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By Dennis Cook
It's easy to miss things. Sensory overload seems too weak a phrase to describe the barrage of input and options that await us when we pull back the covers each morning. So, a really great band can toil away for ten years, making sterling albums and grinding it out in clubs, and still get missed. That's almost the story of Portland, Oregon's Richmond Fontaine.
Richmond Fontaine |
Starting in 1995, the band led by Willy Vlautin both helped define the Americana genre and transcend it. They emerged at the same time as Wilco and Son Volt but have explored a more story-driven, subtly tweaked path. Painting houses and doing other day jobs to get by, Richmond Fontaine produced four heavily shaded gems, and then 2004's incredible Post To Wire was released to ecstatic praise from the UK press, especially Uncut, whose great Allan Jones wrote, "The curtain comes down then, everything turning to cheerless black, the colour of the world in mourning, for which Post To Wire is an exquisite soundtrack. Brilliant." Richmond Fontaine is the real deal. For those of us who've been on board since their '96 debut Safety, it's only gotten better with each pass. Their layered, intense playing and blue-collar perspective have the dark ache of a bruise - a blow we've survived and learned from even as it makes us flinch at the next outstretched hand.
"The only reason I write such dark stuff sometimes – I mean the world in itself is a pretty dark fucking thing if you look at it realistically – is, I'm not a depressed guy, but up until I was 32 (he's 37 now) I had almost crippling anxiety," says Vlautin. "That was probably the reason I drank so much. And I was really shy, too. The combination of those made my outlook on life a lot bleaker when I wrote. I polarize everything, get more dramatic, and I always write songs off that vibe. I always go for the jugular when I write songs."
Willy Vlautin - Richmond Fontaine by CD Forge |
That crimson impulse has never been as close to the skin as it is on their new album The Fitzgerald, a haunting song cycle inspired by Vlautin's hometown of Reno, Nevada. It's a series of vignettes about the people most folks never even see, the invisible ones who clean up all the shit we leave behind us, the toilers in the small hours when most of the world is asleep. What keeps it from being overly depressing are the brief moments of engagement like "The Janitor," which remind us of the strange, clumsy ways love breaks through the concrete we lay to protect ourselves.
"I've always been attracted to guys who fall into the trap of a casino town. It's an easy town to fall into a hole in. I wasted a lot of years just fucking around in Reno," offers Vlautin. "So, it was a lucky thing I got out of there, but at the same time, it's always been a favorite place of mine. I never saw tourists really. I was always attracted to guys who'd moved to the town. You can get a job really easy there. Like my mom said, 'If you showed up sober and had a clean shirt on, you could get a job in Reno.' And it's true. At the same time, none of the jobs pay anything. I think you get a lot of guys who get caught up in gambling and drinking. A lot of my friends have had real problems with gambling where it destroyed their lives. And I've always had my own battles with drinking. You know, I love drinking, but there's a price you pay staying out all night getting drunk. I never gambled as much as I drank. I always worked pretty hard and was scared of losing my money."
Richmond Fontaine is made up of Vlautin (lead vocal, guitar), Dave Harding (bass), Sean Oldham (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Dan Eccles (guitars), and frequent collaborators Paul Brainard (pedal steel) and Mike Coykendall (keyboards, engineering). No one in the band is named either Richmond or Fontaine, even a middle name, so it begs further insight.
"Our bass player used to take long road trips down to Mexico. One time he drove down in a beat up station wagon with a friend of ours, and they got stuck out in the middle of nowhere in Baja. They just camped on the road by the car until someone came a day or two later," explains Vlautin. "The guy that rescued them was an American, an ex-patriot of sorts. He got the car out and took them to his trailer where I guess they threw a three-day party. At the end they woke up, and the guy was gone. They waited around a few hours, but the man didn't return, so Dave and his friend left. That guy was named Richmond Fontaine. When Dave got back, he told us that story, and we needed a band name."
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