Sam Baker is sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, deep in thought. In profile, the weathered good looks, high cheekbones, gray-streaked, shoulder- length hair, and most of all his deep-set, penetrating eyes bear a remarkable resemblance to an Indian head nickel. But he’s not seated sideways for effect or image; it’s so that he can hear.
In 1986, at age 32, Baker was traveling in Peru when, as he says, “I got in the middle of somebody else’s war.” A terrorist bomb (the Sendero Luminoso or “Shining Path” Maoist group) blew up the train he and some friends were riding on. Several passengers died, including a German boy and his parents, who were sitting next to Baker. Though he nearly bled to death, Sam survived but suffered a constellation of injuries and aftereffects—shrapnel in his leg, renal failure, brain damage, even gangrene.
“Right now, the loudest thing I hear is the ringing in my head,” he says of the Tinnitus, which will never go away. The other obvious reminder of the blast is his left hand, the fingers of which are permanently scrunched and twisted. Fortunately, he has enough dexterity to grip a pick—after re-learning to play guitar left-handed (fretting with the less-injured right hand)—so that he can sing and play some of the most vivid, compelling, truly original songs of any artist working today. The brain damage he initially suffered affected mainly the part of the brain where words are stored. Which is ironic, since it’s the stories and images he paints with words that brought him acclaim—first with his 2004 debut, Mercy, and now with its 2007 follow-up, Pretty World (both self released). Of forging a career out of writing and singing his own songs, Baker beams, “To start this at this age is a real interesting thing. I’m 53—a great age. It’s a fabulous age. Just to be, as they say, ‘walking the face of the earth’ is a miracle—no matter what age you are. I’ll take it every day.”
He describes his recovery as “a climb up a steep embankment”—including numerous surgeries, learning how to walk and talk, and getting parts of his memory back. “I could remember things in the past; I just couldn’t remember words. I couldn’t remember the word for ‘chair’; I would have to say, ‘I need that thing for sitting.’ I couldn’t focus [my attention]. For twenty-something days, I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed. My hands were blown up, so I couldn’t do anything with my hands. I couldn’t use my legs. I couldn’t read, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t think of words.”
He pauses and adds, “It was an interesting time. Very introspective. The only thing that came in loud enough to really get through that haze or fog or internal trauma I was dealing with was the raw suffering of others.”
As for words, still, “I have to find them; they don’t just come. I have to go out and pick them. I’m more like a worker in an . . . orchard. I had to go find that word ‘orchard.’ Words certainly don’t fly out of the sky and land on my table.”
Just as that searching influences the way he writes, it distinguishes Baker’s vocal delivery. “I think I have to collect the words, a lot of times. I have to go get them, and then hold them, and then put them out, and then go get some more. I don’t think there’s a steady stream coming in; I have to gather them up.
“Like some kind of sheepdog,” he laughs.
As a result, written out, a song like “Juarez” would read:
He wears a blue suede cowboy hat; Got a Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
But when Sam sings it, it’s:
He wears a blue
Suede
Cowboy hat;
Got a
Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
“I write it the way I sing it,” he states. “I never thought of that as something different or an oddity, but that’s the way I hear it—in that truncated way.”
The accident not only influenced the sound of Sam’s music, but the content of at least some songs, like “Steel” and “Angels” from Mercy. “I think what I was trying to do was write my way out of sudden death. We’re in a beautiful quiet place with people we like—and then the next second, one or both of us is dead or dying. I think what I was trying to do was write my way into an understanding of how that can come about and what it meant. The instant of that—what that meant and how to accommodate that. How to make that more normal, something that’s not so out of the ordinary, so inexplicable.”
“Broken Fingers”, from Pretty World, is perhaps the most autobiographical (a “near tangent,” he calls it) and most powerful. “It’s a reminder, I think. You know, the living owe the dead so much. Mostly everything I walk upon or live by, a great community has provided. Specifically, it’s about the boy who died next to me so horrifically. It’s a reminder that the community that I live in and you live in, it’s pretty broad. It includes all our family, friends, and people who’ ve come before and have done so much and, for whatever reason—generosity, goodwill, charity—have left so much that makes our lives so much easier. That’s one of the things I take from that song, but specifically it’s about the boy.”
Forget his eyes,
His silhouette?
Of course I don’t,
Of course I don’t forget.
There are blue eyes,
A silhouette;
There is a debt,
A debt I don’t forget.
Baker grew up in Itasca, Texas, a small, rural town of about 1,200, on the prairie between Waco and Fort Worth. “There were 35 people in my high school class—1972. And everybody did everything. Everybody played in the band; I played football, basketball, baseball. You had to.”
As a kid, Sam heard his father’s records of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Johnny Cash, while his mother listened to Broadway albums and played piano and organ in the Presbyterian church. “There’d be Handel’s Messiah, ‘My Fair Lady,’ and Brownie McGhee,” he recalls; “pretty broad tastes. And so much of that stuff has held up. I can listen right now to Johnny Cash or Sonny Terry or Lightnin’ Hopkins—or Handel. That stuff was not time-stamped or perishable; it’s stuff that stands up for a long time.”
He went to college in Denton, north of Dallas, at North Texas State, famed for its music program. “There were lots of unbelievable musicians at that school. I took some guitar lessons from a real good jazz player, who taught me music theory. I loved to play that Gershwin and Fats Waller stuff, and loved to hear Joe Pass’s playing.”
After college, Sam worked a day job as a bank examiner, but his restless spirit found him working as a carpenter and a white-water boatman, and just traveling the world—until those travels led him to Peru and the train explosion.
