* The origins of the phrase ‘the devil’s in the detail’ are obscure, but it seems to derive from the days when ‘devils’ or junior lawyers would be paid to fill in the finer points of legal documents for their more illustrious colleagues. It’s an idiom which reminds us that we should never be content with surface impressions of a document, but that we must always look deeper to see what snares we might find in the small print. The expression could have been coined to describe Tom Pacheco’s intricately penned songs, which are interlaced with intricate details … and often lead us to contemplate uncomfortable realities. In this article, I will take a glimpse into the world of those details, looking at themes ranging from fast-food America to famous writers, from celebrated artists to conspiracy theorists, from priests and religious ideas to the devil himself...
Fries with that?
* As many critics have noted, the details in Tom Pacheco’s songs help locate the characters and their experiences within the modern world we know and recognize. Many of the songs are set in particular parts of America: ‘Donna Marie’ and ‘Sweet Lucille’ in particular involve westward journeys across the States, making whistle-stop visits to various places along the way...
* The introduction of brand-names – most famously in Robert and Ramona’s visit to McDonald’s for ‘colas and big Macs’ help to realize this world further. Yet there is a sting in the tail, for these details often make cynical points about the pervasion of consumer culture in the US. The couple in ‘Donna Marie’ speed past ‘bowling alleys, Mobil signs and Wendy’s’, but as they do so they bemoan the atrophy of local identity which big business brings: ‘You know, America looks all the same, this could be Kalamazoo, / Every year that goes by, things just get more confused!’
* The disease of consumer culture is nowhere more evident than when the consumers are Native Americans. The young Sioux in ‘Long Gone’ leaves his reservation drinking that generic brew, Heineken, while the Apache seen ‘From a Window’ is wearing a ‘New York Giants T-shirt and Levi’s pre-shrunk jeans’, but knows nothing of his own cultural history: ‘If you asked him about Geronimo, it just wouldn’t mean a thing.’ Big brands are also used to expose the huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots of American society: it is particularly ironic that Joey in ‘St Christopher and the Cornfield’ dies as a down-and-out in a cardboard box from Sears, one of America’s biggest department stores...
* The most sinister and telling example of the curse of the big brand is when the white supremacist in ‘Real Americans?’ makes up his mind to wreak carnage in a suicide bombing not only while watching the reactionary political show hosted by Rush Limbaugh, but while eating Domino’s Pizza, for that company is boycotted by a significant minority in the States for the right-wing views of its founder...
It’s a mystery
The fictitious fast-food joint Chicken Delight does not come across well in ‘By the Light of the Moon’. This song is an example of what I would describe as Tom’s mystery songs, where the details provide clues as to ‘whodunnit’. In this particular song, the hero takes a job in that eatery, a detail which initially marks him out as a low-class low-paid transient worker, but then, when he takes vengeance on his girlfriend’s violent, gold-toothed ex-partner, a grisly detail comes to light about how he has disposed of the body: ‘All the next week at the Chicken Delight / The chicken tasted especially nice / Her dog eating leftovers down at the creek / Spat out a gold tooth and buried it deep.’ It is a delicious irony that a murdered corpse tastes better than the usual fare dished out at such places...
* A similar example of a throwaway detail providing vital clues is found in ‘Black and Blue’, where a gunman wearing a purple hat seriously injures a New York cop. The assailant’s body is found in the river the next day, and the policeman’s rough-and-ready girlfriend is later seen wearing a purple hat...
* Several of Tom’s mystery songs offer his own wry view of famous conspiracies and events. ‘Jessica Brown’ is Tom’s take on the biggest conundrum of modern history: the killing of JFK. The eponymous heroine is rumoured to have been in Dallas in November 1963, and the hotel room she briefly occupies is found on her departure to contain nothing but a postcard from Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer Jack Ruby. A less well-known song about a presidential assassination is ‘John Wilkes Booth’, in which Tom imagines a scenario whereby an innocent bystander is called upon to help Lincoln’s assassin perfect his escape...
* ‘John Wilkes Booth’ is also an example of the way in which Tom often presents history through the eyes of ordinary people: a classic song in this vein is ‘Juan Romero’, where the killing of Bobby Kennedy is told from the point of view of the young bus-boy who comforted him as he lay dying. ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ criticizes that president’s intervention in Cuba from the point of view of a Rough Rider, who is influenced by the media to join up but then learns the errors of the mission when he sees the Cuban situation for himself. A further telling detail in that song reminds us that the newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst promoted the war but that a later heiress to his millions, Patty Hearst, apparently became a revolutionary in the mid-1970s...
