Vintage Review: Pete Berwick's Ain't No Train Outta Nashville (2007)

A few years back, legend has it, a young punk rocker followed Jason Ringenberg’s trail out of Illinois and sojourned to Nashville with guitar in hand. This young man, like so many before him, was looking for fame and fortune in the Music City. He wrote the right songs, worked the right clubs and played the game like everyone told him he should but, tho’ not for lack of talent or ambition, he found naught but heartache in the hallowed home of country music.

This young man found a manager, a silver-tongued fool who talked a good game but did little to advance his career. The young man recorded an album full of fine songs that nobody got to hear. After years of trying, he found himself beaten, bruised and battered, chewed up in the gears of a star-making machine that has little regard for talent, heart and soul; pissed off and pissed on, this young man left town and went back home, leaving Nashville that much darker and less interesting a place…

Like too many faithful, Pete Berwick found that there ain’t no train outta Nashville. Hundreds of hopefuls flock to the Music City each year, and for every Tim McGraw or Faith Hill that finds fame, there are dozens that return home to Illinois, Oklahoma and points beyond, leaving behind their dreams and a piece of their soul. How many future Hank Williams or Patsy Clines have been denied the city’s embrace after spending years traipsing up and down Music Row, how many have given up their musical ambitions in the face of indifference and corporate ignorance?

In Pete Berwick’s case, there’s a happy ending to the story. Unlike many who give up music altogether after suffering through the traumatic experience of trying to make it…whether in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles or wherever…Berwick refuses to go quietly into that good night. Five years ago, when the urge to create new music became stronger than the beatdown he took in the Music City, Berwick wrote the songs that became Only Bleeding. A powerful album that seamlessly mixed rock and country with punk attitude unlike anybody since early Steve Earle or Jason & the Nashville Scorchers, Only Bleeding was a defiant message that Berwick’s Nashville experience may have left him bloodied, but definitely unbowed.      

After the release of Only Bleeding, Berwick spent a year or so banging it out on the Midwestern circuit, playing smoky clubs and funky honky-tonks before once again retreating from music. However, the muse is hard to deny, and Pete starting thinking about the “lost” album that he had recorded back in Nashville in ’93, the one that nobody got to hear. Taking it down from the shelf and listening to it with fresh ears and the benefits of hindsight, Berwick decided that it was too good a bunch of songs to let go to waste, and I agree with him.

Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville is a brilliant collection of hard-knock tales that reveal the Music City for the provincial small town that it remains in spite of its big city ambitions. These songs are about the lovable losers and hopeless dreamers that flee their one-horse towns every year to go somewhere, anywhere else in search of something that will break them free of their lives of quiet desperation. Although written a decade-and-a-half ago, these songs still resonate with truth and beauty and are just as true today, in the face of corporate homogenization and the “American Idolization” of music as they were when Pete wrote them between his shift at the car wash and “writer’s night” at some Nashville club. Although the words here apply to many nameless travelers going down that same road, I suspect that they are also more than a little autobiographical.   

Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville kicks off with “Rebels and Cadillacs,” a rowdy rave-up with scorching guitar and honky-tonk piano that brings a traditional edge to this blistering portrayal of musical hypocrisy (perhaps more so than when Pete first sang these words). He decries the MTV star “with a diamond ring and a pure silk scarf, singing his concern about the homeless man,” adding “I couldn’t help but notice his Acapulco tan.” Over at CMT you’ll find “more of the same, some talking hat with a common name, singing a song about the poor man’s blues, while turning on the heel of his snakeskin boots,” the singer boldly declaring that “I don’t want to be no rebel in a Cadillac.” With this opening song, Berwick has staked his turf, drawn a line in the sand that is pure punk attitude with Hank Williams’ twang.   

“Six Pack Town” is more than a place, it’s a state of mind as well, the sort of place that people try to escape from to “find” themselves. Berwick’s description of the town as a “stop and half on the road from nowhere” is deceptive because although “there ain’t nothing going down,” it’s still home, a place where people know their neighbors and care about their neighborhood. “Six Pack Town” is working class, small-town America, the kind of place that produces soldiers and singers, dreamers and madmen…the kind of place that people have a love/hate relationship with, the kind of place that never leaves you, even when you’ve left it behind...

