"They shall Take Up Serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." (Mark 16: 18)
To get a good enough bundle of serpents for a show you would need to live in a serpentine sort of continent I guess. English adders really don’t make the grade. You need to be somewhere like North America, and preferably the United States, with abundant rattlesnakes and the bonus of banjos, bibles, juggling shows, silent movies, civil aviation, jazz, yodelling cowboys, comic books for grown ups: and more plumb crazy country singers than you could shake a forked stick at.
Bibles and the rest notwithstanding, the banjo is a beautiful and plaintive thing. Shirley Collins, doyenne of English folk song and sometime wife to Ashley ("The Governor") Hutchings has been a terrific exponent of its simple understatement over the years. Just listen to last year's incredible retrospective "The Classic Shirley Collins" on Highpoint. Sad and quiet songs are set on the edge between despair and glory by those hesitant dying notes and the unfeasible gaps between them. Not the shimmering Earl Scruggs steam train chrome plated banjo, but the provocative take as much time as you need banjo of politically angry, dramatically mesmerising, soulful voiced Curtis Eller from new York City.
To get a first glimpse of the qualities we're talking about here you might need to start "Taking Up Serpents" with his version of Harry Woods' "Red Red Robin". Eller builds it from the bottom up and remakes something that you might have written off or forgotten into the grand little song it always was, with underdog optimism enough to break your heart. Liisa Yonker and Marilee Eitner do some great singing on that one. I'm rehearsing it already to join in when he comes to the UK in April.
Each of Curtis Eller's own top-drawer songs tells a story of loss, heartache, disappointment (yes, "that son-of-a-bitch" was re-elected), regret or foreboding. "Don’t no one remember Luna Park?" he moans on the delicious waltz of "Coney Island Blues" "how I wish that I'd been there in 1903 after dark when they would light the place up like the daytime". The voice and banjo are helped on their swaying way by the American Circus of accordion, a snare drum and a tuba and the tears flow as thick as nostalgia. It’s followed by the sprightly and uplifting line "This is the room where Stephen Foster died and this is the song that finally broke his pride".
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And so through the album. Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton, Amelia Earhart, Elvis Presley, Al Jolson, Fatty Arbuckle come and go in flickering vignettes of what could have been and could still be. But, praise be, it’s the "could still be" that the album leaves you with. Amelia Earhart "disappeared in a cloudbank and the static never cleared", but she did it with a lap steel guitar playing in the background and the sweetest funeral march harmonies you ever heard. There is hope as long as the songs are this good.
Final track "Stagecoach" is the shortest, saddest and most personal of the songs. It’s a straight love song to make you shiver with cold and tremble with sadness. "I hope you will forgive me, but I lied about the Stagecoach and I never have been West of Chicago … don’t you know that I can’t sleep when you’re not here?"
Where Eller's stage show is embellished and intensified by his surreal and physical theatricality his albums have the joys of some perfectly sympathetic musicians – the upright bass of Joseph DeJarnette and Marilee Eitner's accordion, Joe Exley on tuba, Gary Langol on piano and lap steel and Chris Moore on loose and emphatic drums (as required). Graphic artist Jamie B. Walcott contributes a singular maraca. I love this album to a fault.
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