* Another, more quirky example of Tom’s historical mystery songs is ‘The Abduction’ where a black man in the 1880s is saved from a lynching when the Ku Klux Klansmen who are oppressing him are snatched away by aliens. These men receive poetic justice for their actions when the aliens transport them into the future and leave them in a midst of a freedom march. Tom concludes with a joke that the rescued black man was Muddy Waters’ grandfather, and that Waters’ characteristic driving riff (which also powers this song) mimicked the sound of the spaceship!
The sound of music
* ‘The Abduction’ leads us to another set of details: references to famous musicians. Elvis Presley makes almost as many appearances in Tom’s songs as he is alleged to do in modern America. Elvis is central to a couple of songs: ‘Bobby and Elvis’ tells of a fan’s visit to Graceland to fulfil the long-held wish of his late friend, and there is another song (which Tom has played live but has not recorded), in which an innocuous-looking hitch-hiker turns out to be The King himself. Passing glances abound: there is the hero of ‘Jesus in a Leather Jacket’ who has an ‘Elvis Presley grin’, Donna Marie travels past Graceland and thinks about how insubstantial fame is, and Sweet Lucille hears an Elvis impersonator...
* References to musicians of all kinds are often used to make telling moral points. ‘The Other Side’ pokes fun at pious religious fundamentalists who would afford no place in heaven to John Lennon or Jimi Hendrix (‘I asked the old man where they were / He said “They’re in the other place.”’). Lennon was a rebel with qualities needed in a free and vibrant world, but he also espoused peace-loving values: Tom celebrates the latter in his musical tribute to ‘Imagine’, ‘I Had a Dream’ (a song whose title also alludes to another assassinated hero, Martin Luther King). Paul McCartney, on the other hand, is seen as a member of the establishment: in ‘The Last Rolling Stone’, he is the Prime Minister of an England from which rock music has been banned; it takes a clandestine meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to restore rock to the world. Tom was prescient in writing this song in the 1980s, for Macca is now Sir Paul … although perhaps he can be forgiven for not predicting that Jagger would later accept the same accolade!
* Characters’ choice of music often says a great deal about them. One of the credentials of Fred, the ‘Hippy on the Highway’ is that he had been a roadie for the Grateful Dead (a band which Tom celebrates most fully in his tribute to their frontman, ‘Jerry’s Gone’). In ‘Searching for the Sixties’, the heroine Annie Kathy, who had been conceived to the music of Jimi Hendrix, heads off to find her own way in her late teens, playing the music of classic sixties artists Neil Young and Canned Heat, as well as a more recent group whose music captures the commitment to real music characteristic of sixties bands: R.E.M. (In some live renditions, Tom has substituted U2 and The Waterboys for similar reasons)...
* A more macabre musical detail is found in ‘Fine Summer Morning’ where the bodies of a rootless young couple who have gassed themselves in their car lie with a Nirvana tape beside them: Nirvana’s lead singer, Kurt Cobain, epitomized youthful nihilism and shot himself in 1994...
The pen is mightier…
* Writers feature prominently in Tom’s music, and again, the references convey specific values. Oscar Wilde is a hero of Tom’s (he even gets a thank-you on the liner notes to Eagle in the Rain); in ‘Grand Canyon’, Tom quotes Wilde’s adage that ‘You always kill the one you love’ (from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’) to reinforce the devastating effect a lover can have if they seek to curb their partner's freedom...
* Emily Dickinson gets special thanks on Nobodies: its title track takes its hook-line (‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’) from one of her poems. Its picture of two downtrodden twentieth-century people passing one another like ships in the night picks up on the themes of loneliness and lost potential which are prevalent in Dickinson’s poetry...
