Ryan Bingham
Mescalito

There is an America that I love and at the same time hate, a bit like Peter Fonda who in "Easy Rider," wasted and embracing the statue in the cemetery, mumbles: " How could you make yourself so hated...... you never loved me ... let me love you ... how much I hate you ... I loved you ... and you are so stupid, mom!". It's the America whose "civil progress" is in the car that crushes the old cowboy Cable Hougue in the film by Sam Peckinpah, in the frontier dust that envelops the lives of young John Grady and Rawlin in the novel by Cormac McCarthy, in the intertwined and cursed destinies of Pancho and Lefty in the ballad by Townes Van Zandt.

Now it's also a bit of the America of this boy, Ryan Bingham, who can't hide his twenty-five years despite the voice roughened by nights spent sleeping in the dampness of the family trailer following rodeos up and down Texas. The jukebox in his uncle's bar provided him the "raw material" for inspiration during nights spent with his guitar slung around his neck, and his skill earned him a weekend gig in a ballroom in Stephenville.

And here he is, Ryan, with no sycophancy like the homonymous Adams, dressed in the same worn jeans as Willie Nelson and Billy Joe Shaver, and for his debut on the long-distance record he enlists characters of the caliber of Terry Allen and Joe Ely, who are a guarantee of absolute authenticity.

The production by Marc Ford, former guitarist of the Black Crowes, ensures that modernity that so pleases us listeners who have never frequented rodeos or roadhouses and dream with open eyes of a bivouac along the riverbanks. The first track is enough to fall in love with the album, and the harmonica opening "Southside of Heaven" gives way to a ballad that recalls our hero Steve Earle with mandolins and banjos seemingly unwilling to work until the splendid sonic progression finale. It's still not enough because Marc Ford's slide insists on southern accents in "The Other Side" and in "Bread and Water" where the ghosts of Professor Skynyrd's students dance wrapped in the old Confederate flag. The poignant acoustic calm of "Don't wait for me" and "Long way from Georgia", with the beautiful voice upfront, should not deceive: Ryan with "Hard times", where Ford's dark slide is again prominent, and especially with "Take it easy Mama" lays down the old filthy rock and roll that the Stones have been dispensing with full hands for decades, and with "Boracho Station" he is dangerously close to the booze-hound Mark Lanegan who crossed the Rio Grande. And in "Ghost of Travelin' Jones", he pays homage to the great country ballads of master Terry Allen, who honors him with his voice reminding him never to be ashamed of his origins.

So Ryan isn't ashamed to title and angrily sing a song "For What it's Worth" just as the Buffalo Springfield did forty years earlier, when that America seemed it could be a benevolent mother to all the captain Americas and Billys traversing its roads on a chopper, a trailer, or a colored Volkswagen bus like that of the Merry Pranksters.

And so it is not out of shame that on the cover Ryan Bingham hides his face under the cowboy hat, but simply because it doesn't matter to show it, it could be that of one of the magnificent losers like Cable Hougue or John Grady, of Pancho or Lefty, and it would be the same.