The Foghorns – Turn to the Moon
(Self-released, September 2021)
“Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson),” the opener on the Foghorns’ recent Turn to the Moon album, is hands-down my favorite song from their vast, expansive catalog. It’s the simplest of arrangements – a singer and an acoustic guitar – and yet it’s a world in and of itself. Lead Foghorn Bart Cameron sings to an unknown person who’s not necessarily a lover or a child or even a friend. All we know is that this person is disappearing into suffering and the narrator is reaching out with mercy and mysterious hope. While it seems tailor made for the dystopian terror of living in Trump’s America or the isolation and fear of the recent pandemic, I know that this song, and this recording of this song, predates both eras. Recorded, per the Foghorns’ production taste, on basically a steam engine some years ago, “Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson)” is sublime and impossibly human, imploring “Don’t wait for the apocalypse / Do not hold out to the end. / Before it all gets too much for you to stand / Come back to me again.”
“40 Watt Light” adds harmonica to the sonic palette, imploring the listener “If you see my 40 watt light, drive on by” in a lonesome cowboy blues. The woozy starkness carries on through most of the record, pulling in characters like the “Queen of Decatur” and “The Boy on the Bus Again” before meditating about how “Sean’s Gone” when, in fact, you’re actually Sean. The missing persons drawn across Turn to the Moon struggle to temper the despair with resignation, but the levee never fully breaks. Two cover songs shift the temperature – a cover of Casey Ruff’s dollar-draft friendship anthem “You Don’t Bother Me” and a fleshed out, faithful cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that offers relief by putting on a dignified costume and escaping to another time.
My runner-up favorite song on the record is the semi-cryptic “Night of the Comet,” a folk song packed with low culture references leading back to wisdom about the comforting delusion of distraction, how, at “the end of the empire,” “I found my peace in a scream queen / The decimation of man is a happy ending.” I know my record collection and vintage Heavy Metal magazines and ’70s Euro horror DVDs (yes, I still watch DVDs – don’t @ me) and bagged and boarded Bronze Age Marvel beauties won’t save me, but Jean Rollin’s gossamer female vampires make me happy and I need to feel happy now and again.
The album ends with a beautiful bummer of a song that looks outward, placing the lost soul in the social sphere with the brilliant lyric “Police take your belt, they take your shoestrings. / They take your fingerprints and they give you a warning. / If you wake in the morning, they’ll take your pride.” We’re not just lost and alone in here, we’re screwed out there too.
Circling back to “Apocalypse (for Alan Wilson),” Alan Wilson is a sort of skeleton key for Bart Cameron and his Foghorns. Alan Wilson was the singer and guitarist for the ’60’s acid country band Canned Heat who, before he died at age 27 in 1970, gave us two classic songs, “Going Up Country” and “On the Road Again”, while musically mixing it up with the likes of John Lee Hooker and Son House. Wilson’s an obscure mythical figure, nowhere near as popular as Hendrix or Janis or Jim Morrison, but mythical nonetheless for American musical alchemists and doomed purists who refuse to believe our entire cultural legacy adds up to Rock Star artifice and the self-consuming nostalgia factory at the end of history. Wilson wrote a Master’s thesis on Charlie Patton, hung around John Fahey and reportedly coaxed Son House out of retirement, teaching him his own songs to help him record Father of the Delta Blues in 1965. He was the real deal who did real things of beauty and substance. All is not doomed, there’s a light to search out in what might feel like utter darkness.
When you hear the dogs and they are screaming
And the trees they’re starting to burn
And if you’ve had enough of this Earth you feel like leaving.
Turn to the moon.
I’ll turn to you.
Turn to the moon.
Who am I kidding? If you’re reading this you’ll be there on Friday night at the Sunset Tavern when the Foghorns headline a show with Sam Russell and his Harborrats along with Casey Ruff and the Mayors of Ballard. Follow that up with the Ball of Wax Volume 68 release show on Saturday at Cafe Racer and your Cascadian weekend will be one for the ages.