Artist: Male solo artist
Career: recording since 1955
Language: English
Genre: Texas country’n’rock’n’roll
The last recordings Doug Sahm made in 1999 before his passing, they were released in 2000 as this posthumous album. He sings a couple of old ones with real feeling, he wrote a couple beautiful new ones, he takes the opportunity to do a final Dylan song (‘Love minus zero/No limit’), and he tells a story about Leon Payne, the blind balladeer.
I’m no expert on Sahm’s later years – I feel ‘Border wave’, his comeback Sir Douglas Quintet album, is very underrated, but that was 1981, 20 years ago. Listening I get the impression that with time he found a way to reign in his indulgences – you know those hippie Sir Douglas records are great because the whole thing can fall apart at any time and it frequently does. That’s not what this record is about. With time and experience he zoomed in on the heart of what he does, and that is, of course, the Texan tradition. And that’s what you get here, a real Texan country record. The Texan part is not just in the frequent name checks of the state, Dallas, Austin etc. It’s in the taste of the music, the way the fiddles intersect with the pedal steel, it sounds like sun fried tears on a cactus (forgive these stereotypes, all my best friends are Texans etc.).
Well, anyway, this is not a record about dying. Far from it, it’s about really living. Sahm’s summing the whole thing up, what it’s all about. So he’s not dancing on the wire anymore, this time with concentration he’s sending us a beautiful message in a language that we know. As I said, I don’t know much about his later years. I don’t know if he’d been working towards this or if it was the pure concentration of knowing it was his last message. But I’m happy I heard the message. It’s about living –living with pleasure, living with pain, living with others- and with any luck the listener can carry it around with him a little while and put it to good use.
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