circus clowns/ am I a missioner of faith or grace or vision or/
another grinning prisoner of happytown..."
Carter's stance, with one foot in the swirling fogs of myth and
the other planted firmly on a perch of precision-cut flagstone, began to
be postured in his Oklahoma and Texas-based childhood, under the
influence of a left-brain, right-brain parentage described in his
bio-sheet as "a music-fearing engineer/mathematician father and a
charismatic Christian mother who was given to visions and states of
ecstasy."
A trace of the biblical heritage lingers in a verse from the
sensitive "Farewell To Saint Dolores" wherein he sings "...in a carriage
of white linen, in her bed beneath the stairs/ she took me to the jesse
house of women/ and sanctified me there..." Not to quibble over street
address but, when confronted by puzzlement over the term "Jesse house,"
Carter explained a tradition unfamiliar to those who think of the Jesus
lineage as being of the House of David... "Jesse house is the family
tree of Jesus; the House of Jesse... I wanted allusions to a sacred
quality about this woman and people have noted to me that there's also
an implication of prostitution in the song, which hadn't occurred to me
consciously. But, I wanted this St. Dolores character to be threading
this fine line between promiscuity and chastity; holiness and
worldliness..."
With arms wide-stretched and fingers pointed toward opposing
horizons to mark the distance between the sacred and profane, a child
with a hard-headed, science-grounded father and a mystical Christian
mother might take to measuring the mist above the prairie. When Carter
began to hoist his own sails, his twelve-year-old's heretical curiosity
had to be indulged surreptitiously at the local library in Buddhist
texts and other informational materials which may have been pointedly
unwelcome at home. One must assume that the original fervor of his
buckskin-zen style of writing was seeded during these venturesome quests
after forbidden knowledge. Not all of it, however, was to be found
between the covers of dusty books.
"When I was 17, I left home and hitchhiked around the middle of
the country," Carter recalled when reached on the duo's current tour at
a hotel in Columbia, Missouri. "Mostly Colorado, down in Texas,
Arkansas, those areas. To me at that time, having spent all my life in
pretty much one little region, places like New Mexico seemed quite
exotic and I counted myself quite the world traveler for having been
there."
After his soft-spoken, boyish tone had bubbled into a small
laugh of surprise and amusement in self-review, Carter reflected on the
experience of the extensive and far flung touring of the past three
years with Tracy and added: "Now, I realize how provincial a mindset I
still held onto but I had many adventures and I met quite a few
interesting characters in that period of my life."
Mini-Meditations? When you make the observation to Dave Carter that
he has his eyes closed in many of the duo's promotional pictures, be prepared
to answer questions the questions 'Like this?' and 'Or like this?' |
Asking "did any of them turn up in songs?" is unavoidable.
"Oh, yes, definitely, my songs are riddled with characters
based in people I have met," Carter responds. "Had I not had- I don't
know if you can call this good fortune but- had I not met some crazy and
always-in-trouble characters that I used to hang out with during my
(pause) directionless youth (laugh), I don't think that my songs-
whatever impact they may have now- would have as much..."
A case in point may be a composite sort of character named
"Willie," who turns up in different clothes in several of the
Tanglewood Tree songs, once as a recognizable real life figure.
Because the album
possesses such a cohesive, almost seamless, sense of continuity and
progression, as if it were an examination of the different faces of a
single multi-faced gem or oasis stops on a lone pilgrimage of
realization, a natural inclination is to look for connective
ingredients.
"I cannot honestly tell you that I planned to put 'Willie'
in all those songs during that time," shrugs Carter. "I didn't even
notice it until Tanglewood Tree had come out and somebody else in an
interview asked me that. It just came as a total shock to me. With all
the energy, time and concentration I poured into those songs and that
recording, I never noticed that Willie kept turning up throughout the
record.
"So, I've gone back through it and Northrup Frye-like, I've
examined my motivations for that," continued Carter, referencing the
late philosophical literary scholar, "and I think there's a certain
presence that I wanted in that cd and in the period I was writing those
songs. I think it's still true but especially during that time I had a
fascination with an uncontrollable kind of wild and woolly sort of
character- somebody that was a kind of 'x-factor' in whatever setting
you put them in- and somehow the name 'Willie' just sounds like that to
me; like you just don't know what someone named Willie's gonna do..."
