Alias In Wonderland

Alias in Wonderland
Buffalo Gals and Mustang Sallys

by Don Allred
April 30th, 2001 7:00 PM Issue 18

Cyndi Boste, cowgirl of the outback
photo: Paul Fiddes
In 1972, a singer named Mary McCaslin flushed Hollywood and headed into a
West she'd seen only from airplanes. An open-eared folkie in the Age of Dick (Nixon) and
Quaaludes, she carried a notebook, a guitar, hard-won studio expertise, and a
hard-fed appetite for something more. McCaslin soon scored a (reformed)
outlaw hubby, Jim Ringer. Together they assembled The Bramble and the Rose,
recently reissued on Rounder/Philo.
This album contains: death and dreaming, "Geronimo's Cadillac,"  "Hit The Road, Jack," and Christmas---well,  as seasonal suggestions via the jingle-jangle twilight of fresh air "Strawberry Roan", anyway, which generously scatters phosphorescent, undersea-like associations over the Rockies, for de facto lagniappe
---not too far from the high lonesome call to the Reaper, to "spare me over for another year"---
just call it all seeds 'n' needs. Traditional and Contemporary Songs of the American People, simple and subtle as you please. Something in the songs and/or the singers tries to keep
its distance. But like death and dreaming, like life, the music they make
passes through everything; one damn thing leads to another. And of course, it all
started with a woman, pulling her hat down over one eye.

The first time I laid eyes on another Hellywood Kid, Maria McKee, fronting
her "cowpunk" band Lone Justice (a name that makes the same kind of sense as
Blazing Saddles), I saw her as an ancestor/descendant of Bette Midler and Stevie
Nicks: a Gold Dust Woman, (re-)born to raise the stakes and stage in Silver
City (prospectors shooting down chandeliers in appreciation). (Bette Midler?
Western as Hawaii, as in "Who you think brought-um steel guitars, Paleface?" And speaking of Midler, she's Jewish,  as possibly was Annie Oakley a/k/a Phoebe Moses---O rabbithole, spare me over for another point.)

McKee's new Ultimate Collection (Hip-O) , while discreetly tweaking Big 80s blare,  nevertheless unleashes a careening career saga, yet leaves out her self-written, unreleased "To Deserve You" (credibly covered by Midler, on Bette of Roses). Here, a young girl avidly peers out the window at women whose otherworldly beauty and grace come from their virtue. She wants to "shine in
your eye like a jewel," to be as good as, well, gold. This song clarifies (or at least uncovers an especially striking facet of) MM's sometimes distractingly refracted raised-religious-in-Tinseltown
sensibility. She was onstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with her big brother Bryan McLean,
ex-member of punk-psych pioneers Love, when she was only three. (He was also a romantic,  Christian-speculative songpoet, whose "Don't Toss Us Away"t was first launched into lonely orbit by teen McKee on one of the earliest known Lone J. demo tapes.). "Soup, Soap, and Salvation" depicts the wee McKee as pounding a tambourine (and even the Sunset Strip?!), with her allegedly ex-beatnik/born-again parents, belting Gospel to the glitz-blitzed.

But Bryan also turned her on to Broadway, and Maria's teen dreams included
studying with Sondheim at Juilliard. Regarded by some in her hometown as a
proto-alt-country vanguard artist turned Corporate Rock wash-out, she wrote (and released)
"Panic Beach" (included on Ultimate...): Here she finds herself spending another day
by the bee-yootiful sea, taking her place in the sideshow of invisible
friends, eternal Hollywood Hopefuls, utterly ignored. At first the sweet 'n' salty swirl recalls McKee's art based on vintage poster images of L.A, beach areas mirroring Coney Island,  then it's like being trapped inside
the ever growing mural of "The Burning of Los Angeles" in Nathanael West's The
Day of the Locust. But all in her mind—which is finally obligingly
noticed—and then swallowed, by the depths of the now alarmingly reverberating stereo
sky.

However, once in said sky, she learns to ride the whirlwind she hath reaped,
playing guitar like Mick Ronson and swinging by the star once called Ziggy,
into her personal-space odysseys (freshly cherry-picked for UC, from her 1996
breakthrough, Life Is Sweet). She even whistles like Bowie did in "Golden Years," but spookier, a
coded refrain, on "If Love Is a Red Dress (Hang Me in Rags)"—from the Pulp Fiction
soundtrack, appropriately enough. She's one of those Western Women, like
Belle Starr and Calamity Jane, Billy Tipton and Brandon Teena, forever having to
migrate through dime novels and disappearances, trespasses and transports.
Straying is the tradition—that Satellite o' Love always needs more lasso.

Further West, Cyndi Boste has been called "the Lucinda Williams of
Australia." And both artists do bear down, on what could otherwise easily remain mere
backwatery blues-mindedness. But Car Wheels on a Gravel Road usually works best
when Williams looks up from her road maps, and lets the music unwind, even
snake around some. On Home Truths (Warrior) Boste keeps playing her cards (hungry
textures, tiny solos, rationed hooks) close to the vest, but her game's always
gaining momentum. Meanwhile, she's gathering scattered impressions, impulses,
hoarding insights and courage. Sounds like more tension, friction, than Car Wheels.
At just the right moment, she does cuts out, through the day's apparently endless scrutiny of

things-as-they-are, into the desert night, where "new" things start to move around
differently—she wanted it, she's got it. No time left, even after "Daddy Comes
Home," for the world to end, or begin. The deep rich voice intensifies its
clipped delivery of key phrases. These click on by, like slide shows, empty
chambers, telephone poles: she's making a long distance call.

Back in the U.S.A., two girls, sisters, stand at the sink, doing the dishes,
relentlessly critiquing their encounters with guys, maybe even The Guy, when
all's (ever?) said and done. Meanwhile, outside the kitchen window, Guy Life,
High Life (the blue sonic boom 'n' slide of air patrols, stunt pilots, crop
dusters), goes on all around them. Oh, sometimes they get taken for rides—in more
ways than one! "I'm not Sally," they have to point out. True: They're Stacy
and Rhonda Hill. But I'm Not Sally is the name of their band.
 They own this whole yipee-yi-sky show, lock stock 'n' Guy-wire. Neat. Recorded in David
(Camper/Cracker) Lowery's studio and involving, for instance, known pedal steelist
Eric Heywood (who also plays with deft, deadpan dyad sirens Freakwater); still, I've
never heard anything quite like their Jewels and Fools (Big Prank). Alt-country
cowpokes come a-courtin', inspired by "Don't Fear the Reaper," rather than the
Byrd-bleached "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere"? Giddyup!

Cyndi Boste's Home Truths and I'm Not Sally's Jewels and Fools can be ordered
from http://www.milesofmusic.com/
(Update: When Lloyd Maines played his daughter Natalie's audition tape for the hiring-firing Dixie Chicks foresisters, "Panic Beach" got her the meeting.)

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