Dan Stuart
The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings

It seems like a miracle that he is alive, and it probably seems like a miracle to him as well. His problems with alcohol were already known during the days of Green On Red, and I don’t know how much the stories that accompany the release of The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings in 2012 are embellished — perhaps not at all — and which tell of a tempestuous divorce, a stay in a New York psychiatric clinic, a flight to Mexico, and suicidal tendencies. In any case, Dan Stuart, born in Los Angeles but raised in Tucson, Arizona, is certainly a survivor.

The January 1986 issue of L’ultimo Buscadero (I think there was a profile shot of Tom Petty on the cover, but my memory might betray me) contained the Reader’s Pool 1985, that is, the best albums, films, books, etc., released in the just-concluded year, according to readers. In the 33-rpm section, the first place was shared, ex aequo, by two albums: Gas, Food, Lodging by Green On Red and Raindogs by Tom Waits, both unknown to me at the time. Pasquale, my usual high school companion and a fellow dreamer and adventurer in Rock’n’Roll (whom I now rarely hear from), and I decided to fill in the gaps and buy the two aforementioned records. We drew lots, and he got Gas, food, lodging, while I got Raindogs, which had devastating effects on me, but I won’t talk about that now.

That's how I got to know Dan Stuart and Green On Red, a classic example of a band that was right at the wrong time. Too retro and oriented towards root-recovery for that first half of the 80s, which was still very New Wave, and too early to achieve the success that in the 90s would be garnered by the champions of Alternative Country.

In 1995, having ended the adventure with GOR, Dan released his first solo album, Can o’Worms. After that, there was nothing (except for a collaboration with his friend Steve Wynn for the reunion of the duo Danny & Dusty) until the publication, seventeen years later, of this The Deliverance Of Marlowe Billings, autobiographical from the title since Marlowe Billings is none other than Dan Stuart himself. A concept album, then, released almost simultaneously with a book of the same title, The Deliverance of Marlowe Billings. A False Memoir by Dan Stuart, which describes his life on the road, his loves, and his demons, to which two other novels will follow in 2016 and 2018, always in parallel with as many eponymous albums, Marlowe’s Revenge and The Unfortunate Demise of Marlowe Billings.

The liberation of Marlowe Billings is an album that, in the reviewer's opinion, should be classified under the heading “little masterpiece”. A sincere and painful work, consisting mostly of heartfelt twilight ballads enriched by Dan's poignant voice and excellently played by the Italian band Sacri Cuori, a Romagna band led by Antonio Gramentieri, not new to important collaborations (Steve Wynn, Howe Gelb, John Parish, John Paul Jones, Hugo Race, Alex Chilton, Hot Tuna).

The album opens with a ballad in Green on Red style, “Can’t Be Found,” which tells of his separation and the sad escape from NY, introduced by an acoustic guitar leading into the rhythm section and the lonely notes of an electric guitar and a piano. It is followed by “Love so rare,” a divertissement of a minute and forty-one seconds, practically a merry-go-round jingle. The slow shuffle of the delicate and moving “Gonna Change” is dedicated to the son Dan sees less and less. With “Clean White Sheet” and the irresistible anthem of “What Are You Laughing About,” Dan ventures a couple of times into more straightforward rock’n’roll territories where the rhythm becomes more intense and the air more brimming with electricity. “Love Will Kill You” is another ethereal ballad, almost whispered by Dan’s torn voice, in which the Green On Red reappear, playing a jam session with Howe Gelb in some ghost town lost in the desert. However, the piece finds its highest and most evocative moment in the cinematic and also desert-like and dusty “Gringo Go Home,” a twilight homage to the Peckinpah of The Wild Bunch and the border music, where you can almost smell the biting scent of gunpowder, and hear the clinking of glasses filled with mezcal and tequila. “Gringo go home, before you die”. “Gap Toothed Girl” is simple and vital with a catchy melody that to me recalls the Byrds, a song where Dan tries to free himself from the ghosts haunting him and to find a bit of sunshine. But it’s a moment, for right after Dan serves us another glass of absinthe. “What Can I Say,” poetic and haunting, with a sound tainted by various musical suggestions, in which he confesses, “I can’t go on, I can’t go on…” stating, however, finally, more to himself than to the listener, “I must go on!”. The record closes with “Searching Through the Pieces,” beautiful, full of lyricism with a sound crescendo dominated by the acoustic guitar, piano, and accordion, and with the instrumental “Cetina’s Lament,” dreamlike and minimal, inspired by a lyric of Gutierre De Cetina, a sixteenth-century Spanish poet.

Ultimately, the album that brought Poor Old Dan back from the oblivion he had sunk into for seventeen years. An album written from the heart, by a man fighting against his demons with a fistful of anger and another of aching sweetness to sublimate the pain, regret, to burn the melancholy and set off again. A romantic and brutal album about a man headed towards the next disaster.