Mac's Truckin' by Spider Barbour
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Last time I saw Ellen McIlwaine was at the Town Crier in Pawling
(New York) about six or seven years ago. On this incredibly cold January
night we drove down in a dubious old Buick to the club's new location, not too
sure of the way, but grimly determined and knowing Ellen's show would be worth
whatever mishaps of road, car and weather might befall us. Well, nothing bad
happened, nothing whatsoever. A brutal, brittle gust whipped us into the place,
where we warmed quickly to an ample room with a friendly vibe. Then Ellen came
on and turned up the heat. Ellen McIlwaine, who returns to old haunts on Tinker Street this weekend, sings and plays guitar, plays guitar and sings. But blow aside the sensitive, calico- dressed folkie image that discription conjures up. E.M.is roots-ramming rock'n'roll: E.M.is down-and-dirty Delta swamp slide blues: E.M.is the whole- and-nothing-but-the-soul-banging gospel truth. I need not explain this to Woodstock old-timers, people like Mike Winfield, Chris Zaloom, Don Moore--musicians who are still around from a quarter-century ago, when they shared the scene with McIlwaine and many others long gone from town. I remember in '68, the year before the Festival, there were five clubs in Woodstock, at least three with music every night. We'd go gig-hopping from one to the other, not making much money, but playing our butts off and having a party. Yeah, I know, the good old days were never as good as you remember them. And hey, I remember the bad stuff just fine. Let me mention just one club because it's long gone, a very interesting musical microcommunity in which McIlwaine and I were major players, big fish in a little puddle, I suppose. This was the Sled Hill Cafe, where the pizza was still frozen in the middle, jabbering rednecks pointedly ignored the music the stoned hippies gaped at, the owner stood grimly by the door looking exactly like Abe Lincoln, and five acts a night got five bucks a night. They don't run 'em like that anymore. Anyway, that's where Ellen McIlwaine learned to win over the self-distracted by harrassing them right back, dissing them into respect and the genuine shut-up-and- listen we all needed. McIlwaine doesn't need to do that anymore, and hasn't for a long time. But she learned "to be creative", she says,"playing seven nights a week at Sled Hill, especially when--you never knew--Lee Marvin or Al Grossman or somebody else famous might be in the audience". These days McIlwaine does solos and power trios in all the best dives in the big cities and small towns of Canada and the U.S. She's doing both at Tinker Street. Saturday night, E.M. will bring in long-time associates from Albany, Mitch Elrod on bass and Al Cash on drums. Sunday she goes it alone, as featured artist in Judy Whitfield's Women in Music series. I strongly advise going both nights, as Ellen will be doing some different material solo, including several a capella tunes, which I can say from experience are magnificent. OK, as long as I'm waxing superlative, to my ears Ellen McIlwaine is the best singer in rock and always has been. I didn't say "best female singer", I said "best singer". (She's the best talker, too, by the way.) There's the quality of her voice, which is like the greatest liquor in the universe, only the drink doesn't exist to match that voice. Then there's what she does with it, which is everything from warm-mother love to hot-lover love to African scatting to the voices of God and the Devil and the best alien life-forms. You've never heard singing like this. |
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Did I mention she plays guitar too? Well, here I have to qualify my praise, but not
much. McIlwaine to me, is the best power slide guitar player happening. Hey, it's
what she does, and she doesn't need to strum or pick or anything else--the slide
says it all. It's a big sound, warm and wet as a Samoan tsuname, cold and cutting
as an Alberta clipper, strong as the Jet Stream, wild as El Nino. Yep, Ellen
McIlwaine plays guitar and sings, but the combination is huge and beautiful, like
the whale's song and the birth of stars. A bit of history. Ellen the child lived in Japan and listened to Ray Charles, Fats Domino and other R&B artists on the radio. By five she was playing the piano like her piano idol, Professor Longhair. After moving to Georgia she got into blues, took up guitar and developed her one-woman-band style of playing slide with bass, rhythm and lead parts all at once. Like all of us, she idolized Jimi Hendrix. Just recently, Ellen descovered two weird Hendrix connections--one, that thirteen years ago on Jimi's birthday (November 27) she took the pledge and has stayed clean ever since. Two, she discovered that Hendrix had been buried on her birthday. "It's so weird" sighs McIlwaine. "I don't know what things like that mean, but they mean something." McIlwaine's time in Woodstock began in 1968 with Fear Itself, a band that included Chris Zaloom and the late Paul Album, who played with me in Chrysalis. She lived in Woodstock until the mid-70's expanding her gigging territory and releasing three albums on Polydor. Since then she's moved back and forth from Georgia to Canada, continuing to gig and put out records on her own or other independent labels. Her 1982 album, Everybody Needs It with Jack Bruce on bass, won a Naird Indie Award for best Indie rock album of the year and 1987's Looking For Trouble was the only Canadian release in National Public Radio's top 20 records of 1988. McIlwaine says she is anxious to record and release new material she's written since Trouble but "won't play the music business game" of submitting a demo and bowing to a producer's whims. "I know what I'm doing" she says. "All I need is a studio and an engineer." This visit has personal meaning for McIlwaine because she hasn't been back to Woodstock since 1982, when she did a gig with Paul Butterfield and Chris Zaloom. It's been so long that a friend's son, who Ellen remembers as a little bat-swinging kid, "now has a little mustache and his own car". I talked to McIlwaine at her Calgary, ALberta home just before she set out in her Dodge van for the East Coast. She was into the haul, as usual. "I just get on the CB radio and drive." she says. "I know the codes, I talk to the truckers and they tell me where to park my 18-wheeler. They think I'm one of them." By the time you read this, E.M. will have been four days on the road and just pulling into town. It's what she's gotten used to in her home territory. "The cities in Canada are hundreds of miles apart, a long way between gigs." Maybe a longtime between, too. She admits business is "slowing down, not so many people coming out". Why, I ask. "I think people are just staying home watching TV," she suggests, supporting this with the observation from a circus she attended where people didn't applaud, but sat there as if watching the tube, not live action. Have we come to this sorry state? Not all of us. McIlwaine's audience has actually grown, at least demographically. "It's basically two groups who come to hear me" she says. "There's the older fans who've followed me for years, and now a lot of young kids, the grunge crowd, so that's encouraging." As a musician of the first Woodstock generation, I find Ellen McIlwaine's spirit and enthusiasm very encouraging. Despite the growing mass of couch mashies and home we keep the faith. So here's the challenge. This weekend, unglue your eyeballs from that HBO special and do the live thing. Because the rockinest rhythm-reggae-blues- soul mama that ever walked Tinker Street, Bleecker Street or Basin Street will be back, and you better be there if you know what's good! The Press link below will return you to the Articles/Press Quotes Index page. |
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