Metro Pulse/Gamut/Gillian Welch

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What:
Gillian Welch with David Rawlings

When:
7:30 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 11

Where:
Bijou Theatre

Cost:
$17.50/$20. Call 656-4444 for ticket info.

A tall tale. With music.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Darling, remember when you come to me
I'm the pretender, and not what I'm supposed to be...

She was a big-coast girl, long brown hair and a worried smile. Lived on the big coasts, both of them, born on the New York island, moved to California. Born to musicians, raised on music. She went to one of those Los Angeles schools where they spent an hour every day playing folk songs. Learned Woody Guthrie, the Carter Family, Bob Dylan, the whole American lineage, learned it the way you learn to walk and run, without so much as thinking why or where it came from.

My first lover, my first lover
He was tall and breezy with his long hair down
But he gets a little hazy when I think of him now...

So this girl, she goes to San Francisco. Without flowers in her hair—please, this is the 1980s—listening to punk rock and R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven. And then one day, one Sunday morning of course, when the revelations are supposed to come, they do. The sound of the Stanley Brothers echoing through the house she shares. She's cleaning the bathroom, getting ready to take a bath, and here's this baptism ready-made on the record player and she says, "What is that?"

I wanna go all over the world and start living free
I know that there's somebody who is waiting for me...

And then she's really playing, like she means it, still learning songs and writing them too. She ends up across the continent at the other Berklee, in Boston, studying music and listening to weird old records, Lightnin' Hopkins and Bill Monroe. And her friends say, there's this guy you should meet. His name is David Rawlings.

Oh the girls all dance with the boys from the city
And they don't care to dance with me
Now it ain't my fault that the fields are muddy
And the red clay stains my feet...

They meet up and match up and soon they're together in Nashville. This is 1992 now, Garth-time and Billy Ray-time, but also Mary Chapin Carpenter and Dwight Yoakam and some people really writing songs the way she thinks they're meant to be written and singing them right too. Never mind where she came from, down here on Music Row she sounds like she comes from out there, back in the real world, where people work hard and die hard and poetry is just another way of telling the truth. She's got some good songs, really good songs. One's called "Orphan Girl." The first time she plays it for a local writer, he tells her, "You don't have to worry about that one. It'll take care of itself." Tim and Mollie O'Brien record it. Emmylou Harris records it. Eventually, she gets to record it herself.

When the iceberg hit, wasn't much to know
God moves on the waters like Casey Jones...

The new album is the third one for her and David. Time (the Revelator), it's called. Before, sometimes they said she was trying too hard, sounded too planned, too archaic. She thinks that's silly, of course. But anyway, no one's saying it now. This one, they say, is her breakthrough, her most personal record, her first modern record. She shrugs all off. "This record's just as personal as the last record," she says. "It's just easier for people to tell that. It's arguable that the first record was the most personal, it was just more veiled. Only people who really knew me knew what it was about."

I want to sing that rock 'n' roll
I want to 'lectrify my soul
Cause everybody been making a shout
So big and loud, been drowning me out...

But there are differences. She calls this their "rock" record, and she's not really joking. The arrangements are the same as before, acoustic guitars and banjos mostly. But, she says, "they're little rock songs instead of little folk songs." She doesn't elaborate, but it's not hard to hear the difference. There's as much Neil Young as Ralph Stanley in the mix this time. And a lot of Bob Dylan too.

I was thinking that night about Elvis
The day that he died, the day that he died...

She's a mythologist like Dylan, an American mythologist, a collector of songs and stories. She skips across generations and centuries, touching down to watch Booth shooting Lincoln, and Elvis shaking it "like a Harlem queen" and dying like John Henry, and the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl. And the Titanic. "I think we're a very referential culture," she says. "I don't know many people that can get past the Titanic. I think you say 'Titanic,' and whether or not they know it, they have a little shudder that goes all the way down. It's big, it's God punishing us for building something so big it can't be sunk, it's all those things."

And the great boat sank, and the Okies fled
And the Great Emancipator took a bullet in the head...

She had a fine career already, thanks, but then her producer T-Bone Burnett called. Joel and Ethan Coen were making a new movie called O Brother Where Art Thou?, and they wanted Burnett to put together a soundtrack of American folk music, and since Gillian knew everybody anyway, maybe she could help. The movie, partly a celebration of American myths and partly a jokey dismembering of them, was a hit. The soundtrack was a hit too, a huge multi-platinum hit, and there was nothing jokey about it. "It started to get strange for me after it sold a million copies and it was still selling 80,000 a week," she says. "I couldn't imagine who these 80,000 people a week were who wanted it and didn't already have it."

Everything is free now, that's what they say
Everything I ever done, gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score, they figured it out
That we're gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn't pay...

With the soundtrack still on the charts, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings formed their own company and headed back into the studio. They named the company Acony Records. There's a flower called the acony bell, the first flower of spring. She wrote a song about it on her first album, "Just a simple flower so small and plain/ With pearly hue and a little known name..." The recording for the new album went fast, in and out in a month. "I think this is the closest we've come to actually putting on record how I live with this music, how it fits into my life, and what happens when David and I walk into a room and start to play," she says. "The entire album is live. It's just one big room, there's no isolation, my guitar is in his guitar and his vocals are in my vocals."

Oh I dream a highway back to you love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision come and rest my soul
I dream a highway back to you...

You can read these lyrics like a diary, if you want. That first one, is that a big middle finger to the whole question of "authenticity" and who's real and who's the "queen of fakes?" And is this one about her and Rawlings? And the other one about the record business? And...

"These songs are supposed to stand apart from my life," she says. "Other people should be able to sing them without knowing anything about me. I hate songs that we're supposed to like more because we know what was going on when the person wrote them. That belongs in the tabloids, not in the music."

The last song on the album is 14 minutes long, "I Dream a Highway." It feels like a dream, like "Kubla Khan," like 95 theses on the door of Nashville. It's a love song and a hallucination and a declaration, an epic in two-part harmony and minor chords. "Which lover are you, Jack of Diamonds?" she asks. "You be Emmylou and I'll be Gram..." One more myth to live with, one more story to hand down.

Saw a wheel within a wheel,
Heard a call within a call,
And I dreamed a highway back to you...