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CounterPunch
December
31, 2002
The Roots Genius
of Doug Sahm
And It Didn't Even Bring Me
Down
by DAVE MARSH
The weirdness of Doug Sahm's stature as a roots
music icon never really dawned on me 'til last year when I searched
through a batch of vintage electric Dylan interviews. Starting
as soon as "She's About a Mover" hit the airwaves,
Dylan identified the Sir Douglas Quintet as his favorite among
the new rock groups.
Talk about ahead of his time: Sahm never
got respect 'til years after his commercial pop career ended.
Although a very good record, "Mendocino" seemed like
just another Summer of Love ploy from a fading one-shot, and
unless you actually lived in San Francisco or Texas, later records
like Together
After Five and 1
+ 1 + 1 = 4 came across as lovably soulful eccentricities
more than anything else.
Listening now, Doug Sahm's laconic blues-infused
singing sounds like one of the biggest influences on Dylan of
anyone in his own generation. But I know no more glorious batch
of work from the late '60s and early '70s than the Sir Douglas
Quintet albums just reissued on CD: the two above plus Sir
Douglas Quintet + 2 = [Honkey Blues], the Mendocino
album, Together After Five, and one of my favorite records
ever made, The
Return of Doug Saldana (on a single disc with 1+1+1=4
and a handful of obscurities). This represents the Quintet's
entire output for Smash/Mercury Records (two earlier albums originally
came out on Huey Meaux's Tribe label, then were picked up by
Smash). The reissues are on Arcadia, a label I'm told is connected
to Doug's son Shawn, although the version of 1+1+1/Saldana I
have came out on Glenn Baker's Australian reissue label, Raven.
To my ear, Sahm's status as a great roots
musician rises and falls on these records far more than the legendary
but weak Doug Sahm and Band, more notable for Bob Dylan's cameo
and Jerry ler's tries-too-hard  production than for the focus Doug brought
to the music, or the tejano records he made with the Texas Tornadoes.
Each of the Smash albums, on the other hand, moves beyond power-pop
or even folk-rock into a mingling of rock'n'roll, blues, R&B,
norteno, honky tonk country, and some curious combination of
border radio preachment and talking blues. It's like a party
in San Antonio at which the guests include Freddie King, Johnny
Winter, Ray Price, Freddie Fender, Vicente Fernandez, Delbert
McClinton, Wolfman Jack, Pappy O'Daniel and the ghosts of The
Big Bopper and Buddy Holly.
The beauties of Saldana, for instance,
encompass the loose narcotized blues of "Stoned Faces Don't
Lie" (akin to the O'Jays' "Backstabbers" and Undisputed
Truth's "Smiling Faces Sometimes" in its portrait of
a counterculture falling into abject dishonesty), the rocked-up
tejano of "Me and My Destiny" (which has the mood of
a Blonde on Blonde outtake), the goofy rock of "She's Huggin'
You (But She's Lookin' At Me)," the secular gospel lament
"Oh Lord, Please Let It Rain in Texas," a cover of
T-Bone Walker's "Papa Ain't Salty," and probably the
greatest rock'n'roll talking blues, "The Railpak Dun Done
in the Del Monte," a magnificent reminder that the first
time that Woody Guthrie left Oklahoma, he landed not in California
but Texas. Could even Woody have beaten a sweet-tempered anti-corporate
rant ("we're gonna do away with all them _soulful_ trains)
that features the chorus, "The Railpak dun done in the Del
Monte / What a drag, what a drag, what a drag." Could any
other performer since Guthrie have pulled off such an improbable
concoction?
Maybe Bob Dylan. But even Dylan wouldn't
have ended the damn thing by--whistling--the final lines. And
Otis Redding preached only about love.
All this is true, but who in the period
when the Sir Douglas Quintet established Doug Sahm as a great
musician--great enough to follow him through the weedy and somewhat
chaotic years that followed--would have talked about him in the
way that we talk now about current alt.country and roots performers?
In his most popular period, Sahm's work was defined by hit singles--it's
probable that none of his albums until the Texas Tornadoes had
a tenth the circulation of "She's About a Mover." Of
the Mercury albums, only Mendocino charted, for 11 weeks at a
peak of #81. Jerry Wexler, operating under the mistaken impression
that what Sahm did could be constrained as "country rock,"
which missed not half but something more like 85% of the point,
created an opus that spent ten weeks on the charts and peaked
at #125, which at that period basically represented the Dylan
association and a favor to a powerful producer. The Atlantic
album was the only record that charted under Sahm's own name.
To be taken seriously, Doug Sahm had
to go back home to Texas and live without most of his best music
ever being heard outside a tiny cult. (The Texas Tornadoes. "tejano"
breakthrough that it may have been for Anglos, charted one record
, its debut which peaked at #154 after ten weeks on the charts.)
When I was listening to The Return of Doug Saldana every day
for a year, if you'd asked me about "roots," I'd have
thought immediately of Mott the Hoople, who did a great version
of "At the Crossroads" on their debut album (#185,
2 weeks on the chart).
It's taken almost two decades of a CD
reissue boom to restore Sahm's most important albums to print.
Except for a splendid essay by Mitch Myers in a recent issue
of Magnet, nobody's paying them much attention. In a time of
turmoil, these albums have been almost all I've listened to for
the past two weeks, and it's been more than comforting, it's
been a re-education about the music values of Doug Sahm-and me,
too. Myers sums it up, describing all his various aspects and
declaring, "Doug Sahm dared to dream all of these different
dreams and he grew up to be all of those different people."
Keep listening, and you get to share
those dreams, although you'll become those people-as Doug himself
did-at your own risk.
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
Marsh is the author of The
Heart of Rock and Soul: the 1001 Greatest Singles.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
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