  Billy Bragg
Reaching To The Converted
(Minding The Gaps)
Rhino Records
CD Review by Andrew Hamlin
I'm not sure
life is worth living, these days, but if it is,
Billy Bragg's new old material throws me a
towrope out of je ne sais quoi--clicking
play on "Shirley" brings me to
salivation, mental though virtually physical too,
to feel if those Johnny Marr-strummed intro
chords will crack a smile, fire lightning through
a few pleasure synapses, or just pass out some
other side like my head's a potato, leaving the
traveled material between heated, but unwarmed.
Right now it's doing something between the first
and second above and I'm hoping to hold steady
on. This retrospective of rarities and one
never-released arrives in time to remind me why I
fell in love with this cat, why love of his cat
could lead to love of the world, and hence why
you should test your own synapses against mine to
see if you're missing what I'm missing, for one
thing, but more importantly to see if this cat
could gives you even more that what he gives me:
pulls your highs higher, and at least
contextualize the lows, too. I won't put my teeth
together to say you need this record; my
mailing list weaned me off that construction,
pointing out collectively that no matter how
irresistible you find x, or q, or y,
someone will succeed in resisting it.
But I'll dangle
the possibility of needfulness in front of your
furrowed brow.
I caught Bragg
in action, for the fourth or fifth time, several
weeks ago at Bumbershoot, and observed with some
satisfaction how he's joined Ween in mutating towards the Grateful Dead. I say some
satisfaction, because it pleased me more
conceptually than in execution. Ween's let-it-all-hang out
branch is one of their stronger limbs, where
Billy's always affirmed the primacy of songs, making his successful
scope a little more limited, though hardly less
powerful within that scope, than the Weener
non-brothers from New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Successive mutations might enable Bragg to
assimilate the finer points of the long jam; in
the meantime, though, his jogging sideways to the
audience against a ska skank is at least good for
nutritious laughter—and not the sort of
maneuver Jerry Garcia could not have attempted at
any point later than 1971. Reaching To The
Converted, though, reaches back in time. Aye,
there's the seed.
So if you know
Bragg's out-of-the-gate work circa 1983, click if
you like to track seven, "Ontario, Quebec And Me," festooned
with full glory from Billy's falsetto, still
improbable as someone picking up at the Mojave
Phone Booth, still so glorious as the rattle of
an uplifted receiver at the other end of that
connection. Called upon to crucible-fy this disc
down to one essential moment, my vote's 0:34 to
0:37, track 14 or approximately, "Ooh-hoo-hooooo/Oh
no…", and a burnished backslap of solo
guitar, a Ry Cooder song called "The
Tatler," and a strained falsetto this time,
but ladies and gentlemen, the Mojave Phone Booth
is fourteen miles from the nearest paved
road. Elsewhere, you can sing "Sulk" to
your girlfriend without sounding like Michael
Bolton, you can sing "Bad Penny" about
your girlfriend without sounding like Chris
Barron (though I like him too). You also get one
slippery a capella defense of Billy's
business as usual politically (the only real
thorn in the last live set—his sermons are
getting longer and less amusing both), and enough
cover versions—from Cooder, the Beatles, and
the Smiths, to Anna McGarrigle, whom I only know
second-hand, to Dick Gaughan, about whom I
otherwise know nothing—to render Ella
Fizgerald distracted. All in all, not a bad life
from the man with the voice described (unfalsetto
incarnation) by a friend of a friend as,
"Like a tree sloth in heat."
Email Andrew Hamlin
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