One Willie bites the dust in "Cat-Eye Willie Claims His
Lover," a rolling ballad instilled with such exquisitely authentic
flavors of tradition by the wiles of Grammer's violin that it seems
always to have hung in the air. Other unknowable Willies poke their gaze
around scattered corners of the cd while a notable exception is that
'Country Willie' known far and wide in the music world.
"...so strap me in, i'm going clear- burnin' circles 'round the
sun/ the fisher king is here, but he is not the only one/ parcival and
valentino ridin winged palominos/ willie in his el camino, on the
run..."
"In the song, 'Happytown,' I talk about 'Willie in his
El Camino,'" Carter explains. "That, actually, is an intentional
reference to Willie Nelson. I read an interview with him and Dwight
Yokum where they were sitting in Willie Nelson's Cadillac in the picture
that went with the interview and I thought that this is a character that
needed to go in that verse.. because I wanted to have images from pop
and classical culture turning up in the song..."
It's worth dwelling a moment upon the mysterious, if
relatively inconsequential, appearances of the more anonymous willies
here, chiefly for the ray of insight they throw into Carter's creative
process. The fact that they hadn't been consciously accounted for as
individuals on the album as much as symbolic presences in Carter's
overview can be traced to the shamanistic plunge he takes to animate his
portrayals. The relationship to realms of myth and dream which some of
the images in Carter's songs invoke are not accidental. Nor is the
attendance of their forces here quite as deliberate and calculating as
it may appear. But we have to pry a bit deeper into the workings of a
creative mind and the songwriter's own background to discern the true
identity of those nameless willies.
"I started taking piano lessons when I was four
and kept it up until I was about 12, when I temporarily abandoned the
piano for the guitar," Carter recalls, brushing a few lines of musical
color into his self-portrait. There was also cello study somewhere in
there and the Second Wave of Psychedelia rock band he formed in Carter
and Grammer's hometown of Portland, Oregon in the mid-80's; even a bit
of rendering Mozart and other masters in piano bars as he polished his
expertise in horsemanship and the martial arts. But his musical leanings
stayed largely in the flirtatious range, even with a master's degree in
music from the University of Oklahoma, as he followed his father's lead
with a mathematics degree and one in psychology. When your demeanor is
as shy and reserved as Carter's, the impulse to cast it out into the
limelight is a hard one to grasp in your pitching hand. Another barrier
to the stage door can be a richly active intellectual life, especially
when its manifestation remains largely interior.
The influence of Carl Jung brought Carter to an
intensive study of dream symbolism, an interest enhanced by an
opportunity to spend time with Joseph Campbell when the great
mythologist was visiting Carter's university.
"Then, at one point when I left mathematics, I went down to
the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto and then studied
at the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco," Carter reveals.
"I did a lot of work in those places with dreams, dream journals,
relationship of dream to spiritual experience. I was interested in all
of that kind of thing."
To judge by the nature of Carter's songwriting, a saying
of the Indian sage Haridas Chaudhuri, who founded the Institute of
Integral Studies, must have left a lasting impression: "Reality divided
by reason always leaves a remainder." Carter's tunes are firmly rooted
in that "remainder."
It is one thing to clinically study myth and dream, as
Carter has, and quite another and more courageous thing to indulge it on
its own terms, as he does. His tapping of an underground stream of
culture directly from its subconscious wellsprings provides the
psychically natural, loosely ranging and unexpected associations of his
lyrics and melodies. His explanation of the logic in his approach is
succinct: "I try to tap into a kind of mythic aquifer that flows beneath
the bedrock of everyday life. If I can bring the magic of the deep
unconscious into the all-too-predictable realm of the daily grind, well,
that's like bringing water into the desert. I need this to live fully; I
suspect we all do."
Any trace of the dry, intellectual powder of Intent is
utterly dissolved in the actions of their music as what is 'intended'
swirls into what 'Is' like cream into coffee and is carried off on a
stream of sound infused with the phenomenal talents of Tracy Grammer. A
self-described "Aries earth monkey," a phrase which hints at some
familiarity with eastern mystical traditions of her own, Grammer's
voice, mandolin, guitar and violin wing through this union like a
butterfly traversing a flower garden, mingling, merging, punctuating
with a perfectly placed kiss, the flow of sublime balladry.
Raised in a musical home environment in California's
Orange County, Grammer absorbed the spirit of two piano-playing
grandmothers, a mom who could pull out the accordion and a father who
was no stranger to lapsteel guitar and knew where to set the levels for
vocal harmonies. In childhood, she studied classical violin, performed
in school operettas and led regional orchestras before leaving for
Berkeley to study anthropology and English literature.
