....

    Rick Shea, Dave Alvin's longtime multi-instrument sidekick (steel guitar, electric guitar, mandolin), doesn't get off Alvin's tour bus to record his own material too often. His latest release, "Sawbones," is only his third album since 1990. But what Shea leaves out in quantity, he makes up for with quality. "Sawbones" allows Shea to display many of the facets of his talent that cause a consummate pro like Alvin to want to have him around. Alvin lends his own guitar virtuosity to two cuts on "Sawbones."

    While Shea isn't particularly well known nationally, he is an almost legendary figure in Los Angeles and the surrounding area, where he is known not only for his instrumental prowess but also for his intelligent songwriting and a voice that would be the envy of many headliners in the Americana field.

    While "Sawbones" is completely Americana by type, it finds Shea working with sounds and shapes from blues to country to folk, with subtle colorings of Irish sounds, Mexican sounds, and countrified gospel. And Shea can go up tempo or slow as a dirge, play it hot or cool, whatever the lyric calls for.

    He comes out smoking with some nasty Neil Young guitar licks and a Billy Joe Shaver waver in his voice on 'Black-Eyed Girl.' Mom and Dad don't approve of her, but this girl has charms stronger than Mom and Dad's warnings. Shea and the band let it out and he displays how serious his guitar chops are on an extended fade.

That black-eyed girl she cast a spell
She had gypsy charms and shotgun shells
And the song she sings in old Creole
And the knife she brought from Mexico
I got a silver ring and string of soft white pearls
I want to lie all night alone with a black-eyed girl

    'Magdalena' is a Spanish-inflected, spirit-laden country-folk tune based on a local legend about a ghost girl who can be seen some nights walking in the courtyard of the chapel at San Juan Capistrano. She carries a single candle and calls out for her lover to return. Shea has a constructed a very dramatic and spiritually satisfying song, and his Spanish guitar picking adds to the sadness inherent in the story.

    On 'Lonesome Cannonball,' Shea and Alvin compliment each other on electric guitar on this countrified blues. The guitars are bluesy and bad, but Brantley Kearns' fiddling lays on a country overtone. There's lots of fire and plenty of twang to go around on this brooding cut.

Katy Moffatt duets with Shea on 'Deep Within the Well,' another country-folk tune. But this time Shea opts for Irish rather than blues overtones as Shea handles the mandolin work and Kearnes counters with mournful fiddle.
    One doesn't have to hear much of Shea's singing to make the Lefty Frizzell connection. While Shea doesn't sing with quite the nasality and "hickness" that Frizzell projected, the tonal qualities of the two voices are almost identical. So it is probably no coincidence that Shea covers Frizzell's country classic 'Saginaw, Michigan' and gives it a very faithful rendition. Shea's vocal ache also invites comparisons with Frizzell on 'Walkin' to Jerusalem,' the brooding and eerie 'Still Water.'

    'Emperor of the North' finds Shea in his most engaging form, a dramatic country-folk tune with lots of meat and Americana in the subject matter. The song is a tale of "Guitar Whitey" Symmonds, hoboed in 1930's looking for work. He found a job and stayed on it fifty years and reached retirement. After he retired, he went back to hoboing. Shea immortalizes him and his rough-edged American independent spirit here.

Lost John said, Son here's the deal, we'll share everything we can steal
It's a 60-40 proposition given your green looks and poor condition
You can take the split or leave it if you choose
These farmers, they've got more than they can use
I'm not saying it's the best of lives but I've seen worse with 2 mean wives
These boxcar beds they creak and pitch, it's chancy work, you won't get rich
Them railroad dicks don't ever treat you kind but a freer man you'll never hope to find

    Shea and Alvin find a slow, before-daylight blues groove on Shea's 'Piedmont Ridge." This is as lowdown and country as the blues can get.

Sun come up this mornin', two mules lying on the bridge
A steady rain was fallin' out along the Piedmont Ridge

    The title cut sounds like some of our Texas neo-outlaws at work as Shea flashes more of his tasty electric guitar picking in that groove between country and blues known as roadhouse music. The funky, off-kilter lyric would make a perfect Delbert McClinton song.

    The instrumental 'Mesquite' allows Shea to stretch out and demonstrate more of his picking prowess on a straight country reel. Shea whips out hot licks on both acoustic guitar and mandolin.

