| Suitcase on the Loose - Alex Shoumatoff's Album |
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SUITCASE ON THE LOOSE : 10 SONGS BY ALEX SHOUMATOFF Producer : Kate McGarrigle
( click on photo to see the full
album cover: )
Kate's Linernotes : Back in the late sixties early seventies there was an an uncontrollable urge for young folk of well-heeled middle class families as well as a few less fortunate ones to throw away all values taught him or her both at home and in the finest schools and to seek instead the path of truth and godliness - a path strewn with bass weejin loafers and wrap-around madras skirts tossed out of volkswagen van windows and replaced with mexican huaraches or sometimes no shoes at all as these seekers took to this road. And lo they made their way along this path (preferably in a vw van or whatever one's thumb pulled over) and together, along this path, they raised their voices in songs of freedom, thousands and thousands of voices raised in songs of freedom. Now the stones that made up this path were hallucinogenic drugs but the mortar that held them together was music. It was a simple music, not the sophisticated sound of Tin Pan Alley or Broadway but a music that resounded with the same strains as the work songs heard along back roads where convicts, once upon a time chained together, sang from their hearts and souls. We wanted to hear the sound of roots - we wanted to water these roots and help them flourish into a new sound all our own. I first met Alex Shoumatoff in the early seventies in Boston. He had his watering can, i.e., his guitar, and was growing a little garden of country blues....mostly based on the music of Reverend Gary Davis. As it turned out, I too was watering the same patch and fancied myself a decent interpreter of his songs(not bad for a girl) " Twelve Gates to the City" and Oh lordy how happy i am" were on my "let me dazzle you" list i had to impress fellow folkies... Anyhow Alex was in Boston contemplating music as a career as we all were since it was the home of the great Manny Greenhill who put Joan Baez on the map, but with the subsequent publishing of an article on the Reverend Gary Davis(in Rolling Stone), he opted for the written word instead - easy choice - it paid the rent. And time went by, life went by… and many many years pass, over thirty. Suddenly I get a call from Alex saying "Remember me? Alex Shoumatoff? I'm your neighbour now, just live over on Jeanne Mance (about 5 minutes from me)...wanna get together and jam, play some Gary Davis?" He came over and I said "What's in the suitcase Alex? You didn't have that when I first met you" and he said he didn't have use for one yet as life was new and he hadn't collected any baggage and i said "Open it up, let's see what's in there." And 40 years of songs were in there: from the Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues where he first turned on to that path of freedom, right up to "What's the Drill? up or down or back again in another form... I wish I really knew"... and I thought "in this suitcase is a life" - his life, my life: everyman's life, everywoman's life. There's love, lost and found, an Acre or Two and What is the Drill? We all wish we really knew.
Suitcase's Linernotes :
Suitcase
is a voice from the Sixties that sort of fell through the cracks. Back
in l970 Alex Shoumatoff's twenty-three-year life journey came to a fork.
Should become a singer-songwriter, in keeping with the times ? He had a
contract with Manny Greenhill, the manager of Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell,
Joan Baez, and his guitar teacher, blind Reverend Gary Davis (whose gitjo,
or six-string banjo, he plays on several of these songs), and he was supposed
to perform his songs at places like Gerde's Folk City and the Gaslight.
Or should he become a man of letters and take off and see the
world and write about what he encountered ? He ended up doing the latter
and became the celebrated long-time contributor of Vanity Fair and author
of ten books, hailed for his literary reportage from the world's
most remote and inaccessible corners and his chameleon-like ability to
write about anything, from Donald Trump to the pygmies of the Ituri Forest.
In
l999 Shoumatoff and his family, after many moves, landed in Montreal.
Montreal is a city with 200 ethnic groups and all kinds of music, and Shoumatoff
immersed himself in it. He renewed his friendship with Kate McGarrigle,
whom he had met in a club in Boston, where she was performing, in l970.
She and her sister Anna had gone on to become the legendary McGarrigle
sisters, and Kate had had two children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, who
are stars in their own right. Their father, Loudon Wainwright III,
grew up across the street from Shoumatoff in Bedford, New York and became
one of the great singer songwriters of his generation, which a part of
Shoumatoff still yearned to be. But for years he figured, with a
guy right across the street who can sing and write songs like that, what
chance do I have?
