Murder In the Red Barn

Despite the whitewwater weekends, despite the chickens and the swimming pool and the garden and the Ben and Jerry's mural, there was a dark side to life in that little town in upstate New York.

A few houses up the street, a man picked up two teenage boys at a trailer park and brought them back home for an afternoon of drinking and sex.  They drank beer in his living room while the man showed the boys his guns and talked about drugs and his military service in Vietnam.  When the man tried to get sexy-time going and the boys weren't into it so much, things got out of control, a fight broke out, and one of the boys wound up stabbing the man in the neck with a paring knife. 

Panicked and not knowing what else to do, the boys decided to make the incident look like a burglary and a Manson-style satanic ritual.  According to press reports, they wound up stabbing the man 351 times, both before and after he actually died, and nearly severed his head.

The boys put all the items they had touched, a remote control, a towel used to wipe the paring knife, a bread knife, and their bloody shirts, into plastic bags. They left the apartment, but forgot to take the bags, leaving the evidence behind at the crime scene.  Not knowing what else to do to get back home, they called a taxi from a neighbor's house (not mine), and took a cab to McDonald's.  It didn't take the police long to find them.

It was 1992, a year after the Jeffrey Dahmer story had come out.  That year, Tom Waits released the album Bone Machine, featuring the song Murder In the Red Barn.

I lived in a red barn.  For the record, I had nothing to do with the ghastly incident up the road, but a running joke among friends was to always check my refrigerator for severed heads when they came over.

At least, I think they were joking.  

Weren't they?

He Tells You All His Secrets But He Lies About His Past

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.  He could run, but he couldn't hide.  Everywhere he went, there he was.

Pick your cliche.  They all applied to him back in 1987.  Within a year of moving to New York, his life upstate was almost exactly like it was back in Atlanta again, only worse.  He had met a woman up there, and immediately transferred all of his unresolved feelings and emotions about Denver onto her.  It was fun for a while, but when things ultimately didn't work out, he was right back in the funk again.

It was around this time that he first got into Tom Waits.  It really wasn't all that far of a leap from the country music and western swing of the year before to the distorted Americana of Waits.  He enjoyed Waits' swordfishtrombone (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), but it was the unsettling Frank's Wild Years, with its dark lyrics and boozy melodies, that matched his 1987 frame of mind.  With a voice sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car" (Daniel Durchholz), Waits' lyrical milieu of run-down bars, degenerate characters, and thwarted dreams and ambitions described well the rust-belt towns of upstate NY in which he was living and working.  Waits provided the perfect soundtrack for the raw emotions he was feeling at the time. 

To be sure, he was listening to a lot of other music at the time as well.  He was still listening to The Art of Noise, still listening to The Style Council, and still listening to all the other music that was being produced that year - he was a contemporary man living in contemporary times.  He owned a radio.  But looking back at that year, he mainly remembers Waits' music and that gravelly voice in his head, singing about the cold, cold ground and being sent off to bed forevermore.

He was in a dark place.

Josh Rouse at Terminal West, Atlanta - April 19, 2013

Friday night, Terminal West, Atlanta - Josh Rouse performing with his band.  But before that, Nashville's Matthew Perryman Jones opened.

I wasn't familiar with his music before last night, but he has a fine voice and good songwriting skills.  He played a set of mostly originals, closing with a Tom Waits cover.

But like the rest of the audience, I was there to see Josh Rouse.  We last saw Rouse at Variety Playhouse in 2010, when he was touring in support of his El Tourista album (I still have the t-shirt).  That record marked his move to Spain, and was followed by a couple other latin-bossa-nova-tinged releases, but now he's back, touring again in support of a new album, this time The Happiness Waltz.

Rouse's back-catalog of songs hold a lot of meaning to his fans, as they do to me, too.  I "got on board" back in 2003, when he released 1972, a concept-album of sorts of songs written in the style that he imagined musicians played in the year of his birth.  It had a great Philly soul vibe to it, and listening today brings back two distinct memories: cuddling with my girlfriend as the record played in the background, and consoling myself with the songs after she and I broke up.  With that kind of emotional connection, it was easy to become a fan.

Rouse played several songs from his new album, most notably the single, Julie (Come Out of the Rain), but also played a lot of songs from his various other albums, including Lemon Tree and I Will Live On Islands (the world's cheeriest prison song) from El Tourista, 1972 and Comeback from 1972, Hollywood Bass Player from Country Mouse City House (which I bought a vinyl copy of last night at the merch table), Dressed Up Like Nebraska from the album of the same name, and Quiet Town from Subtítulo.

The audience was small (the show did not seem to be promoted very well) but enthusiastic, singing along on many songs.  On one number, Rose just played the opening chords on his guitar, stood back, and let the audience sing the first stanza before joining in himself at the chorus.  Everyone was having a great time, and I hadn't heard this much singing along since The Head and the Heart in Athens.

He  ended his four-song encore with an eminently danceable version of Love Vibration from 1972.

My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that he didn't play his song Flight Attendant (he did at Variety Playhouse back in 2010), so I'll have to play it for myself.

Josh Rouse has embodied the indie singer-songwriter for a decade now, composing songs that reflect his residency in Nebraska, Nashville, and Valencia.  It's great to have someone of his talent and sensitivity in our sphere of music, and it would be great if he stuck around a while and let us hear him live more frequently than once every three or so years.

Update (4/22/13): I listened to the Nashville broadcast last night and think we in Atlanta were treated to the better show, although he did perform Flight Attendant in Nashville.