Webb Wilder with guitarist Bob Williams
If you’ve ever stopped for a minute and pondered the history of rock ’n’ roll, you might have tried to solve a problem that has bedeviled generations of musicians. In its original form, rock wasn’t inclined to look at its roots, and nobody cared. Chuck Berry might have imitated the licks of a now-forgotten figure like R&B guitarist Carl Hogan, and Elvis Presley certainly referenced bluegrass and blues tunes. But Berry wrote about the world he knew, which was populated by teenagers who liked to drink Coca-Cola and drive around in shiny automobiles with radios that were tuned to stations playing Chuck Berry records at maximum volume. Worrying about their musical roots was the last thing Presley, Berry and Sister Rosetta Tharpe likely had on their minds.
On his superb new album Night Without Love, veteran Nashville roots rocker Webb Wilder doesn’t answer the questions some musicians raise about the relationship between modernity and history. This is because Wilder doesn’t acknowledge the problem — and sure enough, there might not be one, at least as far as the sound and feel of the music is concerned. Among his many other accomplishments over a four-decade career, Wilder helped invent modern rock in Nashville, a town full of singers, songwriters and pickers who walk the thin tightrope that connects the old with the new. Wilder remains nimble, which makes him a local legend and a national treasure.
Wilder, who has lived in Nashville since 1982, cut Night Without Love over the past four years at producer and multi-instrumentalist George Bradfute’s Madison studio, Tone Chapparal. In every way, Wilder’s latest music builds upon the virtues of his groundbreaking 1986 release It Came From Nashville. That collection found the Mississippi-born singer covering songs by Steve Earle, Hank Williams Sr. and Roy Orbison, and playing tunes written by his longtime collaborator and fellow Mississippian, producer and musician R.S. Field.
Night Without Love’s first-rate production values mark it as a modern album. But Wilder’s devotion to the verities of country, pub rock and British Invasion pop launches it into the timeless space occupied by greats like Dave Edmunds, NRBQ and Alex Chilton.
“I liked The Beatles and The Porter Wagoner Show, and The Beatles kind of gave me the directive that what you did to be a cool artist was to include variety,” says Wilder about his childhood in Hattiesburg, where he was born John Webb McMurry in 1954. Like other Nashville musicians whose tour plans have been interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, he’s taking a break at home.
Wilder tells me he listened to Ricky Nelson and Presley as a young rock fan in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Furthering his education as a future rocker, Field — another music-obsessed Hattiesburg native — fueled his enthusiasm for British Invasion bands like The Kinks and The Who. In fact, Field, who wrote Night Without Love’s title track, moved to Nashville around the same time Wilder did. He looms large in Wilder’s legend: Field helped invent the Webb Wilder persona in 1981, while the aspiring rockers were still living in Mississippi.
Working with a young filmmaker named Steve Mims, who was finishing his senior thesis in Hattiesburg at The University of Southern Mississippi, Field wrote the outline for a short movie titled “Webb Wilder, Private Eye,” which starred McMurry. The sobriquet combined McMurry’s middle name with the last name of his aunt, Montressa Wilder.
“I based my then-shitty plot on an article in Rolling Stone, ‘Claw Men From the Outer Space,’ ” Field says from his home near Nashville. “That had happened in the early ’70s, where these guys who were out fishing in Pascagoula were supposedly taken up in a flying saucer.” In Nashville in the ’80s, McMurry adopted the character as his rock ’n’ roll alter ego, and he’s never looked back.
With drummers Jimmy Lester and Rick Schell keeping the groove clean and simple, Wilder turns Night into a roots-rock master class that revives semi-obscurities like The Inmates’ 1980 pub-rock tune “Tell Me What’s Wrong,” written by that group’s guitarist, Peter Staines. Meanwhile, Wilder makes like the super-Nashvillian he is by covering the late Russell Smith’s “Hit the Nail on the Head,” which he says he learned from The Amazing Rhythm Aces’ 1975 debut album Stacked Deck.
Night goes down easy, like Edmunds’ 1979 Repeat When Necessary and Chilton’s High Priest, the latter of which was released around the same time as It Came From Nashville. Like the work of Wilder’s forebears, Night modernizes pre-punk rock without succumbing to the pull of nostalgia.
“Way back when, if an artist was young and had long hair and the kids were buying it, the suits didn’t care what they were doing on that record,” he says. “They just called it rock.”