“The Years We Left Behind” is one of the most brilliant and moving songs that these ears have heard in nearly 50 years of listening to, and loving music. We’re every one of us getting older, and facing down a half-century of frustration, unfulfilled promise and lost opportunity brings with it the tendency to reminisce about “the good old days” that, to be honest, were mostly anything but good. Wise beyond his years, Berwick sings:  

“Everywhere I go these days, it seems I always hear;
People talk about desperation, heartache and despair.
The broken-hearted dream that died, the memory from the past;
The good old days, the glory days, the love that didn’t last,
And the childhood that disappeared too fast.

Sometimes at night when all is quiet, and I am all alone;
I hear the voice of yesterday through people I have known.
Some are laughing, some are crying, some of them have died.
I always thought the grass was greener on the other side,
I guess that’s why I can’t kiss the past goodbye…”  

“Time doesn’t wait for no one,” sings Berwick on the chorus, declaring that “it’s not patient, it’s not kind; it seems to me we see the future only through our eyes so blind,” concluding that “we’re living in the years we left behind.” Pete’s insight is both poetic and bleakly realistic – we can’t escape our past, no matter how hard we try, and our future is just the sum of the experience and heartache that we’ve lived through. None of us is unblemished by the past yet, when facing our inevitable mortality, we hang on to those memories like a life raft as the minutes tick by ever more loudly. Berwick addresses these concerns with dazzling beauty:  

“When nighttime turns to morning, still I’m clinging to the past.
I want to stop the clock some times, those hands just turn too fast.
I don’t want to get old; it’s a shame how fast time flies.
If heaven’s what we’re living for, then someone tell me why,
Why no one, why nobody, wants to die?”

You’d think that after a stroke of musical genius like “The Years We Left Behind,” that Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville would flicker and burn out from lack of energy. No, Berwick has lulled us into a warm, quiet remembrance only to kick us back awake with the jolting “Devil Knows His Name,” an eerie, Western-tinged tale of betrayal and escape. If the protagonist of the earlier song finds comfort and solace in his memories, the figure at the heart of “Devil Knows His Name” is trying to outrun the nightmares of his past. Washes of haunted instrumentation flow through the song like a tumbleweed until the guitar explodes and the song fades into an uncertain fate…

The album’s namesake, “Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville,” tells the story of every hopeful songwriter and singer that ever made their way to the Music City in search of something to build a life upon. With the lyrics set to a swinging rockabilly beat, the song’s truth lies beneath Berwick’s tongue-in-cheek delivery, the words summing up the songwriter’s experience. Describing a staggering blur of beer, cheap motels, bad jobs and dashed hopes, he sings, “I play most times for free, and sometimes I just play to eat.” There’s no way to escape intact, “once you’re here, you’re here to stay, if you’re a songwriter, they just throw the key away.”

The hauntingly beautiful “Only Bleeding” ties Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville with its predecessor and it fits perfectly well on either album as both recordings, in their own individual way, are primarily about the continued chase of fame in the face of constant rejection or, worse yet, lack of recognition. Displaying the same sort of defiance as Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” Berwick’s Midwestern drawl sums up the intense loneliness and the darkness felt by every songwriter and poet in the face of indifference. The song’s protagonist is an almost divine figure, shouldering the sins of everyman and offering salvation through his own pain, as expressed by this, and every other song that touches upon the bleak fate that befalls us all, from Springsteen’s “Darkness On the Edge of Town” to Joe Grushecky’s “Blood On the Bricks.” In the end, however, by forgiving those who would sin against him, the poet triumphs against those who would try to silence his or her words.   

Fittingly, Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville ends with the one-two punch of “Rusted Ball and Chain” and “This Used To Be A Town.” Berwick searches for answers on “Rusted Ball and Chain,” finding nothing but more questions. He reaffirms his commitment, however – to life, to love, to music – singing “freedom’s just another word, if you ain’t got a dream. Without a dream, your freedom, it just don’t mean anything.” And for those who doubt his efforts, he adds, “people try to put me down, and throw me off my track, but I just keep on keeping on, there ain’t no turning back.” Roaring down the lost highway in that ghostly Cadillac, Berwick is in it for the long run and won’t be dissuaded by the obstacles that are thrown in the path of every creative person. While others would give up with a whimper, this singer carries on regardless of the weight.

