John Doe 'Fables in a Foreign Land'
In 1976, John Doe left home and followed the pioneer trail from the east coast to the west. “California Dreaming” may have been over—after Charles Manson and Haight-Ashbury’s descent into a junkie haven—but it was still possible to live cheaply and make music in LA. In the shadow of the entertainment industry, in a city whose premiere band was The Eagles, Doe and his singing-songwriting partner Exene Cervenka (along with guitarist Billy Zoom) formed X. The band soon became prominent in the LA punk-rock pushback to the comfortable conformity of the ‘70s.
In 1990, Doe went solo, releasing albums as intensely thoughtful as X’s but at lower volume. His newest, Fables in a Foreign Land, is a set of stories set in 1890s America at the time when the frontier was closing and the pioneer trail came to an end. The sound is wide and spacious, the aural analog to a line from one of the album’s several standout tracks, “See the Almighty”—the one when the protagonist finds himself “alone and forsaken on the open plain.” Acoustic guitars and brushed drums, raw as the clapboard of an old west town, are the sonic heart of many Fables. The beat finds a rolling tempo on the trickster tale “El Romance-o” and slows to a muggy pace on “Missouri,” a story of flood and survival in the face of unrelenting nature. Doe adopts an accordion powered Norteño arrangement for “Guilty Bystander,” a call to abandon complicity and fight injustice whenever we witness it.
Humor can be found in Doe’s Fables, especially the hapless aeronaut in the surreal “The Cowboy and the Hot Air Balloon.” But most songs are draped with unease. The enigmatic “After the Fall” could be about how the west was really won—by “thirsty people who drank the water and left the fish to die.” The taut acoustic rocker “Destroying Angels” beautifully renders a grisly scene, the uncovering of a dead woman’s body. And as the story unfolds, the narrator reveals himself as her killer. Like William Blake, the narrator of “See the Almighty” finds God in a blade of grass and the faces of the hungry, and yet, like Ingmar Bergman, he also ponders the seeming absence of God. “The sky may open wide, He may not provide.”
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Conjuring a mood similar to the revisionist western films of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, Doe revisits the mythology of frontier America and finds it to be a place of violence and desperation. Heroes are hard to recognize.
John Doe performs June 25 at Shank Hall.
