Son Farrar
Deepened and changed by his father's death, Jay Farrar makes the first Son Volt record in five years, a return to soaring rock 'n' roll.
By Chris King
In Jay Farrar's father's mansion, there were many wooden chainsaw sculptures, and one of them bore a likeness to Woody Guthrie.
Actually it was a ranch house built into the side of a hill on the outskirts of Belleville, Ill. The hill permitted a walk- in basement at the bottom, which made a small house seem bigger, almost big enough in which to raise four boys, all musicians.
The Guthrie image, carved from a tree stump with the use of a chainsaw, didn't really look that much like the folk singer, any more than the Crazy Horse sculpture looked like the Indian leader. They looked more like their maker, James Paul Farrar, known within the family--and eventually on the St. Louis music scene--as Pops. But you knew Woody was Woody because Pops had strapped him to a beat-up guitar, much like the cheap six- strings on which Pops taught his sons the rudiments of American folk music.
Of all the Farrars, Jay took music the furthest. With his schoolmate Jeff Tweedy, he formed Uncle Tupelo, a now-legendary band that mated the simple three-chord, country- inflected music Pops taught his boys with the fury of punk rock.
Tweedy would eventually move to Chicago and form Wilco, a rock band with an even wider base of admirers. Jay stayed in South St. Louis, except for a brief period when he followed his wife's work to New Orleans. At that time, he and Pops drove the Natchez Trace north and south, an experience that, chopped and changed, gave Jay many songs.
He recorded them with his next band, Son Volt, formed with two brothers from Minneapolis. Between them, they spanned the length of the Mississippi River, which was appropriate for the band of a son of Pops Farrar, a merchant marine and riverboat engineer who knew every bend of the Midwestern rivers. Son Volt did not last. Its breakup left Jay with a solo career. Many would say he was best suited for that.
Jay has always been shy in a way that can seem painful. I played in the St. Louis music scene years ago with Uncle Tupelo, and Jay never spoke a complete sentence in my presence. This would give him something of a mystique. But to his father, who became my best friend in the years just before his death, Jay was just a shy boy. Pops urged Jay to practice making conversation, telling him it was "like playing catch. They throw it you, and you give it back to them, with a little something extra on it."
I spoke to Jay, for the first time since Pops' death, to deepen this brief story, which aims to excite people about the first Son Volt record in five years, regrouped with different musicians and released this summer. Pops has been haunting his son's songs. Jay's last solo record included "Dent County," a piano ballad named for the Ozark province where Pops got his start. And the new Son Volt record is called Okemah and the Melody of Riot.
Okemah is the Oklahoma birthplace of Woody Guthrie. For Jay to turn from an origins song for his father to an origins record for Woody Guthrie threw me back to that chainsaw sculpture, strapped to the battered guitar. But this is not a strummed, acoustic record. It is a return to soaring rock 'n' roll.
"My father had passed away, and I wasn't looking to rock," Jay said, "so I separated the more rocking songs, and eventually I had a backlog of them."
I hear more than the emptying of a backlog. I also hear the opening up of an inward man. Okemah is unflinchingly political and grown- up, worrying about health and war in clear- headed terms. It's a sane rock record led by a guy nearing 40. I wondered whether his father had rubbed off on him in his passing.
"The words of Woodie Guthrie ringing in my head," Jay sings. But it's the words of Pops Farrar that ring in my head when I hear his son open up and sing straightforward rock. It's as if Pops threw the American tradition to him and now he is throwing it back to us, with a little something extra on it.