In the end, the singer does escape, getting out of Nashville only to go home and discover that “This Used To Be A Town.” The memories of the past have been betrayed by the unrelenting march of “progress,” the kind of small-town development that tears down the past to rebuild every town in the image of every other town. “Time bulldozed it away, built a couple of malls, and they both look the same,” he sings, “don’t they realize the childhood that died when they tore it all down?” It’s an uneasy commentary on the state of America, a sad exclamation mark on the old saying that “nothing stays the same.” It’s also a down song to end the album on, reinforcing, perhaps, the idea that you can’t escape the past, so you may as well embrace it, protect its innocence lest somebody comes to take it away.      

The best album of 2007 was actually recorded in 1993 and, surprisingly, it was so damn far ahead of its time that it sounds as fresh, dynamic and topical today as it would have fourteen years ago; maybe more so. Too rock & roll for Nashville’s taste, too country for the coasts, Pete Berwick has nevertheless been on the verge of his “big break” for almost two decades now. Luckily, it hasn’t kept him from making great music. Ain’t No Train Outta Nashville is proof that you can’t keep a good man down, and if you ain’t listening to Pete Berwick, then you ain’t listening to shit… (Shotgun Records, released 2007)

Review originally published by Trademark of Quality (TMQ) blog, 2007

Vintage Review: Pete Berwick's Hell To Pay (1995)

Pete Berwick has been plugging away at the Nashville country music establishment for a number of years now, tragically too hard a rocker for their delicate sensibilities, too country to fit into any alternative rock straightjacket. He just keeps writing songs, though, good ones, too, full of heart and soul and fire. Hell To Pay slaps a handful of these tunes onto one demo tape that, if anyone in the industry had any ears (or balls) would get Berwick the major league try-out that he deserves. I’d be willing to bet that he’d hit it out of the park on the first swing, with cuts like the jaunty “Hell To Pay” or the striking “I Ain’t Him” good for at least an extra-base hit.

The brilliantly wicked “Rebels and Cadillacs” pisses on the entire entertainment biz with a few choice verses while “Vacancy In My Heart” is a spirited, rollicking recounting of love lost. Berwick’s material bristles with attitude and passion; stick him in a studio with a sympathetic producer and watch the ol’ boy kick the shit out of not only those Music Row cowboy wanna-bes but all those faeux punk rockers, as well. In a music world mostly comprised of watered down whiskey, Berwick is the 200 proof real thing. (Shotgun Records, 1995)
 
Review originally published by R.A.D! Review and Discussion of Rock & Roll zine, 1995 

Vintage Review: Pete Berwick's Only Bleeding (2002)

Like many a troubadour before him, Pete Berwick made his way to Nashville in search of fame and fortune. Also like many artists that walked that same road, he ended up returning home years later without much fame and even less fortune. Berwick did all the things expected of an artist in the Music City, playing his songs at “writer’s nights” in local clubs at night and working a day job at the car wash while waiting for his big break. He signed a songwriting deal with a storefront publisher and hooked up with a fly-by-night indie label. What seemed like a sure thing, a track placed in the River Phoenix movie The Thing Called Love, came to naught when his manager lacked the juice to get the song included on the soundtrack album.

After his Nashville fiasco, Berwick moved back to Chicago, older, wiser and just a little worse for the wear. He gave up music for a while, playing sporadically and writing a few songs. Luckily, the story doesn’t end with this tale of dashed hopes and broken dreams. The attraction of the muse is a strong one, and I’ve personally never met a serious artist who could be kept away from their creative outlet for long. Berwick gathered a group of grizzled Chicago rock-and-blues veterans to record one song in the studio; they ended up recording Only Bleeding, a ten-track reaffirmation of the power of rock ‘n’ roll, and a fresh start for Pete Berwick. A fiercely independent songwriter and performer who has found that he doesn’t need the corporate label system to make a musical statement, Berwick’s fourth album is the accumulation of almost a decade of artistic trials and tribulations.
      
Only Bleeding showcases all of Berwick’s various influences and incarnations, the songs mixing rock, country, and blues in the creation of a heady musical elixir. “Must Think She Loves Me” and the hilarious “Nuclear Boy” are energetic, punk-tinged rockers while “Cold Steel Gun” is a barroom weeper complete with T.C. Furlong’s delicious steel guitar and Berwick’s appropriately morose vocals. With the biker anthem “Outsider” Berwick has created a new musical genre – “metallic country” – the song a defiant declaration of alienation that matches Nashville twang with tasty power chords. The title track is a Dylanesque country blues tune with wonderful vocals, Berwick’s mournful mouth harp work and well-placed piano courtesy of Denny Daniels. The album-closing “Standing At the Gates of Hell” is a lively rocker with brilliant imagery, the story of a poor working class loser who dies and shows up “at the gates of hell” only to find that they won’t let him in. It sounds a lot like Jason & the Scorchers – another obvious influence – but with Berwick’s Rodney Dangerfield-like lyrics and dynamic delivery it’s a wonderful pairing of roots-rock and honky-tonk soul.    

