Casey Ruff – Pomp and Circumstance
(2014, self-released)
You know Casey Ruff before you know him. The honest bartender, the dude who looks the same at 2 AM as 11 AM, who will speak freely, and humorously, at any time. And he does some badass posing—somehow balancing ’80s awesome with self-knowledge.
When I first saw him hold court at Sunset Tavern three years ago, I was blown away. Ruff has presence, the ability to perform and move a crowd, that few have. It’s that unique form of charisma where when the person gets up on stage, you know it’s performance time, you know it means something. The other local artist with the same charisma, and this will seem strange as she performs completely different styles of music, is Shana Cleveland.
Since I saw those shows at the Sunset, I’ve invited him on every bill I had an opening on. Every show, he has engaged the audience.
It turns out, Casey Ruff is a student of live performance. For almost a decade he has worked at the Tractor Tavern—he’s had the crow’s nest view of the preponderance of mid-range country-tinged acts to hit the US. The more I study musicians, the more I discover that what we see as talent is usually extremely hard-earned. For example, when you read Elvis biographies, you find out how insanely the man studied soul and gospel from the time he was a toddler. I don’t want to echo Malcolm Gladwell, so I’ll stop with saying the thousands of hours studying live performance have served as a kind of battery for Casey Ruff—when he hits the stage, it discharges. It is electric.
On April 20, while his sideman work with Virgin of the Birds is dominating UK publications and the BBC Radio 6, Casey Ruff releases his long, long delayed EP Pomp and Circumstance with his band The Mayors of Ballard.
On the EP: The first thing to catch me by surprise was Casey’s voice. Casey ranges in his delivery live, but this recording presents a tenor that suggests more vulnerability than his live performances indicate. The timbre is actually very close to the great Lefty Frizzell. Close enough for me to briefly say, please listen to Lefty Frizzell, who is dead but great. Lefty sang in a tenor as honest as a grease stain, but bent his notes with a blend of remorse and swagger that not even George Jones could surpass. He also recorded a singularly pleasant country song with a Northern theme: Saginaw, Michigan.
If Casey were to add those bends to his voice, he’d have the perfect instrument for the lines of his opening song, a K-Mart Realism masterpiece with lines like “I was conceived between Centipede and Ms. Pac Man arcade games,” segueing to “I’d say Mother please could you spare me some dollars/for some quarters and a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple for the farmer’s daughter.”
On this recording, on this brilliantly written song, there isn’t a Lefty Frizzell mastery. It opens with time-keeping singing, in key, but not full, there isn’t really room, sonically, for the lead vocal—it’s as though it’s part of the arrangement, not the feature instrument. This truly would not matter in a live situation—but on an EP, combined with an electric piano played where a properly roomy upright piano is demanded, it undercuts the effort.
This comes up often. This EP is excellently recorded—every instrument is crystal clear, and bridges soar. But the combination of recording techniques and performance don’t seem to gel as they could.
I write this because A: that’s a damned shame, especially on the opening track, as “Born in a Bar” is such a cleaver of a tune; B: it’s something everyone who’s recorded a record has come across, and comes across constantly; and C: it reminds us of the imperfections of recording, of the complete façade of it, of how little it has to do with performing live.
Small flaws pop up throughout the recording: the songwriting is all hard-earned; I mentioned bridges—the closer, “Goodbye, Good Luck” pulls out a gorgeous bridge with harmony that makes buying this EP worth whatever you pay just to figure out how that song was put together. The arrangements and recording of the Rufftones, I presume Casey Ruff’s highly musical family on horns, is outstanding, and in particular the Telecaster guitar work of Dan Walker is so perfectly recorded and performed that James Butler and Keith Richards come to mind, but there are lines delivered and musical choices in ways that impair the record. Strengths in Casey’s songwriting become weaknesses here—he wrote a high energy, upper register country tune in “Stop Me From Loving You,” that is refreshing in its composition, like the best of ’80s pop mixed with contemporary country, but it comes off thin, the meter too regular, the notes unbalanced, from a compressed acoustic guitar intro, to the yell out on the way to the chorus.
“Walk Behind Me,” the third track, hints at the power of Casey’s live performance. The drive of the horn arrangement is outstanding. With the refrain “I love my hate,” you start to get a groove going. Unlike on “Stop Me from Loving You,” here, when Casey does a proper here-we-go type yell, it’s full and believable.
“Wrong Tree” is a pretty, pretty song. A silky horn intro, a full-sounding piano, an arrangement that fills out as it goes, a gentle bridge. “Goodbye, Good Luck” is the best track of the EP, a song I’ve heard serve as a barn-burning kiss-off of a tune, but here is restrained but full, and, again, in this delivery, the bridge gets full attention.
The five songs on Casey Ruff’s Pomp and Circumstance EP show a promising songwriter, a far more sophisticated songwriter than fans of his probably knew existed.
I’ve read that George Jones (arguably the greatest country singer in the history of music), required 80 takes to record his breakout hit “White Lightning.” This is often attributed to the possum’s heavy drinking, but I believe so much was riding on those takes, every word had to be perfectly in the spirit. (As in holy ghost, not as in white dog.) Casey Ruff is operating at a very high level as a songwriter, and as a live performer, and some of that you can feel in this EP, but I wish it had captured more. I don’t feel like fans will be disappointed, but I do believe that . . . with the perfect recording and performance that my heroes of the ’50s and ’60s waited for, “Born in a Bar” could have earned this EP and Casey a new collection of fans and more exposure. (Of course, he’s doing pretty well right now.)
Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard will release their EP Easter Sunday, April 20, at Sunset Tavern in Ballard, with support from The Rainieros and The Foghorns.