Shea closes the album out with another funky roadhouse country rocker, 'Camellia.' This cut has a New Orleans feel like the The Band was always so good at.

    With tasty playing, simple, pleasing arrangements, and a voice that is friendly to the ear, Rick Shea has cut a wide slice from the center of the Americana pie with "Sawbones." With an album this good, he deserves to do it more often than just every 3 or 4 years.

Rick Shea
Sawbones
Wagon Wheel/AIM

    Rick Shea's demeanor onstage as well as off is so unassuming and non-flashy that it's tempting to pigeonhole him as the kind of musician whose original projects will follow the sensitive singer-songwriter formula: thoughtful, tasteful, nothing too memorable or surprising. But understatement's a wonderful thing, and Sawbones offers up a number of subtle surprises. It's filled with songwriting jewels, and by mixing up his ballads with several more rocking, even bluesy tunes, Shea's created a fine record with tougher edges than either of his previous releases.

    Shea, of course, is best-known as the soulful linchpin of Dave Alvin's Guilty Men band. Sawbones was recorded around the same time as Alvin's Grammy-winning Public Domain , and there's a similar feel to the instrumental performances on both records. When Alvin pops up, electric guitar in hand, to let his inner bluesman roam through "Lonesome Cannonball" and the loose-limbed "Piedmont Ridge," it's sweet, fuzz-toned joy.

    Shea and his changing lineup of bandmates (including, at various times, Alvin, bassist Dave Hall, fiddler Brantley Kearns, drummers John Lee White III and Don Heffington, and organist Wyman Reese) sound like they're having a great time, playing for the love of music, especially when rocking on "Black-Eyed Girl" and "Lonesome Cannonball" or romping through the title track, "Camellia," and "Emperor of the North" (a co-write with Reese, keyboardist in Chris Gaffney's Cold Hard Facts band). There's always a strain of sweet melancholy in Shea's vocals, but that's part of his appeal.

    After honing his chops for two decades as a guitarist and singer playing covers in bars, truck stops and honky-tonks around Southern California, Shea's got a well-deserved rep as a standard bearer for classic California country. But when you get right down to it, his own songs are as much folk as they are country. That's particularly evident on more contemplative material like the Celtic-flavored "Deep Within the Well," featuring longtime pal Katy Moffatt's smoky harmonies, "A Bend in the River" and the Spanish-flavored "Magdalena." "Walkin' to Jerusalem," which was inspired by the death of Alvin's father, is one of the best and most moving songs Shea's ever written; it impresses with the enduring strength and simplicity of classic folk laments.

    Some of these songs -"Magdalena," "Black Eyed Girl," "Camellia" - have been staples of Shea's live shows for a long time. But as a recent acoustic performance with Kearns amply demonstrated, Shea's songs are surprisingly sturdy; if anything, their glow becomes warmer and lovelier with age.

-Bliss

Sawbones, 2000 Wagon Wheel
   The Los Angeles-based Shea is best known for his contributions to "A Town South of Bakersfield," his collaborations with Patty Booker and Heather Miles, and his membership in Dave Alvin's Guilty Men band. Like Alvin, Shea invokes the roots of country while seamlessly adding a whole passel of other influences.
   This third release ranges from a sweet acoustic cover of Lefty Frizell's "Saginaw Michigan" to muscular, electric tunes that bring to mind Lynyrd Skynyrd's less anthemic moments and a host of electric blues greats. Throughout, Shea's picking covers a lot of ground. His mandolin provides tender old-tyme and bluegrass runs on "Walking to Jerusalem" and the instrumental "Mesquite," then ranges to British folk sounds on "Deep Within the Well." His guitars run the gamut from softly picked and rhythmically strummed acoustics to low, reverberating waves of electric notes and bluesy twang.
   Shea's instrumental chops are matched by the suppleness of his singing and the mystery and romance of his lyrics. At turns he sings with the heartbreak of George Jones, the quirky introspection of Richard Buckner and the lament of a honky-tonk bluesman. Altogether, it's just the sort of fusion that the term "Americana" was created to describe. ( Wagon Wheel )
- Eli Messinger

December 21, 2000

Rick Shea
Sawbones (Wagon Wheel)
BY ERIC WAGGONER

Clain

   Rick Shea recently began serving time as one of Dave Alvin's Guilty Men, but he's no prison fish: Sawbones is his third solo album. Shea's own musical style, like Alvin's, is a mix of influences -- a little contemporary folk here, a bit of George Jones over there -- but throughout Sawbones, the common reference point is a Stones-style injection of acoustic rock with a harder electric element.