* The writers mentioned most appreciatively are all suffering souls who write from keenly-felt experience. The only poet of the Beat Generation to be treated with admiration is Neal Cassady, who is celebrated in ‘Out of the American Blue’ for drawing on his deep well of experience with all its terrors. Other writers of that era, including Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg, are dismissed as ‘typewriter outlaws’ as opposed to the ‘real thing’. Kerouac is the subject of two particularly cynical references. In ‘Bluefields’ Tom dismisses the value of being ‘on the road’ just for the sake of it: ‘I’ve seen all those highways, heard those banjos plunk / Even Kerouac died a bitter angry drunk’, while in ‘She Always Thought that He’d Come Back’, the feckless drunk who leaves his family to live in Key West is described as a Kerouac wannabee: ‘At night you’d find him in the bars / Thinkin’ he was Kerouac.’ Characters’ literary tastes, like their musical preferences, speak volumes about them...
Painting a picture
* Artists, or more precisely, works of art, give rise to a powerful set of references and visual allusions in Tom’s songs. The title of ‘Ophelia’ recalls that of a painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (which was, in turn, inspired by the suicidal leading lady in Shakespeare’s Hamlet). Although Tom was inspired to write his song by hearing that the body of a woman had been dragged from the Mississippi, the line ‘her face so pale and fragile like a flower past its bloom’ recalls Millais’ painting where Ophelia lies in the water with flowers scattered about her, a motif which, to Millais’ Victorian spectators was a memento mori, that a person’s life (like a maid’s virginity) was as evanescent as the blooming of a flower...
* Tom’s great paeon to the life of an artist, ‘Van Gogh’, tells part of the story through a glance at one of his most famous works, ‘Corn Field with Rooks’, painted, scholars think, on the eve of his suicide. Tom’s song describes picks out details from the painting ‘the sunny fields of wheat’ and how ‘ten black crows flew away’, evoking a setting which reflects the artist’s agony. As Van Gogh wrote to his sister: ‘They are vast fields under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness’. Van Gogh’s life story has particular poignancy and relevance, for it epitomises the struggle all creative people: ‘Artists walk the high wire over hell / Pieces of their souls are all they’ve got to sell’. It explains Van Gogh’s special place in a pantheon of suffering creative heroes, including Wilde, Cassady and Emily Dickinson. Although Van Gogh’s famous painting of sunflowers is not mentioned in the song, this painting and its artist are commemorated in the title of the album on which this track appears: Sunflowers and Scarecrows...
* Another glimpse of the work of this talented but tortured painter comes in ‘She Always Thought that He’d Come Back’, where a son has a longed-for but disappointing meeting with his errant father against the backdrop of ‘Van Gogh sun’. Always painted as a radiating mass of short, jagged lines, Van Gogh’s suns are as troubled as this meeting...
* In ‘Home is a Place Inside Me’, Tom places his own past in relation to a particular artistic movement, when he sees himself ‘by Warhol’s ghost on St Mark’s Place.’ Tom Pacheco fans will not need to be reminded that St Mark’s Place was the centre of hippy culture in the 1960s. The Grateful Dead, Santana and The Who all played in the vicinity, and Andy Warhol took over the Dom, a Polish community centre, and turned it into an experimental club where the Velvet Underground became the resident band. One of the tricks of the psychedelic light-show was the projection of ghostly images of the dancers on the backdrop...
* Tom’s most detailed set of visual allusions are found in ‘Cannon Street’, a tribute to the painting of that name by his father, Tony Pacheco, which graces the cover of The Lost American Songwriter. Tom begins by painting in words the scene his father created in oils: an empty street of tumble-down houses with gas tanks looming beyond and the morning sun throwing strong shadows across the view. He goes on to describe the depressing and violent lives which are lived out in the area, imagining a street brawl, prostitution, and drug-dealing taking place there. These scenarios are located in particular details of the painting: the drug-den is the house on its own, isolated between the two gas tanks, and the brothel is the building by the hydrant in the foreground. Although there is no red light visible in the picture, the building identified as the house of ill-repute glows a sinister brick-red. While the casual spectator may be tempted to view Pacheco senior’s painting as depicting a warm and rosy scene, Tom’s song reads it as glowing an infernal fiery red. Indeed, he describes a tilting telegraph pole as ‘a crucifix that’s in retreat’, and glancing back at the painting, the two telegraph poles seem to be running in an almost cartoon-like fashion away from this godless scene!
The devil in the detail
* This brings me to my last clutch of images: the plethora of references to religion, beliefs and superstitions and yes, the devil in the detail.
