Greg Wood
Ash Wednesday
Stag Records
by William Michael Smith

Smacked down with endocarditis at 36 when his band Horseshoe seemed to be on the verge of breaking nationally after five hardscrabble, shitty-gig years, Greg Wood's whole life hung by a thread and his livelihood evaporated like a drop of water on a Houston sidewalk in July.

Every now and then, I get the blues so hard
Feel the cold settle in my heart
And there are things I cannot say
Seductive voices from beyond the grave
Say "come on over and play, it's gonna be OK"

With Ash Wednesday, Wood is back with a new album that picks up almost seamlessly where the "pause" button was pushed on his career when he passed out at his home in 1999 and underwent heart valve replacement surgery. After a bizarre series of post-surgical complications that caused Wood to lose a retina and his inner ear balance function, he has regained his strength and the spit-in-your-eye sass that made him one of Houston's most respected songwriters in the '90s.

Maybe I'm white, maybe I'm fat
Maybe it's important for you to see it like that
But tell me what it matters when you're under the rocks
And you're staring up forever at the top of your box

A project originally conceived by Jesse Dayton band bassist Charlie Sanders, Jr., whose former band The Missiles covered two Wood songs, Ash Wednesday was supposed to be a small local record, a way to get Wood back into circulation, a way to test the waters with a minimum investment. It suddenly took on more importance when Dayton offered to produce and put the album out on his Stag label. For Wood, who had doubted that he would ever be involved with music again after the combined disappointments of Horseshoe coming unwound so close to making it and the disintegration of his health, Dayton showing interest was a real spirit lifter.

"I was so burned out, and having come so close as they say to 'cashing my check,' I decided that maybe there was more to life. I'd been there and done that and didn't have anything left to prove aside maybe from proving to myself that my music could connect to a larger audience. Then, almost simultaneously, Charlie and Jesse offered to make a record with me and I started a new relationship with a woman who helped get me focused and motivated. This combo of good news seemed to me a pretty big sign that, hey, maybe I'd bailed out too soon."

Wood's songs are alt.country commentaries on the complexities and absurdities of urban life. Wood doesn't deal in heroes and tough guys and role models. His human examples are primarily drawn from the faceless everyday mob. His characters and situations have an uncanny ability to strike a chord with hip listeners, while the unhip, uptight crowd will run in horror to their houses of worship to escape Wood's realistic blasphemies. With smartly crafted black comedy, Wood touches a shared sense of the emotional and ethical conundrums that nag and trouble us. His lyrics often contain the wry, armor-piercing observations of our best standup comics. Wood even pays a rocking homage to former Houston comic Sam Kinison on the album.

Haven't seen him in a while
I know he's gone but I don't know why
But sometimes when I scream I hear him and it seems
Like he never left, but I know he's dead
And he left a bloody bride, but he was broke when he died
He spent his money on cocaine, and there were traces of it in his veins
When they cut him open, I guess he wasn't jokin'

Wood tried standup a few times and is still prone to say almost anything between songs (back in the early days of Horseshoe, Wood was known to read those "Letters to the Editor" from Penthouse magazine between songs when the mood struck him). There are nights when Howard Stern has nothing on Greg Wood. He found Kinison to be an artist he related to.

"Kinison made it to the top of his gig. He was the hottest commodity in the comedy biz for a while, and he did it on his own terms. He sold out without ever having to sell. I wanted that too, maybe not in big, national-size numbers, but enough to say, 'hey, the audience came to me, not the other way around.' Plus, let's face it, he was a big, rotund fellow who got up on stage and did his thing, and I can relate."

Wood is a master at evoking the ego battering uncertainties and dejection that surround love and rejection. Whereas Ronny Elliott once wrote "nothing is as complicated as it seems," Wood's lyrics imply there aren't enough words to delve all the possibilities, that there aren't enough colors in the universal palette to begin to adequately paint a psychological panorama of love, insecurity, attraction, and loss, that these concepts contain a complicated bipolarity almost beyond understanding. But he does the best he can.