   This isn't innocuous folkie rock, either; Shea isn't afraid to rave up on cuts like the title track, which is the most Stonesy song on the album, or "Emperor of the North," which manages to be a celebration of, and a poking-fun at, the kind of superstar ego that Americana songwriters like Shea have tended to avoid (at least partly because we tend not to make superstars of Americana songwriters). All but one of the 13 cuts here were penned by Shea, and the sole exception -- an acoustic cover of Lefty Frizell's "Saginaw Michigan" -- finds him reaching into the Nashville tradition, which is one of the record's prime progenitors.

   Make that Nashville songwriting, though, not production. For while Sawbones is mixed for maximum clarity of all instruments, this isn't a "slick" record by any shot. The swagger-walk through blues, country, folk-rock and roots-rock Shea performs here is a stripped-down, old Fender tube-amp variety. It's the sound you'd get if you invited all your talented friends over with their instruments, so you could hang around and try out a few Creedence covers with the new Silvertone guitar you just bought.

   Rick Shea pulls it off better than we would, of course. The mossy, it-came-from-the-home-country approach bears out remarkably well over the course of the entire disc, which itself sustains a number of heavy songs; most of the 13 cuts here run between four and five minutes. But Shea never gets bogged down in roots stylistics just for the sake of it, which is what makes Sawbones such a treat for folk-rock fans, who may not have heard many records this edgy.

   Roots-rock and Americana aficionados will enjoy it for the music, which is consistent and strong without a slip. If the lyrical content on Sawbones often seems a bit too predictable (especially, and unfortunately, on the album's leadoff track, "Black Eyed Girl"), that might be a result of this being only Shea's third solo outing in a decade. It might also be that Shea's forerunners are so obvious here, and the playing techniques he learned from them so well-executed, that it's hard to listen to Sawbones without hearing, say, Cosmo's Factory in some little pocket of your head at the same time, which is undoubtedly unfair. Sawbones has a great deal of genuine life in its marrow, when you get right down in it.

RICK SHEA – SAWBONES – WAGON WHEEL RECORDS ARC 7-18042 (BERTUS)

Rick Shea is de gitarist by Dave Alvin's backingband The Guilty Men, en in die functie ook aanwezig op Alvin's   ‘Public Domain'.   Op die toch wat matige plaat bleef hij wat in de scha-duw van Alvin, en kreeg niet echt de kans een grote indruk te maken.

Zijn recente solo-worp ‘Sawbones' is echter niet het zoveelste overbodige plaatje van een side-man.   In de openingstrack ‘Black eyed girl' wordt er funky-stompend afgetrapt voor een plaat die er best mag wezen.   De produktie van Cody Bryant is sappig en zit snor.   Shea's stem is een vage samensmelting van het timbre van Eric Andersen en Jimmie Dale Gilmore (‘Saginaw Michigan') en als gitarist komt hij knap rootsy uit de hoek.   Naast Dave Alvin die op enkele nummers leadgitaar

speelt, is ook Katy Moffatt van de partij als muzikale gaste.

  Blijft enkel nog de vraag hoe het zit met zijn songs ?   Dit is misschien wel de sterkste troef van Shea.   Van de 13 num-mers is er geen enkel ondermaats.   Er zitten voldoende uit-schieters in deze collectie om de plaat een eigen gezicht te geven.   Zo kunnen ‘Lonesome cannonball', ‘Walking to Jerusalem' of ‘Still Water' naast het werk van Alvin staan.   Alles is erg stijlvol en rootsy gespeeld (luister maar naar het bezwerende ‘Still water') zodat deze Sawbones een aangename luistertrip is tot aan het frisse instrumentale ‘ Mosquito' en afsluiter ‘Camellia'.   U mag mij (ten onrechte) van stemmingmakerij ver-denken, maar als ik moest kiezen tussen Alvin's ‘Public Domain' en deze ‘Sawbones', zou ik zonder twijfel voor deze pretentielozere maar betere plaat van Rick Shea kiezen.

Knap werkstuk !                                                            Dirk De Bruyn.

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