Ben Weaver on Larry Brown

Day 5 of Larry Brown Week.

Novelist Larry Brown had a unique relationship with music and musicians. Many writers aspire to be musicians, just as musicians aspire to be actors, actors aspire to be novelists and so on. But Brown seemed content to strum his guitar and sing on his back porch; he didn’t hop up on stage and try to front a band. Instead, he appreciated music, befriended musicians and wrote about the music that he loved. He wrote liner notes, conducted interviews for magazines like No Depression and clearly reveled in the sounds of Americana.

He performed with Alejandro Escovedo on several occasions, and sat in with Ben Weaver a few times as well. I had the pleasure of catching one of the latter performances, at a club down the street from the Iowa City book store where he had given a reading from The Rabbit Factory earlier in the evening. As Weaver played his guitar, Brown read, his prose occasionally punctuated by Weaver’s singing. It was a ramshackle affair, perfectly suited to Brown’s work.

Brown’s admiration for musicians was reciprocated; one need look no further than the tribute CD forthcoming from Bloodshot Records, Just One More, to see proof of that. As Tim Lee, the musician who compiled and produced the disc said, “The simple concept of this disc was to put together a mix tape of sorts, the type of thing that Larry would have enjoyed listening to as he drove his little truck into the gloam’ with a cooler full of beer and an ass pocket of something that burns a little bit on the way down.” There was no pretension in Brown’s love of music, no attempt to tap into something that would make him seem hip or extend his reach. He simply knew what he liked and was singularly talented when it came to expressing how and why.

My original idea for this post, wrapping up what I have declared to be “Larry Brown Week,” was to have musicians weigh in on what they liked about Brown and his music. A promising premise, perhaps, but given the fact that most of these guys are road dogs who tour a lot and aren’t exactly tethered to their e-mail accounts, it was perhaps a case of reach exceeding grasp. Weaver was my lone respondent, but this doesn’t suffer from the lack of contributions from his peers. Brown called Weaver “an American original whose voice and guitar are matched only by the power of his words. His songs are an incredible, haunting gift of music.” Weaver’s powerful words about Brown are a fitting way to bring the week to a close:

“He is a bird now. A hawk rather. He looks over his family and his fish and his shack. He perches on half sunken trees at the river’s edge… I think when we leave this world, people that knew us will see us in the things that resemble the essence of what we were when we were alive. What I mean is, I know I’m not the only one that thinks of Larry when a hawk flies overhead. Larry told the honest truth about things. He didn’t just talk about things, he talked about the things that made up the things and the things that made up those things, which in the end made up his characters. To me that is what the honest truth is. It’s the facts, the feelings, the circumstance, the heart and the guts. I believe all these things were ever present in Larry’s writing. That is one of the many reasons why my respect and appreciation for the man and his work will never die.”