Music |
Bill Morrissey
By
Published: Aug 11, 2011
Category:
Country
Guest Butler Michael P. Krupa is a psychologist and health care consultant whose interests include music, photography and poetry. He lives with his wife and children in Concord, Massachusetts.
In the short story Where I’m Calling From, Raymond Carver writes of J.P., a fellow traveler in Bill’s “drying out place”, who fell into a dark, dry well when he was 12 years old. Terrified and wetting himself, J.P. hollered himself hoarse until he was pulled up and out and back into the light.
Carver’s life experience and his short stories take readers to the bottom and, sometimes, back out into the light with alcoholics, sober and dry, and couples stuck in spare settings and stark circumstances. Carver died young (50), ten years sober, productive, and forever grateful for a new life and a new love in poet Tess Gallagher, having gotten to experience what he called the “gravy years.”
Like Carver, to whom he is often compared, singer songwriter Bill Morrissey developed poignant characters and settings and stories and set them to music. Morrissey died last month at the age of 59. Like Carver, Bill died sober and solidly connected to the circle of friends and loved ones who lived in close quarters with his grand but subtle talent as well as his troubles.
Bill was a musical street mystic whose work is not nearly as widely known as it deserves to be, no doubt due at least in part to his battles with alcohol and depression. Bill’s story and his music are known in folk circles, especially in New Hampshire where he lived, and in small enclaves beyond. But unlike his sometime manager and early promoter Tom Rush, and in spite of Boston Music Awards for best folk recordings, Grammy nominations and numerous positive Rolling Stone mentions, Bill’s music is not well known outside of those small circles.
Bill was talented, prolific, personable, troubled, uncomfortable. He smoked to the point of brown fingers. He was skinny and, even in sobriety, didn’t always look well. He wore flannel shirts and work pants and lived alone with his dog. While other musicians of wider public recognition have voices and stage personas that communicate a kind of dramatic street grit — say Tom Waits, Leon Redbone — Bill Morrissey was more a modern day version of Mississippi John Hurt or Robert Johnson, whose songs he admired and covered, with nothing put on or amplified. He was wry and impish and had a sparkle in his eye.
Though he did perform in some large and storied venues, Bill’s live performances and his CD’s convey the feeling of a very small stage or even his living room. He sometimes forgot words but was not overly bothered and thus neither were we. His Epiphone guitar was simple and banged up. His playing was clean but sparse. He was a storyteller of subtle but intense mood and feeling. Nothing grand or Springsteen-like. Small moments at the gas station, the airport, a small apartment with a black and white TV, a woman well into life and a marriage.
Rounder Records’ 2004 Bill Morrissey The Essential Collection contains 17 previously released songs Bill personally selected with help from his long-time supporter, producer, manager and former wife Ellen Karas, plus three songs written specifically for the collection. Each of these versions are clean and uncluttered by excess ornament while including wonderful touches including Suzanne Vega doubling a vocal, a Hammond B-3 organ, dobro, electric guitar (including child prodigy Duke Levine and Patty Larkin), friend Ed Gerhard on slide guitar and fiddler Johnny Cunningham. The center of every piece is Bill’s writing, baritone vocal, and his exquisitely matched strummed and finger-picked guitar. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
What to share with you? Start with Inside, which opens with a lone violin and includes Suzanne Vega’s lovely vocals:
Birches, perhaps Morrissey’s signature piece, takes what on the surface is a similar circumstance to that portrayed Inside — that of a couple and the inevitable tradeoffs of later life and marriage:
They sat at each end of the couch, watched as the fire burned down,
So quiet on this winter’s night, not a house light on for miles around.
Then he said, “I think I’ll fill the stove, it’s getting time for bed.”
She looked up, “I think I’ll have some wine. how ’bout you?”
She asked, and he declined…
“Warren,” she said, “maybe just for tonight,
Let’s fill the stove with birches and watch as the fire burns bright.
How long has it been? I know it’s quite a while.
Pour yourself half a glass. Stay with me a little while.”
And Warren, he shook his head, as if she’d made some kind of joke.
“Birches on a winter night? No – we’ll fill the stove with oak.
Oak will burn as long and hot as a July afternoon,
And birch will burn itself out by the rising of the moon.
And you hate a cold house, same as me. Am I right or not?”
“All right, all right, that’s true,” she said. “It was just a thought.”
Then she said, “Warren, you do look tired. Maybe you should go up to bed. I’ll take care of the wood tonight.”
“Oak,” he told her.
“Oak,” she said.
She listened to his footsteps as he climbed up the stairs,
And she pulled a sweater on her, set her wineglass on a chair.
She walked down cellar to the wood box — it was as cold as an ice chest –
And climbed back up with four logs, each as white as a wedding dress.
And she filled the stove and poured the wine and then she sat down on the floor.
She curled her legs beneath her as the fire sprang to life once more.
And it filled the room with its hungry light and it cracked as it drew air,
And the shadows danced a jittery waltz like no one else was there.
And she stood up in the heat. She twirled around the room.
And the shadows they saw nothing but a young girl on her honeymoon.
And she knew the time it would be short; soon the fire would start to fade.
She thought of heat.
She thought of time.
She called it an even trade.
Nearly every song in the collection contains just such gems of reflection and feeling and affection for people whose stories are not obviously glorious. And as one who lived near the edge, he had a wry take on mortality, as in Letter from Heaven, in which he reports on Mama Cass, Charlie Parker, Jimmy Hendrix and others:
And me I couldn’t be happier.
Yea the service here is fine.
They got dinner ready at half past nine
And I’m going steady with Patsy Cline
And just last night in the barroom
I bought Robert Johnson a beer
Yea, I know, everybody’s always
surprised to find him here.
It’s a great life here in Heaven.
It’s better than the Bible said.
It’s a great life here in heaven.
It’s a great life when you’re dead.
We hope so, Bill.