Following the long, arduous recovery, his goal was “to do one good piece of art” —which became Mercy. “I really wasn’t much of a writer. I wrote pretty junky stuff. But at some point—it was in 2000—I decided to learn to write, to learn to be clear. And it’s hard. It’s hard, hard, hard. I have to take a word and look at it as it is by itself, from all different angles—shine lights on it at different angles— and then put it in context and see what that does to shade it. See if it changes. See how that word shades the pre-word, post-word, the whole phrase, the whole sentence, and see how it changes the color of what I’m trying to say— and see if that’s what I want to say. It takes a lot. I am the slowest writer in the world. You have to reduce. You have to be ruthless. You can’t fall in love with any line—because they’re all at the mercy of every other line.”
There’s obviously a strong literary element to Baker’s work. “For me, songwriting starts with literature. I started reading Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury again, and I just finished Islands In The Stream by Hemingway again. How they pace things, how they glue things together, and how they don’t glue things together—it’s so beautiful, so masterful. I like Hemingway because he’s tight, Faulkner because he’s not. I’m in awe of how they make the stories flow so beautifully. And the little bitty pieces of the story all reflect the light of the narrative. How do they do it? They do it because they’re masters [laughs]. Sometimes Hemingway will throw in a detail that doesn’t fit, but then he’ll come back. It’s like coming in with a change-up just before the fastball.”
(Other writers, “storytellers,” Baker lists include Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marques’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homer, J.D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and early Ken Kesey—whose Sometimes a Great Notion took its title, Sam points out, from Huddie Ledbetter’s “Goodnight Irene.”)
Of specific songwriters, he feels, “Stephen Foster’s melodies are so beautiful. Randy Newman was a pretty influential thing, when Newman started doing that stuff out of the South. ‘Born is Tuscaloosa, but I’ll die right here in Birmingham.’ Leonard Cohen, because he’s so exact. I like all the anger in that early Dylan stuff. And I thought Joni Mitchell was a remarkable writer. Guy Clark was a beautiful singer and a stunning storyteller, but I thought Van Zandt was just a terrific poet. Intuitive, beautiful, clear. But also Lightnin’ Hopkins. When he sings about coming in and his kids are crying because they’re hungry, and he doesn’t have any money to feed them—that’s about as powerful as you can go. I don’t know that Robert Johnson has influenced me, but when he sings, ‘There’ s a hellhound on my trail,’ you look around and there’s probably a hellhound on his trail.”
When Baker opened a show for Walt Wilkins, the singer/songwriter told Sam, “I know what you should sound like.” Sam credits Wilkins and Tim Lorsch with putting his voice and songs in the proper setting. “Both CDs are terrifically produced by those guys, but the thing I love most is the combination of the cello, the pedal steel, and octave violin. The octave violin has more of an oboe sound, more nasal than the cello.”
Lorsch provides the octave violin (along with standard violin and mandolin), while Ron DeLaVega plays bass and cello, and Mike Daly supplies pedal steel and various slide and resophonic guitars, with Lloyd Maines lending a hand on Pretty World, along with guitarist Gurf Morlix and accordionist Joel Guzman.
Of his own guitar playing, he laughs, “I’m not much of a guitar player at all; you know that, don’t you?” But he has very specific preferences when it comes to his Taylor acoustics. “I have two 414s, so I’ll have one as a backup,” he details. “I like the balanced sound, the neck, and the consistency. It’s a high-quality instrument that fits my hands, and to my ear it’s just something I like.”
He views minutiae like picks and strings—Clayton plectrums and Martin SP Phosphor Bronze lights, respectively—as tools, “like knowing what type of skill saw a carpenter uses.” Though his 414s each have pickguards on both sides of the soundhole, he points out, “I use factory left-handed models, and put an extra pickguard on top just because aesthetically it appeals to me more. I like it visually. And I don’t play cutaways; I just play the standard old style. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but theoretically I think more resonating space is better. That’s my instinct.”
He strives for and achieves a realistic acoustic sound onstage “The 414 came with the Fishman, but I’m using the Aura on top of that. It’s made by Fishman, too, and it’s a device that takes the sound from a pickup and outputs it in a way that resembles the unamplified acoustic guitar. Basically, I’m using a 414 through the pickup, into the Aura, and coming out with a 414 on the other side. I’m not trying to color it; I’m trying to de-color it; I’m trying to take the metallic, electronic color out of it. It’s a nice round sound. I’m really pleased with the nice warm sound I’m getting out of this Aura. Those 414s really do sound good coming through that system.
“I think there are good acoustic-electric sounds,” he goes on; “you just have to work on it. I’ve been working on it six months now to get my sound right. I’ve tried a million different things. You start out with a good guitar, reasonably fresh strings, and a decent pickup, and then have something that takes that electronic metal-y sound away. I think we’ve all approached it like, ‘What do we add to give it the sound we want?’ Really, what we need is reduction—to take the things out we don’t want. Not put the 414 back, but just not cover it up. I just want a 414 to sound like a 414.”
For somebody who’s gone through the pain and trauma he’s gone through, Sam Baker has an amazingly positive outlook on life, as though everything’s a gift at this point. “Everything is a gift at this point,” he declares. “But, see, it’s a gift for you at this point. It’s not just me; it’s everybody in this restaurant. I went through the anger and the bitterness—deeply. But that energy didn’t get me anywhere. It’s toxic. And ultimately, I did come to a point where these days are beautiful. Because they are so short and so quick to pass. And that’s all we’ve got—no matter what we hold in our hands, drive around in, put in the bank, or shower ourselves with.
“All we’ve got is this one breath,” he concludes. “And then, if we’re lucky, we have the next breath.”
By Dan Forte
As Published in
Wood and Steel Magazine
Copyright 2007 |
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September 2010
Territories: UK
Format: duo
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