Cold eyes can burn right through you
You're not so special any more
Every sound you make is ancient history
You're not so wonderful anymore
And I don't know why it's so but it's so
And I don't why it is but there you go
Things just can't go on and on
She'll make a good memory when she's gone

Wood possesses a painter's ability to see the fine details in the women that populate his relationship songs. Like a Hindu walking through a bed of coals, Wood shoulders his less than perfect female companions like a mendicant walking blindly in a trance to endure the pain that must be endured to cleanse the soul. His description of his female counterpart in "End of the World" is both photographic and pornographic.

She smiled and flashed the diamond in her teeth
And dangled that cigarette just like Marlene Dietrich
She slipped her hand inside my vest
Numbers on a matchbook, bare sheets and left undressed
It's the end of the world with another beautiful girl

She raised a glass, and the tattoos on her arm
The eye of a needle and a dagger six inches long
So she knows her men always measure up

Throughout his songwriting career, Wood has always been somewhat the religious cynic, and his Job-like experiences of the past few years don't seem to have altered his jaded view. He remakes "Covenant" here, giving it more drive and focus than the loose, twangy version on Horseshoe's 1996 album, King of the World. Both versions are equally biting and effective. Obviously Wood and W.C Fields have quite a bit in common.

Not many more days, not many more steps
Slouchin' into Bethlehem with a price on my head
I really hope these senses are lying to me
And somewhere out there is something I just don't see

Because some have excuses, some have elaborate plans
Some have choices nobody chooses, some are always takin' a stand
Some of them have vision, most of them are blind
I'm just looking for a covenant that I can hide behind

Ironically, despite the fact that most of the songs on Ash Wednesday were written seven or eight years ago, many seem like they were written after Wood's health crisis. On "Everything is OK," Wood signals he's still the surly, logical doubting backslider.

Did you have a good day, don't take too long
The world is simple and the world is wrong
There is evil in this place, waving wicked gospels in my face
Trying to make me say everything is OK

Wood takes his natural tendency for blasphemous black comedy a step further on the title track, as a vision appears to the singer as he lies on his couch drunk. It's fairly obvious Greg Wood has no fear of lightning bolts and divine intervention.

I was drunk on Ash Wednesday, I had the angels in my head
I thought that I'd seen Mary, but I saw Joseph instead
And he said, "The kid's not mine but I loved him just the same
Until he stole all my wine and ran off with that gang"

If this was the Oprah Winfrey show and I was that smoothass got-an-answer-for-everything Dr. Phil (the horror...), we could all get mushy about the triumph of the human spirit over adversity or about the precious nature of human life. If we wanted to get completely sappy, we could veer off into the "today is the first day of the rest of your life" chicken-soup-for-the-soul, touchy-feely goobledy-gock province. But we're talking here about the guy who wrote "No Shit," "End of the World," "Breakfast at 3 A.M.," "Slow Learner," and "Smashed Flat," the guy who Billy Joe Shaver bowed to from the stage at the 1997 South By Southwest, so we ain't goin' there. Suffice it to say Greg Wood is back. He's put a new band together, his musical soulmate Scott Daniels is working with him again, Eric Dane, one Houston's hottest guitarists, has signed on, and the buzz in Europe about Ash Wednesday is already encouraging. It all seems to be playing out according to the scenario Wood lays out in "37 Years."

You can compromise til there's nothing left to bargain
You can trade your soul for an empty promise
Make believe that you're livin' honest
You can compromise til there's nothing left to bargain
Now he plays the guitar behind the old bookstore
Now he plays for tips and he don't make much
A handful of change and a coupla bucks
But he swears he's richer than he ever was before

* Info on Greg Wood's Ash Wednesday is at www.stagrecords.com Jesse Dayton also has some info on the album on his site www.jessedayton.com and if you are up for some really bizarre Sam Kinison stuff, check out www.sacredcow.com/hicks/kinison.html

 
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