Smokestack Lightnin' Home Page -- The Blues Profile Page
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Two songs into Rooster, Minnesota-based bluesman Charlie Parr achieves the well-nigh impossible. He makes "Bethlehem", a traditional, Biblically-themed acoustic song so dangerously intense that it feels current. It is a stark retelling of Herod's massacre of the innocents -- the night when the king of Israel killed all the two-year-old boys in hopes of eliminating Jesus -- told from the perspective of an ordinary father who lost his son that night. The event is so massive, so unthinkable, that it overshadows what most people consider the larger story: that Jesus escaped and went on to die on the cross. Indeed when the father sees Jesus hanging on a cross, he can only envision his lost boy's face. It is all the more powerful for being minimal musically, with the thump of foot punctuating minor key picking and a monochrome melody filtered through a ravaged voice.
Though the rest of Rooster is excellent, this single song tells you most
of what you need to know about Charlie Parr, his traditional roots, his
coiled emotional intensity, his sparseness and his almost unbearable
honesty. Later in the album, his work will take on slightly different
shades and colorings, in the sardonic humor of "One Eyed Jack," in the
ghostly slide of "Dead Cat on the Line", in the cake-walky
exuberance of "Public Record Rag," but he returns to this peak level of
quality just once. That happens in "Cheap Wine", a slow and melancholy
ache of a tune, underwritten to the point of bare essence, and
encompassing all the loneliness of old ladies and their cheap wine and
the morose liquor clerks who serve them. "I can't stand the sight of any
of them. I wish I could sell this place. I wish I could buy a
boat...float away," may not look like a universal truth there on the
page, but on the album, this verse contains every color of
disappointment and dead-ended-ness and alienation. |