"In high school, I got to be involved in all the
musicals as a member of the orchestra," Grammer said, recalling an early
interest in acting and stage work. "It was a struggle for me because I
really wanted to be on stage singing and doing the acting but our
orchestra was so small that my absence would definitely be noticed,
because I was the concert mistress. So, I just stayed down there in the
pit."
Grammer, like Carter, had strayed from music for a period of
some years by the mid-90's when she met Curtis Coleman, a former member
of the New Christy Minstrels, through her father and decided to borrow
her dad's Yahama guitar and break out the bow again to back Coleman in
local coffeehouses. Somewhere in about the same time-frame, Carter was
beginning to hear the lure of his own neglected instincts.
Employed as a computer programmer while studying commercial
calculus in Portland, Carter had a vision of his grandmother, a poet and
healer long since departed, which urged him to ditch this numbers stuff,
pack up his guitar and banjo and head for Nashville. While striving his
way through the open mike scenes of Tennessee, Carter learned to hone
his performance style and crack his way out of an introspective shell.
"I set out, really, to be a songwriter and I was not
particularly interested in performing," Carter explains. "I had written
a lot of songs but my natural bent is to be kind of introverted; to be a
hermit. So, I knew very few people and, at one time in my life, when I
decided I'm going to take these songs and try to get them out into the
world, I entered a songwriting contest in Portland, which I won.
Suddenly, all these songwriters wanted to be friends with me and I was
invited to a party for songwriters where we all sat around in a circle
and did our songs.
"There was a guy there who had just put together a studio
in his house," Carter continues. "He said he really liked my songs and I
that should put a cd together. Against my better judgment, I went to
make the cd."
The result, Snake-Handling Man, was of limited run and
is unlikely to be reissued. Not, Carter asserts, because he has to
apologize for the songs, a couple of which have been revisited by the
duo, but because "at that time, I had very little performing experience
as a singer. The guitar playing isn't that good either. I was not really
ready to make a cd."
Although Carter may flinch a little today at mention of
the cd, his Nashville experiences following its release had begun
shaping his public presentation to an edge which captured Tracy's
attention when she happened into him at a folk concert in early 1996,
just weeks after she had moved to Portland.
"Basically, I was in one of those 'throw a dart at a
map and see where it lands' kind of states," recalls Grammer. "I had
been in Berkeley for about 9 or 10 years and really just wanted a
change. I had a friend who lives in Portland I kept going up to visit
and really loved it there."
"Oklahoma is a cool place in a way," Carter says, explaining
how he landed in Portland. "There's a lot of Native American culture.
It's not too expensive to live there. There's a lot of open space. But
it's also culturally very conservative and it can be very repressive. I
just wanted to get out, wanted to get to the West Coast. I had tried
living in San Francisco and found it to be too expensive; too difficult
to make my way in and still have time to do music. I moved back to
Oklahoma for a while before eventually making my break for Portland-
which is actually a lot like SanFrancisco but easier to live in. It's
cheaper and not as dense and mean a city as San Francisco has become..."
When you hear the irresistible manner in which Grammer's
voice and music weave and blend their flesh onto the bones of Carter's
elegant structures, you'll want to tip your hat to the whole state of
Oregon just for providing a space for the meeting. Before long they were
stitching together a band and by the summer of 1998 had started to
record their first album, When I Go, in Tracy's kitchen.
When I Go |
"The room was just one big, wide, open rectangular
space," describes Grammer. "The carpeted portion was the living room and
the linoleum portion was the kitchen. It had a wooden pantry off to one
side which made for kind of a nice reflection of the sound in the room
but it wasn't very 'live'; it wasn't real 'bouncy' like there was a lot
of natural reverb. There were a lot of windows but mostly just a big
open space where we set the microphones up in the middle of the floor
and the recording equipment in the living room portion. Sometimes, only
one of us was available to record and engineer or indulge our passion
for staying up in the middle of the night with the remote control for
the ADAT machine- hitting it with our toes or whatever body part was
available and then singing or playing our part and playing it back to
see if it worked. A lot of the tracks on When I Go were done that way."
It was a humble but passionate period of conception for
an album which the Los Angeles Times would name as one of their "best of
the year" and it comes from a couple who in no outward way resemble "pop
stars." In the Sunday go-to-meetin' outfits they wear in most of their
promotional photographs, Dave, with his short haircut and subdued jacket
and tie; Tracy in her tasteful and demure dresses, the pair look more
like part of a team from Austin overseeing the recount of Floridian
votes currently in progress than performers of extraordinary caliber.
