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Wrestling with the Edge
Malcolm Holcombe plays with the boundaries
by Paige M. Travis
There are 70-year-olds who look younger than Malcolm Holcombe. The 49-year-old has aged like the mountain men of his native North Carolina—arching back, squinting eyes assisted by tiny wire-rimmed glasses, a face full of crows’ feet, all advanced by hard times flavored with drugs and alcohol. His fans, frequently musicians themselves, refer to him as “Malcolm” whether they are personally acquainted or not; to see Holcombe perform more than once is an intimate exchange requiring a first-name basis.
For the past year or more, Holcombe has performed at Barley’s every couple of months on a Friday night. Particularly during football season, the pizzeria has the spirit of a sports bar, and performers can be relegated to background noise. But Holcombe demands attention.
His fans report on the singer-songwriter’s relative sobriety. He’s had much worse days, they imply. I’ve only ever seen him drink coffee, his beverage of choice on a Thursday morning at the WDVX studios on Gay Street. He squints at me as we shake hands. His eyes are shockingly blue, a flash of sharp cognition that’s not surprising given his stage presence. His songs may be acoustic, but Malcolm’s no mellow folkie. He wrestles with his guitar, plying its strings with all five fingers, his foot stomping out a constant beat. He mutters and barks, slurs and spits. His lyrics weave abstract narratives for which sense and comprehension are more a matter of instinct. You can ask the meaning of “Strong soap and lots o’ hot water, behind my ears pound by pound, before my eyes moment to moment, pages rockin’ justice in a cradle,” but the meaning of Holcombe’s song is found in the gut rather than the mind.
Holcombe is a cult figure in musical circles, revered as much as Townes Van Zandt or Bob Dylan by artists with plenty of talent themselves. Lucinda Williams told Rolling Stone, “If I had a record label, I’d sign him.” Back in the ‘90s, this kind of industry support helped Holcombe turn a dishwashing gig at a Nashville club into a songwriting deal, but not before he had sold the rights to many of his songs in deals with disreputable publishing companies. “I wasn’t young, but I was green,” Holcombe has said. “And when you’re green, people will take advantage of you.” A guardian angel found him—J. Steven Soles, who helped the writer sign with Bug Music and record A Hundred Lies in 1996. As part of Holcombe’s two-steps-forward, one-step-back saga, the disc’s label, Geffen, got swallowed up into Universal, leaving the recordings in limbo. It didn’t get released until 1999 when, without representation, Holcombe didn’t get airplay, promotion or a tour.
But that’s the business angle of Malcolm Holcombe, the part that doesn’t really matter when you’re in a dark room listening to him bang out haggard, haunting tunes. Even under the bright lights of the WDVX studio, Holcombe’s influence is intoxicating. One clean-cut, white-collar couple in their mid- to late-50s sits at a tall cafe table. They see Malcolm—they’re on a first-name basis too—any chance they get. Many of the people who crowd into Barley’s on those Friday nights are just as unlikely: indie rockers who seem to disdain sincerity; attention-span-challenged college kids; older folks up past bedtime. They are drawn to the spectacle—Malcolm pushing and pulling the crowd with yells and whispers—as much as the artistry. It’s the same thing—fascinating, touching, undiscovered, rare. Difficult to approach.
My voice breaks when I ask Malcolm about writing and playing folk music in the age of commercial noise—strip malls and billboards and dollar stores and the Internet. He answers slowly, deliberately, in a craggy drawl. On the playback, I can hear myself holding my breath.
“Nobody lives in your own skin but you. Nobody knows your mind but you and God. And what you do with this technology is your responsibility. The buck stops at you.”
He puts songwriting and mowing the yard on the same plane, God-made tools in the hands of mortals. Folk music is people music, he says, a purer form. But labels are mostly misleading. He invokes a metaphor of sheep following other sheep off a cliff, and at the moment it seems to refer as much to artistic trends as the current political climate.
“Some people don’t know if they’re coming or going in this world of fast-paced technology, and it takes effort more and more for people to keep from jumping—or being driven—off the cliff with a sack full of money. So you might end up with a sack full of money, but you’re going off a cliff. I’d rather stay up here, maybe in mid-air, with just enough money to get by and try to pull the ripcord.”
Songwriting—dealing with his own perceptions and living in his own skin—keeps Malcolm from jumping. The rest of us are in charge of ourselves, he says, handing a bit of responsibility to me.
“It’s your job to give the people something in print that they can digest,” he says. “And maybe keep them from jumping off a cliff. Or at least make them aware there’s a cliff there.”
OK. Friends, there’s a cliff. And you might feel less in danger of jumping off it if you get familiar with Malcolm Holcombe. He’s been to the edge. Mid-air is better.
October 7, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 41
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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