Roxy Gordon – Crazy Horse Never Died

Paradise Of Bachelors

Friend of and brother to Townes Van Zandt, Roxy Gordon was a Texan-born outlaw poet who used the spoken word medium to highlight the contentious relationship between European settlers and native Americans.

Working with other marginal Texan musicians, his dry as a bone drawl, ancient as the dusty earth from which he came, is perfect for these cheaply produced but supremely moving and historically fascinating vignettes.

Roxy only ever recorded two albums, but worked in other media as journalist, visual artist and activist for the American Indian Movement. Primarily a storyteller, the short form of the song is a great vehicle for his recollections and hard-eyed impressions of the complex North American story of the last 400 years. Utilising producer Brad Bradley‘s keyboards and guitar alongside Frank Tolbert‘s washtub bass, he paints dry adobe sketches, shorn of pretence and faintly coloured by years of reservation living in Texas and the empty reaches of Montana.

“Crazy horse is alive”, he drawls, painting the tortured picture of the titular leader’s bloody raids on isolated farmsteads as payback for the Europeans’ demands for what lay under the soil. Brad’s keyboard atmospherics and pan pipe are eerie; a desert moan that lays the vocals open to all the ravages of that landscape, the landscape which he describes as being part of his lonely childhood. “Junked Cars” features cheap but melancholic electric piano and his tale of surrounding himself with the abandoned detritus of scattered homesteaders is a rather moving one.

The lo-fi production and home-made values only lend charm to these singular tales. Cheesy ’80s synth adorns “Living Life As A Living Target”, the staccato tones enhancing observations on the futile existence of prairie dogs, while the Ennio Morricone-like desert guitar of “Flying Into Ann Arbour” accompanies a more moralistic western tale of drug abuse and its after-effects. These simple backings are all the songs need, the bass a gentle undulation, the motion of a horse across the desert plain.

There is such charm in the delivery though, and it is hard not to be drawn into the tale, be it “the house of Chuck Berry’s girlfriend” as on “The Western Edge” or the broader expanse of the Southern states as on “Open Letter To Illegal Aliens”, where he accuses seventeenth-century European “wetbacks” of the same crimes that they accuse modern immigrants of today. The sepulchral church organ on this track is a surprising accompaniment to his agitation, the inequality clearly affecting him emotionally.

Over these ten tracks of outlaw country lesson-teaching, our eyes are opened and minds expanded. Paradise Of Bachelors have done an important thing to bring this material back into print and have plans for further reissues in the future. Regardless of your stance on country, these tracks go beyond the style to true universal storytelling and for that reason should be embraced by all.

-Mr Olivetti-