Woody Guthrie famously wrote on his guitar, “This machine kills fascists”. The world could certainly do with a return from the great man. The lyrics to Steve Earle’s ‘Christmas In Washington’ ask Guthrie to “Tear your eyes from paradise / And rise again somehow.” In 1995, Guthrie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, contacted English folk hero Billy Bragg to ask him to put music to a selection of her father’s lyrics giving a welcome return to the world for Guthrie, poetically anyway.
Bragg contacted Jeff Tweedy and the band Wilco, and almost three years from the initial contact, the album “Mermaid Avenue” was born. The title was taken from the street where Guthrie lived in Coney Island, New York. The finished set won global plaudits and critical acclaim. Bragg and Wilco created something special. Would Guthrie have enjoyed it? We will never know, but the contemporary spin on his words is such a great idea that we are sure he would approve.
The song we are focusing on is track two in the running order. Jeff Tweedy, of the band Wilco, takes centre stage to sing the simple, beautiful ‘California Stars’. It would have been impossible for Bragg and Wilco to crawl inside Guthrie’s head and know what he meant by the lyrics he left behind, but adding a country feel to the words works.
The guitar and piano-led slow-paced tune was written mainly by Wilco pianist Jay Bennett. Bennett, who sadly passed aged 45, only eleven years after the release of Mermaid Avenue, considered it one of his finest compositions. We have no idea how Guthrie would have set the lyrics to music. Poetry was his thing, and the guitar was only there to carry the words along. As Bragg started his career in much the same way, simple guitar and words, it was fitting that Nora Guthrie invited him to look at the plethora of her father’s material. It is a significant surprise that until 1992, Bragg was not familiar with Guthrie’s work. He was asked to appear at Guthrie’s posthumous 80th birthday celebration in Central Park, New York, in July 1992. The story goes that during soundcheck, Bragg slipped away to Tower Records on 72nd Street to buy a compilation cassette so he could check out Guthrie’s songs. Three years later, he began selecting the words for the songs on ‘Mermaid Avenue’.
The final mix has an old-time feel to it. Listen on headphones; it is a sonic sensation, the way the different instruments appear on the left and right sides. Tweedy’s acoustic is speaker right with the drums kicking in on the left. It’s almost George Martin, Beatle-esque in the approach. Eliza Carthy joins in on the fiddle, and it is almost out of reach in the left speaker. It is undoubtedly a case of less is more. The lap steel guitar played by Corey Harris is just wonderful, and wait for the final thirty seconds where Bennett’s piano playfully duals with Tweedy’s picking.
Lyrically, we will have to consult Guthrie for the final answer, but it is a feeling of wanting to escape. We do not have a date for when the song was written, but as most of Guthrie’s work was in the 1930s/40s, it would be safe to say it was around that time. California was seen as a utopia, a relaxed place with that West Coast vibe. It is essentially a love song. “I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight / On a bed of California Stars / I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight / On a bed of California Stars”. A song of longing and peace. It can feel sad and uplifting at the same time.
It is a shame that Wilco and Bragg fell out following the recording over the mixing of the album. Wilco remixed the songs once they were back in Chicago. Although they had asked Bragg if they could remix it, the agreement was that if Bragg didn’t like them, they wouldn’t make the final cut. Bragg didn’t like them. This caused the relationship between the two to break down, and unfortunately, “Mermaid Avenue” was never taken on tour. Each faction played its own version at different times. Bragg formed a group called Billy Bragg and The Blokes and turned ‘California Stars’ into honky-tonk hoe down. Wilco had ‘California Stars’ appear in their set list with regularity. The two did appear together on a handful of occasions, and we include an incredibly heart-warming version from the Rolling Stone Weekender, 2009, at Ferienpark, Weissenhäuser, Germany, where Bragg and Tweedy are genuinely happy to be performing the song together, sharing vocal duties, just astounding.
