Johnny Dowd
The Pawnbroker's Wife
Catamount Records
by William Michael Smith

People call him Billy, William is his name
In the coming darkness, the keeper of the flame
He repairs radios with alien transistors
Cosmic communication with brothers and sisters
--- Johnny Dowd, "Billy Blu"

Johnny Dowd certainly fits the "cult artist" bill. And let's face it ­ he's trying to. While critics have praised his dark, off-center albums and artists such as the Mekons have embraced him, Dowd's audience remains a small hardcore of non-mainstream "twisteds." I saw Dowd perform with Swag and Scott Miller (now that's an eclectic bill!) two years ago and his live show reminded me of the intense, inventive, can't-look-away bizarreness of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band minus the costuming. Once a Ft. Worth resident and currently a New-York-by-way-of-Oklahoma poet who chooses to work in musical forms, former moving truck driver Dowd is not your grandfather's version of Americana any more than Don Van Vliet or Frank Zappa are.

In a year that has seen more than its share of artists blurring genre lines in attempts to create new forms free of the narrow restraints of classification (exactly what Van Vliet and Zappa did thirty years ago), Dowd makes some of the oddest music on the scene today. Any scene. Any day. He's one of those artists who simply hears it all differently (and, yes, Alice, part of it is an "act" but let's face it, he can effectively pull the act off).

On The Pawnbroker's Wife, Dowd hasn't just overstepped a few simplistic arbitrary musical demarcations, he's even blurred the lines between music, poetry, prose, and performance. Taken in its 14-track entirety, this is more movie script or novella than "album." Maybe Reservoir Dogs? Or Twin Peaks? It certainly has a movie score feel to it. The deadpan "I Love You" (sounding like Tammy and George-on-downers singing with a '60s female soul ensemble) is a scene-setter, a pan shot prelude, a mood setter if you will to Dowd's exploration of the psychopathic mentality and the murky downside of marriage (on "True Love," a wife who has murdered her husband travels to his gravesite on their anniversary to place flowers!).

Dowd's musical mixture features his Night of the Living Dead vocals that contrast perfectly with the stylish singing of Kim Sherwood-Caso. Backed by Brian Wilson (not the zoned out Beach Boy) on drums and an assortment of other instruments and bassist/guitarist/co-producer Justin Asher, Dowd primarily fills his musical space with off-kilter rock and jagged blues grooves that would not be out of place on the more accessible Captain Beefheart albums. However, Dowd can also cross over into tinkly show tune pop schmaltz or into choppy, ponderous, down-and-out jazz arrangements if a scene requires. Dowd's unlikely cover of "Jingle Bells" is a bluesy jazz arrangement that is at once beautiful, smart, and innovative, yet also has a certain tense, sinister edge that would make a subtitle like "A Charles Manson Christmas" apropos. (Those who despise insipid, homogenized Christmas music should check this track out; guaranteed to send your in-laws packing before the second chorus comes around; they may even insist that they take the reason you are in-laws home with them.) Dowd's "On Shaky Ground We Stand" portrays those dreaded holiday dysfunctional family gatherings and is delivered over a druggy, dirge-like musical nightmare soundtrack in Dowd's droning medicated I-hear-voices-in-my-head monotone.

Christmas comes but once a year
Time to celebrate with those you hold dear
Friends and family all gather 'round
Death comes callin', you won't hear a sound

You think that I'm talkin' about them
But I'm talkin' about you

While Dowd doesn't have a pretty voice (but Sherwood-Caso sure does), like Beefheart Dowd does have serious vocal ability in the sense of getting inside the part he's playing in these songs that translate into cinematic vignettes. His voice allows him to play multiple parts: the violent redneck, the chilling psychopath, the prying pawnbroker, the cuckolded husband, the Alfred Hitchcock narrator. Behind his Halloween scare vocals, Dowd conducts his band like a mad scientist in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. He brilliantly alternates his sinister sound swatches with too-pretty-for-the-lyrics arrangements like the one on "Virginia Beach," where Sherwood-Caso counterbalances the building tension with her falsetto backing vocals that sound like the Manhattan Transfer on a bottle of Quaaludes.

The centerpiece is "Judgment Day," a syncopated, drums-and-bass driven psycho-surf rock comment on the death penalty in Texas in which Dowd recalls the controversial execution of born-again Christian Carla Faye Tucker, whose death sentence then Governor George W. Bush refused to commute. Dowd snarls this one like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, complete with bulging neck veins and wild-eyed fanaticism.

(She's dead)
They executed her today
God gave her life
Mighty state of Texas took it away
(She's dead)
Gone to a better place
Governor should be ashamed
To even show his face

The purposeful helter-skelter oddness aside, the underlying appeal of Dowd is that he and his ensemble can rock. They may not sound Top 40 but tracks like the murky "Rose Tattoo," "Monkey Run" with its trance-inducing rhythm and riff structure, "Sweeter Than Honey" ("I hate you and your so-called friends/I hate the way they use foreign words/Everything is "boring" and "absurd"/I hate the way they pour the wine/With dinner") and "Woodie Guthrie Blues," which borrows rhythmically from the drum-manic percussive rave-up style of new-waver Adam Ant, and "King of Emptiness" with its '60s-through-the-time-warp vibe all rock hard if disjointedly. At first listen, they may seem like nothing you've ever heard, but each contains specific references to our rock past. The rhythm section provides a kinetic jazz foundation for the sonic solar-flare bursts from the guitars of Dowd and Asher.

The Pawnbroker's Wife is Johnny Dowd's most accessible record yet, but it's not likely to be a big fav with the corporate 'fraidy cats who have a stranglehold on the airwaves and our musical culture. Perhaps their just fate will be the subject of Dowd's next installment? He's the man for the job. I'm sure he'll think of something fittingly gruesome, something as painful and excruciating as a J-Lo two-fer or another Toby Keith video.

* Johnny Dowd has a very interesting website at www.johnnydowd.com with a number of Mp3 clips from his four albums so you can sample before you buy. Also at www.catamountco.com , the label that brings us Tom House and Kirk Rundstrom and other artists who don't fit the corporate radio business model ­ and don't want to.

 
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