Lucinda Williams

SWEET RE-RELEASE

Lucinda Williams brings back her 1988 Americana classic, with a little help from her fans

by Matt Ashare |  
Published January 15, 2014 http://www.newsadvance.com/the_burg/music/pop_rocks/

The 1988 "Rough Trade Album"

In early 1989, I was convinced by a couple of friends to come along with them to a now long-gone small club in Cambridge, MA to see an artist I’d never heard of, not that it’s all that likely I had much else to do that evening, or that it would have been particularly unusual for me to check out an obscure performer. I don’t recall whether there was much buzz about Lucinda Williams. She was 36 years old at the time, and in the midst of relaunching a career that had gotten off to rocky start a full decade earlier, when the Louisiana native failed to get much traction with a gritty collection of trad acoustic blues reworkings — Robert Johnson covers; Hank Williams’ “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”; the new Orleans flavored “Me and My Chauffer,” credited to Clifton Chennier and Memphis Minnie — on the Smithsonian Folkways label. In that respect, her timing had been less than optimal: the blues-steeped folk revival of the ’60s was just a distant memory, and it would be a good decade before widespread interest in Americana would be reawakened by, among other things, the reappearance of the Smithsonian Folkways’ Anthology of American Folk Music (a/k/a, “The Harry Smith Box”).

      Without access to now readily searchable online discographies, I would have had no way of knowing about Williams’ past, save for word-of-mouth. And, all I remember being aware of is that Williams had just released, in 1988, a self-titled album on Rough Trade, a London-based, punk-oriented indie label. That, along with the urging of friends, was good enough for me.

     At this point, whatever details of that show I do remember — the alluringly waifish, bleached blond Williams fronting a foursome of laidback Nashville looking dudes with bolo ties; the darkly churning blues rocker “Changed the Locks” (later covered by Tom Petty); the melodic chime of “Passionate Kisses” — have likely been distorted by the tendency of memory to romanticize such things. But Williams, who emerged on 1988’s Lucinda Williams as a gifted songwriter in the country-rock vein, definitely left an impression that resonated well beyond the walls of the club.

     Over the next few years, it wasn’t uncommon to see punk/alternative bands like the Lemonheads tear into one of Williams’ songs during an impromptu encore. And, both Patty Loveless and Mary Chapin Carpenter would go on to have country hits with their own version of tunes from Lucinda Williams — Loveless reached #20 on the charts with the aching “The Night’s Too Long” in 1990, and Carpenter’s recording of “Passionate Kisses” earned Williams a Grammy for “Best Country Song” in 1994. Indeed, just ten years after its initial release, when Williams scored the closest thing she’s had to a mainstream breakthrough with her 1998, Grammy-winning, big-label debut Car Wheels On a Gravel Road (on Mercury), Lucinda Williams was well on its way to being embraced as a modern Americana classic, part of a canon that includes seminal albums by Steve Earle, Uncle Tupelo, and Ryan Adams’ Whiskeytown, not to mention legacy artists like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Bob Dylan.      An expanded version of the “Rough Trade Album,” as some now refer to it, was reissued by another international indie, KOCH, in the wake of Car Wheels in 1998.  But, apparently, nobody actually bothered to keep the disc in print after that. I found that out the hard way back in November when I went online intending to buy a copy for one of my nieces: the cheapest of the few copies of the KOCH reissue I did find was going for $60, and several were priced well above that. The original Rough Trade vinyl — I’ve still got mine, though it’s suffered through repeated spins and a couple of cross-country moves — is now a bona fide collector’s item.

Perhaps it’s just a sign of our digital times, of the increasingly diffuse and fleeting nature of music in the virtual cloud, but the Lucinda Williams CD, a fairly easily reproducible product that there clearly was some demand for, had been sitting in a kind of commercial purgatory for some period of time. As Williams reflects, somewhat hyperbolically, on her PledgeMusic.com homepage, “For decades, people have wondered why they couldn’t buy this album in stores. . .”

Okay, so maybe it’s only really been a decade and change. But, just in time for its 25^th anniversary, and for Williams’ 61^st birthday, is that the “Rough Trade Album” is back in print. And, as yet another sign of our digital times, it’s largely thanks to Williams herself, who procured the rights to the recordings, and to all of the fans who chipped in through PledgeMusic, a crowd-funding site that’s currently hosting projects by modern-rockers Sevendust, singer-songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, and Brit-punk stalwarts the Buzzcocks (who, coincidentally, also got their start on Rough Trade). There are several packages available: a pledge of $18 get you a digital download; a newly reconfigured, expanded format two-CD digipack, featuring a live set from the Netherlands in ’89, is $25; and, for true audiophiles, there’s the 180-gram, translucent red vinyl LP, for $35. If you happen to be looking for an heirloom, there are also autographed copies of the CD and LP for sale, along with posters and t-shirts.

I’m all for crowd-funding, particularly to the extent that it cuts out the record label as middle man and allows for a more unencumbered kind of artist freedom. And, yet, it’s worth at least pausing for a moment to consider how Williams might have faired in 1988 if, as a largely unknown entity, she been left to her own devices — if, for example, she’d had to raise money from a then mostly non-existent fan base in order to record and release Lucinda Williams. In some ways it’s fitting that the disc is now referred to as the “Rough Trade Album,” and even more so that former Rough Trade A&R scout Robin Hurley, who was instrumental in signing Williams to the label, penned liner notes to the new edition. If it weren’t for Rough Trade taking a chance on Williams and, in a commercial sense, coming up short, then we very well might not have Lucinda Williams.

Hypothetical scenarios aside, Hurley and Rough Trade were smart, prescient, and/or canny enough to see and hear something special in Williams. The album that resulted, with its mix of New Orleans-flavored country comforts, blues attitude, and pop smarts, may not have sold very well, but it got the proverbial ball rolling for Williams, who’s now regarded as one of the best songwriters of her generation. It’s certainly something Williams appreciates. “I can’t even begin to explain what this album means to me,” she admits in her post on PledgeMusic. “It was the first record where I truly found myself. . . Or, at least, figured out what it is I do. And it has shaped me as an artist from that year forward.”