The Dalai Lama let out a series of resonant basso ho-ho-ho's, and said, "What is a suitcase ? You can describe everything about your suitcase : its size, shape, the material it is made from, and so on. But there will always be something about the suitcase that you failed to describe. And furthermore, if you had been a sub-atomic particle, you would have passed right through the suitcase. Therefore neither you nor the suitcase exist—independently." One day in 2003, sitting on his old battered Delsey hardshell suitcase, his inseparable traveling companion for the last fifteen years,waiting for a boat on a dock in the Peruvian Amazon, killing the time as he usually did by picking his little Guitalele, he remembered their conservation and said to himself, "That's what I am. The Suitcase." An unfettered, free-floating consciousness, he explained to his friend the Brazilian artist Antonio Petikov a few weeks later in Sao Paulo, "a stateless suitcase, a weightless suitcase, a loveless and a hateless suitcase, just trying to stay one town ahead of the repo man," and Petikov added, "surfing the world, no bullshit attached." Years later, Shoumatoff realized, esprit d'escalier, that he should have said to the Dalai Lama when he asked "What is a suitcase?" : "A suitcase if what's in your hand when you 're leaving." The Suitcase (one of a number of suitcases in the music world, Shoumatoff discovered to his chagrin after he had adopted the name and it was too late to change it) began to write songs again. Four of the songs on this cd are of this millennium, the other six are from the hippie days of his youth and were optioned by Manny Greenhill. He played them for Kate—the new ones and the ones from years ago, and she liked them enough to help him realize his dream of recording them. The sessions took place in Kate's cozy home studio in Montreal, Querbes Service, in the summer of 2007. Some of Montreal's most accomplished musicians dropped by. The six-foot-nine genius guitarist John Reissner, who hadn't picked up a guitar in four years and was working in a paint store ((Reisner had given up the instrument after coming to the devastating conclusion that he was never going to be able to play like Danjo Reinhardt), was persuaded to come over, and he laid down some astonishing licks. Slava Egorov, who was doing the recording with his old Soviet microphones, contributed some manic, shamanic fluting. Two generations of McGarrigle women sang backup vocals. Kate orchestrated and arranged the cosmic gazpacho that the musicians—Joel Zifkin, Michael Jerome Browne, Michel Pepin, John Rudel, Chaim Tannenbaum-- were cooking on her ground floor, and here is the result— a bag of tunes going back 38 years and as recent as a few weeks ago, a beautiful musical accompaniment to a voice that is not beautiful or musical, but distinctive, the voice of Everyman of the generation that came of age in the Sixties, untainted by having to make a living at it, ten songs written over the course of a lifetime, so together they are a kind of life statement. Anyone who likes a good lyric will agree that the Suitcase coulda been a contenda. 1. "The Blind Wandering Prophet of
Old," written in l970
In some houses there's no laughter
Some people are crazy about guilt
Let me tell you about class cuz I
been there
Chorus : Come to me you weary souls
Some want to see the Eiffel Tower
Some people will tell you this place
is no good
Yes, everybody's got a homing device
Chorus Well I've sung my way through different
scenes
Four score and twenty ears ago
2. "What's the Drill?" written at
Pullahari Monastery, Kathmandu, 2006
It sure would be nice to know
Is there anything at all ?
I won't miss the brutality
There will always be suffering
Death is not the end of it
3. "Pennsylvania Turnpike Blues,"
written in 1973
Chorus :
Threw my belongings into the trunk
Chorus Well I don't want to go to Harrisburg,
Chorus Picked up a hitchhiking stranger
Chorus Let's make it down to Philadelphia
Chorus
4. "It's Only Flesh," written in
2005
It's only flesh
It's only flesh
Life is full of painful twists
5. "Forest Woman," written in l970
There was a forest woman
From the clouds that float like foam
But tears of distress came into them
But I was lost and desperate
Our love was brief and it brought
little joy
One day she came to me and told
Well I'm going to see that beautiful
shore
6."One Morning Soon," written in
1970
Early in the morning
All the little children in the land
Chorus : One morning soon
As I stand by my window
All the little children in the land
Chorus As the sun shines through
Chorus 7."Looking for a Place," written
in l970
I'm looking for a place about an
acre or two
It's got a dog and a fire and a field
and a stream
It's got a little front porch with
a railing for your feet
Well I hear there's land available
in Brazil,
Well can anybody tell me where it
could be
8. "Too Much," written in 2008
Too much wealth
You feel much better when you share
The human hand is heavy on the land
We got to mobilize
Cuz the human hand is heavy on the
land
9. "The Stream of Life," written
in l970, last verse in 2007
I was walking down a stream
I walked a little more
The stream ran into a river
10."Suitcase On the Loose," written
in 2003
I'm a suitcase
I'm a lost case
Got no heart to break
I'm a suitcase on the case
I been to Mali and Bali
I'm a stateless suitcase, a weightless
suitcase,
Well I guess it's time to skedaddle
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