Offered in the spirit of the great bootlegs...
Jimmy LaFave over the years;
Doing 12 Dylan songs, a cover or two,
and turning loose of some treasures of his own.
Everything here is live, unreleased or off the air.
The sound is impressive but still rough enough
to slip us in the back door of that very intimate room,
Jimmy in the first few bars of our secret request.
1 Positively 4th Street
2 Red Dirt Roads At Night
3 Because The Wind
4 Burden To Bear
5 Nobody Knows You When You're Down & Out
6 Going Home
7 Simple Twist Of Fate
8 The Perfect Combination
9 How It Must Remain
10 Key To The Highway
11 Oh, Sister
12 Loved You Like Rainbows
13 Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
14 Oklahoma Hills
15 Forever Young
1 Valentine's Day
2 Ellie's Song
3 If You Want To See Me Rock
4 If Not For You
5 I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
6 The Open Road
7 Never Be Mine
8 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
9 Have You Ever Loved A Woman
10 Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You
11 I Threw It All Away
12 Down In The Flood
13 The Lone Wolf
14 One Too Many Mornings
15 Hold On
Bonus track ** Jackson Browne's "Rosie"
(just let track 15 keep on playing)
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DAVE MARSH'S LINER NOTES
(Dave is one of America's most respected rock critics.)
Jimmy LaFave has one of America's greatest voices,
and this album is the story of what he has learned to do
with it. It's a unique instrument, with startling range
and its own peculiar sense of gravity, liable to
swoop in and wreck your expectations at any instant.
Listening to the songs on Trail, the product of more
than a decade of learning his art, and trying to think
of how to prepare you for them (I'm sure not good enough
to add to them) is flat-out daunting. I thought I ought
to use this space to tell you how he's the best
rock'n'roll interpreter of Dylan songs ever--here, he
sings everything from "Forever Young" to "Positively
Fourth Street," that is, from the predictable to the
practically impossible, and he makes those songs shine
in new ways. In short, he makes those Dylan songs into
Jimmy LaFave music. Then Jimmy lets loose with a song
of his own like "How It Must Remain," a gorgeous and
uncompromising love letter, which forces me to remember
that he's not only a Dylan interpreter but also a Dylan
inheritor.
It's a brave album. Jimmy stands his own songs right up
against the songs he interprets--the ones by Dylan and
by Bruce Springsteen, the ones he learned from his red
dirt mentors Woody Guthrie and Bob Childers, and the ones
he took from the blues ("Nobody Knows You When You're Down
and Out," "Key to the Highway," and "Have You Ever Loved
a Woman"). He dares you to compare what he writes to the
best songwriters of his time, and to compare how he sings
to some of the greatest blues and folk singers of all time.
It's a bet he cashes every time.
The mark of a great interpretive singer is that he leaves
his own stamp on even the most familiar songs and that he
is capable of reviving some songs that would otherwise be
lost. That's as good a description of what happens on Trail
as you'll get. And then Jimmy turns in a selection of his
original songs that shows one reason why: He knows not only
how to take a tune apart, he's adept at putting one together.
As he declares in "Red Dirt Roads at Night" and his
stunningly personal version of Woody Guthrie's "Oklahoma
Hills," Jimmy LaFave is a true son of the Southwest.
He is the only singer I know of who could sing that
line about in Springsteen's "Valentine's Day" about a
voice that contains "the sky and the river, the timberwolf
and the pines" and make you think he might be singing of his
own voice. He sings like one of those clear channel radio
stations, cutting across the night and burrowing into parts
of your heart you thought were utterly private.
If I ever get my chance to drop some quarters into that
great mythical jukebox out on Route 59, I bet I'll find
a Jimmy LaFave record there, and I bet I'll play it.
'Til then, I'll gladly join him--and you--
follow these Trails.
Dave Marsh
More Reviews
To Hear a Sample or to Order Trail
(Rounder Store)
Photo: Herman Nijhoff
Photo: Terry Tammadge
Photo: Celeste Coronado
** Note: The photo above in this section of Jimmy and Larry Wilson was
taken by Terry Tammadge. We used it in the album graphics and credited itincorrectly.
Sorry, Terry, and thanks for the great shot.
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