Tom’s songs offer a range of different perspectives on beliefs to reflect the ways – good, but more often bad – in which religion affects society. His most scathing treatment of the ways in which religions and superstitions harm society is ‘Strange Gods’, which attacks ways in which people put faith in astrology, reincarnation and UFO sightings, or unthinkingly buy into belief systems they do not understand (such as the addict turned Hari Krishna who is one of the ‘zombies’ who ‘live a happy life, they don’t have to think at all’). It also excoriates religious leaders who use their power to exploit and oppress: from TV evangelists to the Muslim authorities who condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his irreverent treatment of the Koran (‘Satirize somebody’s god, your sentence will be death’)...
* A more complicated picture emerges from Tom’s other songs. His priests are a mixed bunch: in ‘The Beaches of Rio’, we see a Catholic priest battling against the odds to help street children in Brazil, and in ‘The Heroes’, a Jesuit priest risks his life to teach shepherds in a war-torn African state. On the other hand, the victim of a drive-by shooting in ‘The Other Side’ has his wallet stolen by a priest who is no doubt abusing his role of ministering to the dead and dying (‘no-one has respect at all for the recently deceased’). The priest in ‘Midnight at the Hot Club’ is an ambiguous character: he tries to wipe out evil by burning down a cantina containing ‘murderers, outlaws, dictators, sinners’, including some of the world’s most notorious terrorists such as Carlos the Jackal, but we see him in the last scene praying ‘by a tall twisted cactus / That reached up like the devil’s own hand’. This may be a sign that evil can never finally be destroyed, or a hint that the priest has compromised himself by performing a wicked deed in an attempt to root out evil.
TV evangelists, by contrast, are always treated with disdain. In ‘Strange Gods’, they are attacked for preying on the vulnerable and milking them for financial gain. ‘Donna Marie’ pokes fun at a preacher who takes a literal, Creationist stand:
Some evangelist was shouting to send him money right now,
And if you believed in evolution, your soul would combust.
She said, ‘I think he’s trying to make monkeys of us...’
* Well, without evolution we would have remained apes, wouldn’t we?
Cult leaders are treated with unreserved contempt, most notably in ‘Reverend Jake’, the story of a leader who gathers together a commune of vulnerable, isolated people and controls them with the threat of violence – caressing a gun whilst urging his flock to defend him against any attack from the outside. Like many of Tom’s villains, he receives retribution when the commune is destroyed by a tornado, but as in ‘Midnight at the Hot Club’, his evil has not been eradicated: his dead body looks like a vampire (suggesting that he is merely undead), and a young escapee is pregnant with his child…
* Religious insignia play a small but significant part in Tom’s songs. Juan Romero places great hope in the influence of the Kennedys as a Catholic political family. His home gives pride of place to ‘the Kennedys right next to Jesus and Mary / With rosary beads by them all.’ In ‘Saint Christopher and the Cornfield’, an autobiographical story, it is significant that Tom, who found the medal of the patron saint of travellers whilst playing with friends is the only one still alive forty years later. A more obscure reference to a saint’s image is found in ‘All They Got is Love’, where a young woman who has lost everything except her husband throws away her St Jude’s medal – an admission that she is beyond the help even of this patron saint of lost causes...
* Some of Tom’s songs suggest a working-out of Christian motifs in the modern world. These are often laden with irony, such as the spine-tingling conclusion of ‘Robert and Ramona’ where the falling headlights of the car in which the fugitive outlaws commit suicide on Christmas Eve are mistaken by onlookers for the Star of Bethlehem. These references often reflect ironically on a flawed world: ‘Texas Red’ is a close allegory of the Gospel story, except that the Christ figure is set up and executed because his healing powers put doctors out of work; another divine incarnation, ‘The Stranger’, incurs the wrath of those in power by solving the world’s environmental problems...
* Salvation is something to be worked out in the world, rather than bought from a dubious preacher. In ‘I Had a Dream’, it is to be found in ‘kindness, concern and respect for all souls’. For the young Mexican refugee hoping to make a new life in ‘The Midnite Waters of the Rio Grande’, the ‘land of milk and honey’ he aspires towards is not heaven but America. By the same token, Apocalypse is environmental disaster, as in ‘Till the Last Breath I Breathe’, where the arrival of the Biblical ‘pale rider’ presages a nuclear holocaust which makes the trees shine ‘radium green’...
* Many of Tom’s songs reflect a Native American spirituality by which the spirit of goodness can be found in the world, particularly in the natural world. Thus, ‘The Soul’ reminds us that the Great Creative Spirit exists in all things, and in ‘The Sacred’, a high-flying businessman undergoes a life-changing transformation when he learns to find holiness in ‘a grain of sand’...
