Wheels Keep Turnin': Lucinda Williams and the rocky road to a masterpiece

 

Her recent apparition in the Best Album Eliminator and the admission of a certain featured reader that he doesn't know anything about Lucinda Williams makes me think that we should change that. 

When Car Wheels On A Gravel Road finally arrived in stores in 1998, it had been a long time coming. A full six years to be exact. Williams was a notoriously slow worker, needing years to follow her breakthrough, the excellent self-titled album from 1988 with Sweet Old World, an album that, like Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, she re-recorded entirely. The even longer wait for Car Wheels was mainly due to its extremely long and difficult production history. Williams herself has described the making of that album as a "total clusterfuck", which it no doubt was, taking more than two years (plus another due to label complications) and no less than three different producers. It also cost her the friendship and services of her musical director and bandleader of twelve years...

Lucinda had, in early 1995, recorded an entire record of fifteen songs, as before produced by said bandleader and musical director, the improbably named Gurf Morlix, who basically can play anything with strings and did so on those two records mentioned above. Ex-Small Faces/Faces member Ian McLagan engineered the sessions and playd organ on several of the numbers. That original version of the album is very much in keeping with its predecessors, but Williams wasn't happy with it, notably with a couple of her vocal performances. She wanted to recut not just her vocals, but the music tracks as well, basically starting from scratch. After doing guest vocals on a Steve Earle song and being mightily impressed by the work of Earle's producer Ray Kennedy, she convinced Earle and Kennedy to rerecord the songs she wasn't happy with, leading inevitably to Morlix either stepping down or being fired. Earle and Kennedy, credited as The Twangtrust, continued working on the material, emphasizing her vocals and the live sound of her band, though Kennedy added tons of overdubs later. With the main parts done Earle went off to finish his own tour, under the tacit understanding that after the tour he would wrap up the record. 

But Williams was unwilling to wait, instead hiring E-Streeter Roy Bittan and giving him the tapes, on which he overdubbed a bunch of accordion and some organ (plus tons of guitar work by a who's who of stringbenders, including Charlie Sexton, Greg Leisz and Buddy Miller). Bittan's work is really subtle, his overdubs are woven into the arrangements without drawing attention to themselves. If you'd asked me without me knowing the answer "On how many tracks do we hear an accordion?" , I'd probably say one, maybe two tops. It's seven. That and his organ added to three songs (an instrument she used relatively extensively on Sweet Old World as well) give Car Wheels a unity of sounds that work on an almost uncosncious level. You don't really hear the accordion all the time, but you feel that it's there. 

Lucinda's decision to continue reworking what became Car Wheels was probably down several factors. For one, to her being more and more confident in her own choices - and the insistance that her choices were heard and respected. But maybe the musical divorce from Morlix also was rooted in this - a need - however conscious - to break away from what had worked before, but had probably also become a little routine. Her insistence of more focus on her vocals - as opposed to a band sound that band leader Morlix would obviously prefer- was one of the official reason for the rift between her and Morlix, but maybe after that long of a time, it was just time to move on. Almost twelve years is a long time to hang out and work with someone, so maybe it was time to separate for these two either way.  

The original Car Wheels are probably easily listenable and/or acquirable on the Net, and since I aim to feature the rare and the reworked here on One Buck Records, today's download is the Gurf Morlix version of the album, whih is essentially an entire different album (different vocals and instrumenst), despite the familiarity of the songs. It also features two songs that weren't kept for the final version. ("Out Of Touch" showed up on follow-up Blue). 

While the final version of Car Wheels is an extremely produced, big-budget record where you can hear the time and money invested in it (well...maybe not three years worth...), the early Morlix version is... not. He isn't wrong when he estimated that the record is "90% finished". There is a feeling of the last coat of paint missing to some of the numbers, but these aren't raw demos, either. They are fully produced songs with a very solid country rock band, though they do miss the swing and hip-hop influenced groove that the final record has, as well as the many fine touches Earle & Kennedy and then Bittan brought to the table. There is no question that Williams was right and that the published version of Car Wheels is the strongest. But the Gurf Morlix version has its own modest charms. I personally also don't hear much that is wrong with her vocals. Phrasing is different, but that is expected from what is now essentially a first stab at an album. It's a rewarding "alternative" version of a modern classic, or, you know, an interesting way to relisten to these songs, at worst. 

So, go get the original set of Wheels. Get this set of  Wheels. And let 'em spin...

[very good vintage article on Lucinda and Car Wheels here: Lucinda Williams - Setting the record straight - No Depression. And a pretty good retro one here: PAIN IS NOT THE POINT: REFLECTIONS ON THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF CAR WHEELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD - ANTIGRAVITY Magazine]