Wilco, Bragg Get Comfy With Woody Guthrie

"We thought, 'Let's see if anyone likes it first, and if they like it, we'll put out another one," Nora Guthrie says of Mermaid Avenue, the critically-lauded, Grammy-nominated 1998 album on which Wilco and Billy Bragg set music to fifteen unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics. Turns out nearly 200,000 anyones did like the album, and the same crew are about to drop another helping of Guthrie lyrics filtered through their musical channels in the form of the tentatively titled Mermaid Avenue Volume II, currently scheduled for release in June on Elektra Records.

As the gatekeeper of the Woody Guthrie Archives, and by proxy the driving force behind a recent rediscovery of America's greatest lyricist, Woody's daughter Nora is largely responsible for these albums. And with the latest album she promises something that resembles its predecessor only in name. "This is more cutting edge musically," she says of the album. "Woody's words were at the front of Mermaid I, but this is a louder sound. I feel like they might have liked a lot of the songs as artists on the first album, but we were kind of tiptoeing through it a little bit. This one really cuts loose."

Some of the tracks that will make the cut for Mermaid Avenue Volume II are leftovers from the original Bragg/Wilco sessions in Dublin, Ireland. But Guthrie claims Wilco's relationship with her father's lyrics has grown since the project's inception and the band assembled in Chicago to hammer out a few additional cuts. "[Mermaid Avenue Volume II] is a more balanced affair. Jeff [Tweedy] and Jay [Bennett] came back and said, 'We really want to get our teeth into this material now.'"

Wilco's Bennett sees the new album as possibly being a little darker, but not entirely different. "Taken as a collection, this subset of the complete Guthrie work that we've done may be a tad more, I hesitate to say 'rock' or 'pop' -- heavier maybe," he says. "Some of the most minor key, dark stuff is on there and some of the angriest stuff we've done is on there. But by the time we finished the first one, we had a notion that we were going to make a second one and we already had some tracks leftover. And we ran into some conflicts in sequencing the record, picking what tracks were going to be on it. And one of the ways we were able to reconcile it between us and Billy was to say, 'I think there's going to be a second one. So if this killer track gets left off just because we have too much good stuff, it's going to see the light of day in two years.'"
Woody Guthrie's imagination knew no bounds and some of the new batch of songs reflect his wide-eyed interest in most anything. "The topics are so diverse," Nora says. "There's a Joe DiMaggio tune. There's one called 'My Flying Saucer' that my dad wrote in the beginning of the Sputnik age. 'The Meanest Man' is a really nasty one; it's so opposite of 'Pastures of Plenty.' Billy really gets the chance to howl on that one. There's a beautiful love song, and there's this screaming heavy-metal song that's basically a 'screw you' to fascists."

"It has yet to stop producing surprising things," Bennett says of Guthrie's archival material. "[Woody]'s done creating, but the stock of stuff left behind is still yielding fresh material."

Guthrie says that the range of material has made for difficult meetings with regards to the prospective cover art. "I'm hoping we use this picture of a cat that my dad took on Mermaid Avenue with our house in the background. How else are you going to tie flying saucers, Joe DiMaggio, a love song and an anti-fascist song together," she says laughing. "You might as well put a cat on the cover."

In the weeks before the album's release (with or without the cat), Wilco are busying themselves with work on their next album, which probably won't see release until next year. Bennett claims that work on the album will take place around a summer tour as well as a possible fall tour with Bragg. "It's just day six," he says of the new sessions. "But it'll be great, that's all I really know."

As for Nora Guthrie, Mermaid Avenue Volume II isn't the only thing on her plate right now. She's also been involved in Til We Outnumber Them, a live album recorded at a 1996 tribute to her father featuring Bragg, Ani DiFranco, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Dave Pirner, Tim Robbins and Bruce Springsteen to be released on DiFranco's Righteous Babe label in April. She and bassist Rob Wasserman are also taking some of Woody Guthrie's diary entries that are written in rhyme and meter and recording them as improvised musical pieces with various guests. Spearhead's Michael Franti has already contributed a track, and DiFranco is committed for another. "It's a very funky and New Yorky kind of project," Guthrie says. "I tease the musicians that they won't be working on this for a year and a half. You're in the studio, you jam and you walk out. It's more like recording with Miles Davis."

Guthrie doesn't expect a third Mermaid Avenue entry, but thinks some additional Woody/Wilco collaborations might trickle out on the band's albums or on compilations or soundtracks. "If Nora would let us do that, I would love it," Bennett says of the chance to continue making music from Guthrie's vaults.

"I love working with the artists," Guthrie says of the future of Woody-related projects. "I love discovering how all of this material can fit into life out there. Some of the material just screams, 'Sing me! Sing me!'"

ANDREW DANSBY
(April 1, 2000)