However, When I Go presents a very different kind of
credentials. It features an expansive range of finely-etched and
many-mooded excursions into what Carter calls "Postmodern Mythic
American Music." Its title track stirringly samples the thoughts of a
Native American warrior preparing himself to meet the Great Spirit on
the eve of battle and shifts directly on to a Woody Guthrie-tinted
talking blues without gnashing gears. Add the poignancy of "Kate and the
Ghost of Lost Love," the breathless rollicking pace of a downhill
careening truck in "Little Liza Jane," the bright, sly wit of "The
River, Where She Sleeps" or the escapist fantasy of "Frank To
Valentino," and you're still only scratching the surface. It was an
album which brought Carter and Grammer the Discovery they needed to
reach out further.
"The cd that we recorded in Tracy's kitchen did very
well for airplay," Carter says. "At one time it was the fourth most
played cd in the country, so there was a sort of buzz on it. Record
companies began to approach us and we talked with a few of them. All in
all, we liked Signature Sounds the best. We felt they offered us the
greatest amount of artistic freedom and we left our first meeting with
them with just a feeling that it would be a good partnership. And it has
proven to be. We are really happy and proud to be on that label."
The addition of studio players was carefully and
sparingly applied at the sessions which produced Tanglewood in April of
this year. Each entry was, again, painstakingly polished by hand with a
distinct philosophy guiding the work. Where many contemporary popular
artists take pride in successfully trading on a "sound" of their own at
least somewhat distinguishable from that of other artists, Carter and
Grammer strive to instill each individual song with a power and identity
of its own without the slightest regard for a trademark "sound"... and
they have the wherewithal to accomplish just that.
"We did consciously attempt a certain amount of
stylistic continuity with the instrumentation and so forth, so it would
hold together as a cd," Carter concedes after voicing his awareness of
the branded styles of modern music. "A problem with a lot of
singer-songwriter CDs is that, after you play it, all the songs sound
like one big song. That's the problem with a lot of acts in general.
They have a 'sound' which is their product. You may get into particular
moments in the lyrics or the music but you basically buy their CDs
because you like that 'sound'... just like when you walk into a
McDonald's, you know what you're going to get. We didn't take that
approach."
Tanglewood Tree |
Indeed not. Smooth without sounding slick, each song
emerges in some measure of conceptual isolation from its companions,
united by the common illusion of dream-tilted logic and a nearly
subliminal musical affinity. You can't tell rumors from legends in the
buoyant opening track or yodel for Dylan against the shared secrets of
"Farewell To Saint Dolores," which Carter delivers with Townes Van Zandt
sensitivity. The violin weave and vocal counterpoint and layering of the
title tune is a highwire act that dazzles like sunlight through
intricate lace. A whiff of Hank Thompson and early Johnny Cash pours
from the engine's smokestack in the infectious "Hey, Conductor," which
rambles through the mountains, leaning into snatches of traditional
melodies on the turns while you want to hold your breath for the
eggshell ballad "Walking Away from Caroline" lest you break the mournful
spell.
Taking the lead vocal on "Crocodile Man," Grammer's
expressive delivery suggests that maybe she should have been an actor in
those high school plays, culminating with a final explosive "hah!" which
packs enough haughty, tough and sexy emphasis into that brief syllable
to curl your toes. All things considered, Tanglewood Tree has the
makings not only of an award-winning album but an all-time classic of
the genre. This is extraordinary stuff.
And that's what all the fuss is about. Out of
nowhere, well, out of a rectangular kitchen, actually, Carter and
Grammer has brought a new breath of life to a genus of music which had
begun to wilt in the shade of the megamusic onslaught. They offer fresh
energy and new direction. That should be more than enough to bring you
out on Thursday night.
-Gary Alexander
Gary Alexander
is an independent journalist and scholar whose focus of
interests range through a variety of disciplines. Under various names,
he has written (and ghost written) upon history and current event;
science and technology, as well as music and the arts in books and for
national periodicals. While particularly attentive to the subtle and
complex impact upon cultural imagination and contemporary structures of
presumption which activity in the above mentioned topics tend to have,
Alexander treats his topics with a slightly more than occasional resort
to humor.
Posted on July 18, 2001
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