* If the spirit of goodness may be found in this world, then the spirit of evil is here too, and here we come to the devil in the detail. An early song, ‘Devil’s Hopyard’ retells a folk legend of mysterious footprints in a country community, but there is also a little glimpse in ‘Big Muddy River’, with the appearance of the ‘calico cat’ – the devil’s familiar – on a roof. Finally, could the devil be one answer to the mystery of ‘who the hell was Sam Maguire?’, for the birds avoid him and nothing grows on the land around his house…
* So where does our journey through some of the details in Tom Pacheco’s songs take us? It reveals that Tom’s songs operate on several levels, for he takes a close critical look at modern society, but also exposes some of the moral and spiritual battles going on within it. The complexity of Tom’s songs means that different listeners will take different things from them (the ideas I have drawn from these songs may not have been ones Tom intended to convey, and some readers will probably disagree with some of the things I have said and offer alternative readings). It also means that we can return to his songs to find different things within them on almost every listen. In short, we can see why Tom’s songs merit even more critical attention than they have been given to date, and why his careful crafting places him among the top poet-songwriters writing and performing today...
Notes:
The albums on which the songs discussed above may be found are identified here. For a guide to abbreviations see the list of albums below...
Abduction, The (LAS)
All They Got is Love (S&S)
Beaches of Rio, The (BSC)
Big Muddy River (Blue, LAS)
Black and Blue (TRL)
Bluefields (Blue, LAS)
Bobby and Elvis (Nb)
By the Light of the Moon (LAS)
Cannon Street (LAS)
Devil’s Hopyard (Out)
Donna Marie (ER, BBBW)
Fine Summer Morning (Blue)
From a Window (BSC)
Grand Canyon (BSC, BBBW)
Heroes, The (Time)
Hippy on the Highway (S&S, BBBW)
Home is a Place Inside Me (TRL)
I Had a Dream (BSC)
Jerry’s Gone (WW)
Jessica Brown (TRL, BBBW)
Jesus in a Leather Jacket (ER, BBBW)
John Wilkes Booth (LAS)
Juan Romero (LAS, LW)
Last Rolling Stone, The (LW)
Long Gone (TRL, BBBW)
Midnight at the Hot Club (ER)
Midnight Waters of the Rio Grande, The (S&S, LAS)
Nobodies (Nb)
Ophelia (TRL, BBBW)
Other Side, The (TRL, BBBW)
Out of the American Blue (LAS)
Real Americans? (WW)
Reverend Jake (LoA, BBBW)
Robert and Ramona (ER, LoA, BBBW)
Sacred, The (WW)
Searching for the Sixties (LoA)
She Always Thought that He’d Come Back (ER)
Soul, The (TRL, BBBW)
St Christopher and the Cornfield (Time)
Strange Gods (S&S, BBBW)
Stranger, The (BSC)
Sweet Lucille (S&S)
Teddy Roosevelt (Nb)
Texas Red (Out)
Till the Last Breath I Breathe (Blue)
Van Gogh (S&S, BBBW)
Who Was Sam Maguire? (BBBW)
Guide to abbreviations:
The Outsider (Out) RCA 1976 APL1-1887
Eagle in the Rain (ER) Ringsend Road (Round Tower) 1989 TPMC1
Sunflowers and Scarecrows (S&S) Round Tower 1991 RTMMC30
Tales from the Red Lake (TRL) Round Tower 1992 RTMMC42
Big Storm Comin' (BSC) Round Tower 1993 RTMMC53 (with Steinar Albrigtsen)
Luck of Angels (LoA) Sonet 1994 SCD15072
Bluefields (Blue) Fjording 1995 FJCD 2007 [deleted]
Woodstock Winter (WW) Mercury (US)/Polygram (Norway) 1997 314 532 793-2
Bare Bones and Barbed Wire (BBBW) Road Goes on Forever 1997 RGF/TPDCD040
The Lost American Songwriter (LAS) Road Goes on Forever 1999 RGF/TPDCD046
Nobodies (Nb) Norske Gram 2000 EKGCD191 (with Steinar Albrigtsen)
There Was a Time (Time) Appleseed Recordings 2002 APR CD 1067
Long Walk (LW) Playground (Norway) 2004
