Music
By Chris Parker
Playing April 25 at Mercy Lounge. photo: Susan Alzner
Ed Hamell is the kind of guy who’s willing to get his hands dirty. Though short, bespectacled and carrying an acoustic guitar, Ed Hamell isn’t your typical overwrought singer-songwriter type. No, Hamell, or Hamell on Trial as he bills himself, has a hard-boiled, straight-talking style cadged from the pages of Raymond Chandler by way of Lou Reed’s no-nonsense delivery. Born in Syracuse, N.Y., Hamell’s built a 15-year career on his entertaining, hard-strumming guitar style and scathing, piano wire wit.
“High school honed my wit, because I was a short kid and I went to a tough school. I got into a lot of fights, but I would try to avoid them as often as I could, so my verbal skills got pretty attuned,” Hamell says. “It’s just where I grew up was a really blue collar town. There was no bullshitting those guys.”
While playing in local bands, he worked at a local bar that doubled as a cocaine den. (“We were just making sure our clientele would come back,” he cracks on his new album, Songs For Parents Who Enjoy Drugs.) Frequented by small-time hustlers and local Mafioso, those characters and their exploits provided inspiration for the criminal noir tales (“When Bobby Comes Down,” “When Destiny Calls”) that would dot his catalog when he started playing solo.
After releasing a couple of albums for Mercury Records in the mid-nineties, Hamell ended up on Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe for 2003’s Tough Love. It features some of championship wiseass Hamell’s most scathing rants, from his broadside on our celebrity-shilling culture, “Halfway,” (“It’s insulting your pretense of integrity / Take the movie’s name, tattoo it to your labia / Spread your legs for the camera, what difference would it make?/ I mean fuck it, why go halfway?”), to the war-bashing “Don’t Kill,” in which God asks, “was it the ‘Thou’ part that threw you? ‘Thou’ means ‘you.’... ‘Shalt not’ means ‘don’t.’ ”
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Hamell’s latest release is even more shaped by politics, as well as the growth of Hamell’s son, Detroit, (named in deference to Hamell’s abiding love of classic Detroit rock acts the MC5 and The Stooges). The two come together on the track, “Values,” which draws a parallel between Hamell’s son and the president, inverting the old Democrat-bashing Republican theme. Over a light strum, Hamell relates his son’s growing resistance to authority, culminating in a playground fight over toys.
“When I tell my son he has to share,” Hamell sings, “he says, ‘I’m an isolationist. That kid made me really fucking mad. I don’t need him or NATO, God chose me. It’s fate.’ Values are tough to teach a child when the president’s gone completely wild.”
Hamell’s vitriol finds an even better match in conservative commentators, whom he assails mercilessly on “Coulter’s Snatch.” Using the same kind of outrageous, outsized rhetoric and personal attack on which they make their money, Hamell sings, “Ann Coulter’s got one stinky box,” suggesting, “Let’s engage her in debate/ Let’s make her deny it.” He concludes with the warning, “You take the low road/ I’ll take the lower road/ You’ve met your match.”
“Subtle really isn’t my forte,” Hamell says with a laugh. “Obviously I’m really fed up. I try to be optimistic but I see some of the revisionist history. Like Ann Coulter saying maybe McCarthy wasn’t all bad. And I’m thinking, ‘Really?’ ”
But the album’s funniest and most poignant song is album-opener, “Inquiring Minds,” which contemplates a source of angst for every parent—just how much of your youthful indiscretions should you share with your children when they inevitably ask?
“That was the conversation my wife and I had,” Hamell says. “She said, ‘I’m going to tell the truth. I made mistakes; this was not a good thing to do.’ And I thought, ‘I’m just going to lie.’ ”
Given Hamell’s colorful background, it’s not surprising he was concerned. Still, he tackles the subject with characteristic bluntness and humor.
“Dad, did you ever do it with any woman besides Mom?/ Did you ever see that Fellini movie, Satyricon,” Hamell sings. “Dad, did you ever steal from the store when you didn’t have the bucks?/ From what I remember most of the stuff just fell off of trucks.”
Ironically, over the course of recording the album, Hamell came up with an answer to the question that initially inspired it, thanks to Ani DiFranco and her boyfriend, engineer Mike Napolitano, who worked on the album with him.
“Mike said, ‘I’m going to tell my kid, a lot of the drugs we were doing at the time, like cocaine and ecstasy, we didn’t know there was a downside when we started doing them, and now a lot of my friends who did them are in jail or dead. So now I don’t do them because it became brutally apparent to me that these aren’t good things to do,’ ” Hamell says. “I thought, that’s a sensitive and truthful kind of response.”
While he’s a little loathe to admit it, Hamell wouldn’t mind if his son were to follow in his footsteps, and take up the guitar like he did as a preteen.
“I wouldn’t want him to be a musician full-time unless he had the passion for it, because it can be tough and very discouraging in a number of different ways. You really have to love it so much the other stuff doesn’t matter,” Hamell says. “But it’d be cool if—not unlike skiing or playing golf—his hobby was playing drums and he and I could gig. Then we could pal around forever.”
He’s jumping the gun a bit—his son’s only 3 and still a decade removed from his rebellious teens—but if Woody can beget Arlo, what’s to prevent Hamell from spawning his own rabble-rousing progeny?