MUSIC AND THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE

MIXED MESSAGES

The trials and tunes of the West Memphis Three, and the new Voices For Justice

by Matt Ashare |
Published January 18, 2013

Almost twenty years ago, on May 6, 1993, the bodies of three eight-year-old boys — Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers, and Michael Moore — were found naked and bound in a drainage ditch in the Robin Hood Hills of West Memphis, Arkansas. Three local teens — 16-year-old Jason Baldwin, 17-year-old Jessie Misskelley Jr., and 18-year-old Damien Echols — were subsequently rounded up by local police and charged with the murders. Amidst rumors that the tragedy had been part of a satanic ritual, they were tried and convicted the following year. And that's where the sordid story of the Robin Hood Hills murders may have ended if not for the work of a film crew that had been sent to cover the trial by HBO.
    When it premiered in June of 1996, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost: Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills not only raised major concerns about how the investigation had been conducted, it also called into question the ultimate guilt of the suspects. As the film chronicles, hysteria surrounding the nature of the murders, coupled with less than stellar police work, dubious witness testimony, and some bad lawyering, created a toxic atmosphere in which the convictions of three troubled teens were more or less a forgone conclusion, even in the absence of solid evidence. At the very least, Paradise Lost painted a vividly disturbing picture of the American criminal justice system, particularly in regards to Echols, the perceived ringleader and most articulate and charismatic of what would come to be known as the West Memphis Three.
    In the wake of Paradise Lost, national interest in the case proliferated, Berlinger and Sinofsky set out to film a sequel, and efforts to aid the West Memphis Three began to coalesce. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, country rocker Steve Earle, and punk legend Joe Strummer were among a diverse cast of musician-activists who contributed to 2000's Free the West Memphis 3, a benefit compilation that raised money for the legal defense of Baldwin, Misskelley, and Echols. That same year, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations aired on HBO. And, in 2002, former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins, released Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs to Benefit the West Memphis Three, a Rollins Band production featuring cameos by almost two dozen guests, including Chuck D, Iggy Pop, and Hank Williams III.
    There's nothing particularly new about artists earnestly banding together to support this or that cause. (Just last month, 12-12-12: The Concert for Sandy Relief brought out big guns like Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, the Who, and the Stones.) What's made the West Memphis Three situation somewhat unique, is that it's one of the rare cases where the cause in question was both pressing, in that Echols was on death row, and clearly defined. It was also largely successful: after 18 years behind bars, and a fight that went all the way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, attorneys for Baldwin, Misskelley, and Echols made a deal with prosecutors that set the three free in August of 2011.
    That not quite final chapter of the story is the subject of the third Paradise Lost installment, 2011's Purgatory, and the new West of Memphis, a documentary directed by Amy Berg and produced by Echols with help from veteran filmmaker Peter Jackson of Tolkien trilogy fame. The latter film, which opened in New York and LA on Christmas Day, is accompanied by yet another compilation disc aimed, in part, at raising funds for the ongoing battle to fully exonerate the West Memphis Three, who have yet to be fully cleared for the murders.
    In that sense, the intent of the 15-track West of Memphis: Voices for Justice is straightforward enough. But the album occupies a gray area between a soundtrack and a score, otherwise known as "music from and inspired by. . ." the film in question. Disembodied echoes of the darkly ambient music Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds compadre Warren Ellis wrote for the film emerge on the opening cut, which features Henry Rollins' artfully affectless reading of a letter Echols wrote from death row in the ninth year of his incarceration. Much of what Echols, the prisoner, has to say simply details the numbing isolation of life behind bars at a maximum security facility, from the concrete room with a water spout in the wall for washing, to the dismal quality of the food. "You can adapt to almost anything, given enough time," he relates stoically, before admitting, in a moment of dire candor, "I'm getting scared. . ."
    The hushed piano chordings and nervous string melodies of the Cave/Ellis compositions reemerge again near the end of the disc on the instrumental "Score Suite." And so do Echols haunting words, from a letter he penned during his final year in jail, this time read to good effect by Johnny Depp. But the rest of Voices for Justice is a bit of a mixed bag, with highs and lows that don't necessarily congruent with their relation to the film itself. Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, a longtime Memphis Three advocate, offers a devastatingly tender, countrified reworking on the Pink Floyd classic "Mother" that features Ben Harper on steel guitar. Up-and-coming indie-folk dude Jake Smith, who records as the White Buffalo, strips "House of Pain," an Echols favorite by the ’80s LA metal band Faster Pussycat, down to its elemental sadness as a ballad of an abandoned son. And Austin, Texas troubadour Bill Carter, working with his wife Ruth, spins Dylanesque poetry out of a scrap of dialogue from a phone conversation he had with Echols in prison on the ruminative original "Anything Made of Paper."
    Along with Eddie Vedder's plaintive yet hopeful "Satellite" and Lucinda Williams' angrier, gutbucket-blues rerecording of "Joy" from her 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, those are some of the high points on the album. And the hymn-like spiritual tenor of Bob Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" does, at least, fit the somber mood set by the Cave/Ellis score, even if it doesn't really feel entirely necessary. But that mood is rather rudely interrupted by a more or less straight rendition of the Bowie glam rock hit "The Jean Genie" by Camp Freddy, a group fronted by Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. And the disc's two live cuts — Band of Horses doing their most recent hit "Dumpster World" and an inexplicably low-fi recording of Patti Smith performing "Wing" at an August of 2010 Memphis Three "Voices for Justice" benefit concert — seem largely out of context here.
    Then again, it never feels quite right to take issue with a project that, at heart, has noble ambitions. Which, I suppose, is part of the problem. Because, if a live track by Band of Horses or a cameo by Johnny Depp, who also turns up covering a Mumford & Sons tune with his ridiculously named band Tonto's Giant Nuts, gets a few more people to take a closer look into the abyss that the West Memphis Three were cast into, then that's ultimately a good thing, right?