It’s with “Gotta Get Out of Here,” the centerpiece of Only Bleeding, that Berwick hits that once-in-a-lifetime adrenaline O.D. where decades of rage and frustration are expressed perfectly in a three-minute rock song. In the tradition of Eric Burdon’s “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Jackson Cage,” the song is about hopelessness and dashed dreams and, in a more personal vein, the torment of being a talented musician in a land of mundane mediocrity. When Berwick sings “I got a daytime job, teevee at night, if the boredom don’t kill me, then the cigarettes might,” he’s expressing the fears of every factory worker, slaughterhouse grunt and service industry wage slave who suspects that there must be something more to life. For Berwick, the song itself is an act of transcendence, its performance “getting” him out of here, his tortured vocals and screaming guitar allowing the artist a brief moment of escape. It’s a powerful musical moment, a solid example of why most of us started listening to rock ‘n’ roll in the first place.

Berwick sees the world of human relationships and frailties with a folkie’s sensitivity and writes about them with the poetic blue-collar perspective of a Steve Earle or Bruce Springsteen. A gifted songwriter and charismatic performer, Berwick is a true rock ‘n’ roll survivor, an artist of integrity and vision who never even stood a chance in the industry babylon that is Nashville. Only Bleeding offers an eclectic mix of styles that defies industry homogenization to deliver a strong and thoroughly enjoyable musical experience for the listener. Pete Berwick has been singing his songs for a small, if faithful audience for far too long; with Only Bleeding, people will be forced to listen. (Shotgun Records, released 2002)

Review originally published by Alt.Culture.Guide™, 2002 

Vintage Review: Pete Berwick's Give It Time (2011)

I dunno, just when I think that this whole promising alt-country thing has run its inevitable course, someone comes along to renew my faith in the ghost of Gram Parsons. Singer/songwriter Pete Berwick has been walking that ‘Lonesome Highway’ all by himself for more years than he’d probably care to add up, but in the hallowed tradition of Hank, JC, Gram, and all those other cosmic troubadours that ran afoul of Nashville’s corporate Music Row and decided to just do the damn thing their way, Berwick continues to amaze and astound with each new collection of songs.

I’m proud to say that Berwick is a friend of mine, and Peter knows me well enough to know that I’d call bullshit if he dared to deliver anything short of greatness. No worries, ‘cause Give It Time is his latest, a near-perfect melding of country and rock music, Berwick channeling the reckless energy and boundless enthusiasm of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley in creating an album that leans heavily towards the punk side of the cowpunk equation, the singer and songwriter sounding as pissed-off and proud as any nineteen-year-old. After decades suffering the indignities and insults of the music biz, Berwick remains a streetwalkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm, and with Give It Time he’s once again rolled the bones and come up with snake-eyes.

The album-opening “Renegade” is a defiant statement of purpose, an outlaw credo delivering with an unimaginable fury that is as hardcore punk in spirit as anything that you’ll hear from either the punk-rock or alt-country crowd. With unbridled guitars chomping at your eardrums, syncopated rhythms and fierce vocals deliver the (autobiographical?) tale of living fast, dying young, and leaving behind a burned-out corpse. Berwick slows the pace only slightly for “I Keep Waiting”, an unabashed rocker with a heart of gold, swirling guitars and bash-crash rhythms creating a disconcerting wall of sound on top of which Berwick lays down his whiskey-soaked vocals and one of the greasiest, most fulfilling guitar solos you’ll ever hear. In the distant background, Jason Botka’s honky-tonk piano-pounding sounds like the din creeping out of a back-alley barroom.

