Wilco

Mermaid Avenue

Not meant to BE Guthrie, but this still misses a trick

Review Score:

(8/10)
This is a fine album. There are many memorable tunes, lyrics and ideas that have clearly sprung from the head of the enigmatic Billy Bragg. As an album of new music it works and therefore should rightly be as highly rated as it is.
My problems with this record are not the artists themselves, but rather that they were the ones chosen to undertake the project. Billy Bragg has always had tremendous unrealised promise as a writer and performer, mostly owing to the fact that he spends 90% of his time being rabidly left wing and not concentrating on writing. Wilco were, at this time, an up and coming band and not ready for something of this magnitude. I certainly disagree with allowing Jeff Tweedy free reign on many numbers, which I believe fell short more often than not, too often resembling middle of the road alt-country - which was perhaps the aim...
As for Bragg, whilst he certainly applied himself with vigour, as demonstrated by the terrific documentary 'Man In The Sand', he was not the man for the job.
To my mind, the venture cried out for Ramblin' Jack Elliott's input. Elliott even once recorded a version of 'At My Window' himself in the early seventies. Of course, with Jack at the helm, the album would have passed without a whisper and not been named in Amazon's 'Best of 1998.' Bob Dylan is another name that obviously presents itself, but Dylan would no doubt have made an electric-based record which would sound too much like everything else he's done in the last ten years.
Nonetheless, Nora Guthrie chose Billy over Jack Elliott and a host of others (Springsteen, Young, Wainwright, Van Zandt - Johnny Cash?) for the reason that Bragg is so overtly left wing. I don't believe Guthrie was as left wing as is widely thought, but perhaps Nora would know best.
Nonetheless, I think Bragg, Tweedy, Elliott and just about anyone else would appreciate Woody's wonderful quote, which was discovered in the making of the album and is a wonderful slogan for the project:

"I ain't necessarily a communist, but I been in the red all my life."

More Reviews: