Sparked by tragedy

Musician Sam Baker finds inspiration in dark reaches for final piece of trilogy.

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, October 17, 2009

Sam Baker lives in West Lake Hills, in a cedar-colored cottage of his own design, near the base of a half-dozen transmission towers that soar hundreds of feet in the sky. He loves it when the storms come, when lightning flickers in the clouds above the towers, when the wind whistles and whines through the support cables. It's eerie, beautiful, electric.

"I love these towers," Baker says with a cheerful, slurry drawl, glancing at the red-and-white spires in the light of a blazing summer afternoon. "Some people feel uneasy around them, 'cause it's like living beneath lightning rods. But I think of them as sculpture. They're like lighted masts, these red-lighted masts.

"When the winds get high and the lightning strikes, there's an odor in the air. It's different. And there's a sense that the world has been made fresh, that it's been made clean again. I think of lightning as the great purifier — this fire, this voltage, that clips the edge or our world. And sometimes clips us. It's violent, beautifully violent. I'm intimidated by it. But I'm also truly drawn to it."

Sam Baker — singer, songwriter, artist, architect, carpenter — feels life vividly, intensely, and he throws himself open to receive as much of it as he can bear. He has made it a point to hang no curtains in his house, as to allow as much light into his life as possible, as to minimize the partition between bedroom and nature. The man is fiercely and finely attuned. So, too, is his music.

Baker's albums flicker with immediacy, with electricity. They are spare, naked, poetic, downright arresting in their lyrical and musical intimacy. His debut "Mercy" — self-released in 2004, the year Baker turned 50 — is one of the great albums of acoustic music released in Texas this decade, the first album of a three-record trilogy of delicate, devastating story songs backed by steel guitar, octave violin and cello that ripple with trauma and transcendence. Baker creates music that can knock the emotional wind out of you, music that compels you to sit down and feel.

As he hangs out in his backyard, popping open a cold beer after a full day of house painting, Baker remarks off-handedly that making an album is a lot like running a river — the secret is in feeling the flow of the water, in staying true to "the emotional line" of the current. Baker knows what he's talking about.

"Sam's music is so honest, so uncompromisingly honest and poetic, that it just threw me for a loop the first time I heard it," says Baker's friend Gurf Morlix, the esteemed Austin producer, songwriter and guitarist. "I just couldn't believe this was coming out of a middle-aged man who I'd never heard of before who lived in my town.

"Sam's albums and his songs sound timeless to me, as if they could have been written by someone a thousand years old. He's connected to the universe in a way most of us will never know. And I think that comes from him having died, you know? He's the only person I know that died and lived to talk about it. You don't come away from that with nothing."

A mercy

Sam Baker did die, almost, while traveling in Peru in 1986. He had just boarded a four-car train to Machu Picchu and began chatting with a family of German tourists when the passenger car exploded as it sat in the Cuzco station. A terrorist had placed a bomb, in a red backpack, above Baker's head in the storage compartment.

The explosion ripped a hole in the roof of the passenger car. There was blood, smoke, shrapnel. Seven people died — including the German family and their blue-eyed teenage boy sitting directly beside him. Baker was thrown upside down by the blast. The bomb blew off the top of his shoulder, maimed his arms and hands, bruised his brain, severed the femoral artery in his left leg. After Peruvian doctors sutured his contaminated wounds, Baker developed gangrene and was sent to a hospital in Lima.

"Really, I should have died in Peru. I should have died in the train. I should have died on the operating table," says Baker, his voice soft, reflective. "I would lie there in that hospital in Lima and really smell myself dying. The infection was giant. And it stunk. It smelled like rotted chicken."

Eventually, Baker and a second injured passenger from the Cuzco blast — a little girl named Monica — were flown out of Peru on an emergency U.S. military airlift. Baker remembers Monica fell into a coma and "coded out" shortly after they took off. He remembers a feeling of stress and urgency and exhaustion all around him. And yet ...

"It wasn't stressful to me because I was dying anyway. I wasn't in pain, really. I was in this gauzy place. The infection at that time was so wild, I was past the point where stress matters. If someone killed me I was mostly there anyway."

Baker spent the next several weeks in San Antonio and Houston, undergoing painful debridement procedures in which doctors cut away the dead tissue around shrapnel. After the wounds healed, he spent the next three years in recovery — learning how to use his body again, learning how to use his brain again.

"When I got hit in South America, I was a white-water boatman and a carpenter. I was certainly not a hedonist, but more 'of this world.' There were rivers. There were mountains. There were things to build. And they were right there before me. The wind blew and I blew with it," says Baker, a native Texan, raised in Itasca. "After that, those doors were closed, those windows shut, and I couldn't walk for a long time. I couldn't hear. And there for a long time I couldn't remember words. I'd had a subdural hematoma. So I couldn't remember the words for 'fork,' or 'knife.' I would have to say, 'That thing you eat with.'

"I think this started an inward journey for me. My body seemed so unfamiliar. Once my hands were blown up and my leg was all blown up, I guess I didn't know myself. And that is such an internal thing, to re-learn who I was: what my hands were made for, what my legs could do."

Baker's inward journey led him deeper into reflection, deeper into art. He wrote as a form of therapy, found familiar comfort in music. He took up photography. Art allowed his spirit to wander when his body couldn't tolerate trips of the physical kind. Yet when he moved to Austin in the early 1990s, Baker didn't come to work the clubs. He went to work in a bank.

For the longest time, Baker couldn't see music as a vocation. His singing voice lacked range, he knew that. The bomb blast had left him deaf in his left ear and with chronic tinnitus in his right ear. Baker's left hand was so badly shattered that he had to re-string his guitars and teach himself how to fret with his right hand.

But in 2002, at age 47, he played his first open-mike night at the Cactus Cafe — and he began to accept, at last, that the authenticity of the song was more important than the range of his voice.

Journey

Eighteen years after the train blew up in Cuzco, Sam Baker — little-known middle-aged singer songwriter from Austin, Texas — released his first album. It was called "Mercy." At its soul, Baker's album is about fate, about the sensation of being "blown away." The characters in Baker's songs are in turn blown away by loss, by love, by fate, by a looming war, by fallibility, by recklessness, yes, by a bomb blast in Peruvian train station.

"Mercy" is a masterpiece of tone, of mood, of pacing. Baker is not a classic "singer," but he treats his songs authentically, as one knows in the most brutal way the sensation of having the breath knocked out of him. His singing voice is a little haggard, a little slurry — think Rickie Lee Jones — yet very much in awe of the larger, unexplainable forces of mercy.

"For the most part, the characters in my songs, me and my characters, we know what it is to get thrashed," says Baker, sitting behind his house, long gray hair flowing down his back, his jeans flecked with paint from a day's work. "We're still all nervous about getting thrashed again. We've actually, conscientiously, tried to avoid getting thrashed."

What's harder to convey, in writing, is the overarching intimacy of "Mercy." It's a pretty record. Baker's folk melodies are supported with cello and octave violin and steel guitar, giving the record a little bit of a chamber feel, as well as a solitary, western feel.

Baker thinks of "Mercy" as a collection of atonal story songs — little movies backed by instrumentation that feels like film scoring. It's a good description.

"Intellectually, I knew his songs were great from the moment I heard them. But on a personal level, I was deeply moved," says Austin musician Walt Wilkins, who co-produced Baker's first two albums. "What Sam writes about — and where he writes from — is completely universal."

After the critical success of "Mercy," Baker thought in longer terms — wanting to release two more albums, similar in tone and instrumentation, that would comprise a reflective trilogy. As "Mercy" was about fate, his newly released "Cotton" is a sophisticated record about forgiveness and forgetting. "Pretty World," released second in line in 2007, is in fact the final installment a message of gratitude.

Baker's artistic temperament shines on all three records. He not only writes the songs — but also photographs the cover art work, designs the albums, selects the typeface and paper. The albums look united — black-and-white image on white paper, very clean, very spare. The ordering of songs is meticulous. "Mercy" and "Pretty World" are albums that unfold in three distinct, four-song acts. Baker is very careful in the way he steers you through his music.

"J.D. Salinger said that writing a novel is like driving in a really heavy fog, and that's what has guided me," Baker says today, three albums down the road. "The fog was heavy. I couldn't see very far. And I made the whole trip that way.

"In a fog, I believe you've got so little a sightline in front of you that faith in the next step is more important than belief in the greater course, the greater path. I believe in 'the next step.' "

Electricity

Sam Baker is so right. Those giant transmission towers that soar into the sky behind his Austin home? They do cut the sky like ship masts. And the long support cables that drape down from the towers and fasten to the rock? They look just like mast lines, the sturdy cordage of a great earth ship.

It's hard to see those towers simply, literally, ever again, once you see them through Baker's eyes. Looking skyward, watching the clouds blow past the forward masts, you have the distinct sense that you're moving, that this rock-and-cedar hilltop is the deck of the Central Texas earth ship, that you're sailing free, in high wind.

"We live in paradise," Baker likes to say, looking at the color, the light, the laughter, even the heartache and struggle that surrounds him in a given moment. "This is Eden."

"Someone asked me, once, how I could write 'Pretty World' (his great song of gratitude). And I said, 'Easy!' If I'm not in an ICU, pumping blood, with people not dying all around me — that's pretty nice!' Just us, sitting here in the wind — that's a 'Pretty World.' "

Baker's life seems rich with possibility, rich with creativity, especially now that his musical trilogy is complete. When he's home, Baker paints every day in an airy studio space where the easels are draped with funky Christmas lights. In a rush of creative enthusiasm, he's been producing a lot of minimalist portraits in chalk, oil, pastel — using vivid colors, a lot of yellow — and then producing meticulous black-and-white photographs of those works. It's a wonderful study in the power of imagination: one constant image, two dramatically different pieces of art.

Baker clearly wants to grow for a while. It's possible he might take a left turn — and leave music completely. His friend Wilkins thinks Baker has a great future as a visual artist. "I'll be shocked," he says, "if Sam doesn't have an installation up within the next year."

But it is dusk now, and there's a summer storm on the horizon. Sam Baker and a friend — a painter named Andrea — are sitting behind Baker's cottage, watching lightning flicker in dark clouds to the north, miles and miles beyond those great blinking transmission towers.

Slowly, slowly, the clouds roll closer toward the ship masts. A faint wind whips through the mastlines. It makes a high, thin, bending sound: Sheeeeooo. Sheeeeoooo. A bolt of lightning, closer now, leaves a jagged mark in the night sky. Will the storm reach us? Will it pass?

In the darkness, in the gentle and electric night, Sam Baker and his friend lie flat on their backs on the rocks behind the house, looking straight up at the spires and the clouds and the sky. It's been a hot summer. Maybe, just maybe, he'll feel a drop of water fall on his face.

"OK," says Sam Baker. "Let's see if there's a storm."

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967