“Won’t Give It Up” is another crucified rocker that displays Berwick’s deft touch as a wordsmith, the song’s blistering soundtrack pumped up by Berwick’s non-stop verbal barrage. Shaking a bloody fist at the record-making establishment, Berwick spits out muscular lines like “you wanna see scars, I got ‘em”; “the world don’t care if you live or die, one man laughs while another cries”; and “gotta make a stand for something, ain’t settling for nothing”; and “tell me are you really satisfied, do you think that it’s too late to try, maybe for you but not for me…I won’t give it up!” Nashville’s star-making machinery may have turned its back on Berwick and his fellow travelers on the fringe of “polite” country music, but this is one hombre that ain’t going down without a fight, not while there’s still one last breath and a chance to spit in authority’s face.

Even the ballads on Give It Time (“My Heart Is On Hold”) rattle and clank like rusty machinery beneath the weight of the songwriter’s angst and frustration. Berwick imbues the song with so much heartache and anguish that you’ll bury your head under the bedcovers for a week if you approach the tune without caution. None of the songwriting-by-committee that creates many of Music Row’s hits these days comes anywhere close to expressing the sort of emotion and fire that you’ll find in “My Heart Is On Hold,” the song’s conflicted protagonist turning his back on love to venture off into the uncertain badlands walked by lonesome wanderers from Ricky Nelson and Dion to Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle. To lighten up the load a bit after better than a half-dozen mind-numbing exercises in seriously heartfelt songwriting, the humorous rave-up “Beer” is a cleverly glib ode to that golden-brown honky-tonk beverage favored worldwide.

Berwick is an outlaw and outcast by choice, not by marketing, and the magic displayed by “Falling From the Circle of Love” shows that he can write commercial country fare with the best of ‘em…hell, better than just about any of them, really, and some smart label suit could score a big hit for one of his artists with this elegant love song. That would make ol’ Pete a bundle of well-deserved cash, and besides, nobody is going to do the song better, Berwick’s leathery vocals standing in stark contrast to the song’s elegant construction and Botka’s wonderful piano-work. “The Sadness In Your Eyes” is another fine romantic moment, kind of bittersweet and tear-stained but evidence of the deepness of Berwick’s talent, a Dylanesque ballad with sweeping grandeur and finely-crafted lyrics that, again, in the right hands, could earn the songwriter a truck full o’ cash and accolades. Berwick’s breaking-heart delivery could never be equaled, however, his weathered vocals balanced on the edge of tears, accompanied by female backing harmonies and a filigree acoustic guitar solo that is simply outstanding.

Ten songs in, you figure that Give It Time has run its course, and you’d be as wrong as you could be to overlook “When”. This epic stream-of-consciousness rant is Berwick’s “Eve of Destruction”, his “Jungleland”, his “Positively 4th Street” all rolled into one massive, monster, six-minute-plus song. “When” opens with a spacey, almost psychedelic guitar-driven intro before Berwick’s battered acoustic chimes in and the vocals jump off… “how long must we wait” Berwick screams towards the heavens. “As the road goes on and on, how will we know when we are there?” he asks, “time is a deceiver that’s got us in its grasp.” Hell, Berwick throws out enough ideas, concepts, and questions in this one tune to fuel six or eight other songs. Man’s longstanding philosophical conundrums are echoed in Berwick’s existential “how long must we wait?” In this case, though, the song only gets stronger, louder, and more strident as it rolls along, Berwick’s tone growing in urgency, his questions more potent, his anger and frustration more apparent as the instrumentation swells to a cacophonic assault. It’s like Berwick’s brain busted open and all the shit that’s been mugging him for years comes pouring out in one powerful, uncensored blast of white light/white heat. In the end, no answers are to be had, just a song that is rock ‘n’ roll at its core, and the nagging, enduring final question “how long must we wait?”       

A lot of pundits have spilled a lot of ink (and electrons) talking about the end of the music industry…well, Pete Berwick is dancing on the graves of all those Music Row naysayers, and with Give It Time he takes the D.I.Y. aesthetic to an entirely different level. There are few artists that will create an album this personal, this emotional, and this powerful in this year, or any other for that matter…the kids on the indie-rock tip just aren’t ready and willing to reveal themselves so openly, no matter what little lyrical clues they send their audience. Give It Time is the real deal, though, a postcard from the edge from a middle-aged country-rocker who has looked into the abyss and stomped all over his inner demons, doubts, and frustrations to emerge on the other side even stronger and more pissed off than before. Let’s hope that Berwick continues to make music as engaging, vulnerable, and potent as that on Give It Time, ‘cause dammit, the man is speaking for all of us who want, and deserve something better from our entertainment than Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts. (Shotgun Records)

Review originally published by Blurt magazine, 2011