For Guy Forsyth, all roads eventually lead back to blues

Songwriter whose Austin music start was at jams and on the streets headlines Kerrville Folk Festival Saturday

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, June 07, 2008

Don't let the Austin music pedigree, the killer voice and the wide smile fool you. Guy Forsyth is a bit of a geek.

Here's the first thing he asks when we sit down at Little City to chat about his new album, "Calico Girl": "You keep a comics blog, right?"

Well, Guy, I used to keep a blog called "What's Good?" over at Austin360.com that focused on comics, but that blog has been defunct for some time. And more importantly, what titles do you follow?

"I am still imprinted on some tights-wearing superheroes that I probably won't ever get away from," Forsyth says. "I'm interested in what (Brian Michael) Bendis is doing with the Marvel titles. Joss Whedon is doing some of the best-written comics I've ever seen.

"I really liked 'Strangers in Paradise'; I really respected the way the creator would not let himself to be put in any one genre," he continues. (Forsyth can talk.) "Which I'm certainly interested in musically. I don't want to be put into any particular genre. Nobody sounded like Muddy Waters before he plugged in; nobody sounded like John Lee Hooker. There wasn't a name for it."

But no matter where Forsyth goes — from the old-timey acoustic music of Asylum Street Spankers to a solo career full of blind alleys to the singing saw and almost psychedelic jams — he always comes back to the blues.

"For me, the blues is a lot more about the way we are hard-wired for certain sounds, like the way we respond when a baby cries or the way a wolf sounds at night," Forsyth said. "I heard in these records music that was totally divorced from the music business and fashion as it exists today. I mean, blues records were recorded for commercial reasons, but Robert Johnson knew that playing guitar was a much better job than, say, plowing. It was a better job, but he wasn't thinking that someone was going to clean up after him."

The notion of cleaning up after people or the desire for a situation where others clean up after you comes up a couple of times. Forsyth uses it as an allegory for, well, a whole lot of things. More on that later.

An airline brat whose dad worked for TWA, Forsyth settled in the Kansas City suburbs for what's known as the formative years. "My folks met at the University of Arizona and owned a lot of the same records," Forsyth said. "My brother and I would get the more beat-up of the two copies. They had lots of Western music. Not country, but Western."

Which meant Sons of the Pioneers, Frankie Lane and Marty Robbins.

"Robbins was such a great singer; that song 'The Master's Call' scared me to death," Forsyth says. (Check out Robbins' immortal album "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs" for the full story.) There were also a lot of Broadway musicals ("I loved those records because those guys could sing! They really understood the instrument") and a box set of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks' "2000 Year Old Man" albums.

But very little pop music. Forsyth's family were big singers, however. "When we took long drives to someplace like Los Angeles or Houston, there would be no radio reception for long stretches of time," he says. "We sang in the car. People are a lot more self-conscious about that now because there's music everywhere. One hundred years ago, you wanted music, you sang and nobody thought twice about it. If someone had a good voice, it was like, 'Hey, that guy's got a good voice,' but it didn't stop anyone else."

After a brief flirtation with prog rock ("when we would make pretend bands, I would be like, 'I'll design the sets!' Big skulls, that sort of thing") Forsyth got into punk ("we would see shows in this concrete bunker that was halfway to Lawrence (Kan.). I still have no idea if anyone owned the thing").

Then two things happened: Forsyth got a harmonica for Christmas when he was 16 and "The Blues Brothers" became a national phenomenon.

"It was my first time seeing John Lee Hooker, Big Walter Horton, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin," he said. "It's an incredible piece of work and so pervasive it reached all the way to the suburbs of Kansas City."

He picked up a James Cotton album and that, as they say, was that.

"Blues was so unlike anything I had ever heard," Forsyth says. "It was different than prog, but also different from punk."

He began going to blues jams at a downtown Kansas City bar. "I snuck into this club that was not nearly as seedy as it must have appeared at the time," he says. "I saw Blind Ray and the Blues All-stars, local guys, really great musicians doing their thing."

Forsyth discovered more and more artists at the library. "It was totally a Spielberg moment," he says. "There's that moment in the library when you turn a corner and there's this wall of vinyl. I was like, 'Does anyone else know this is here?' "

He ended up in Austin in 1990, busking around town: "When I first moved here, I was going to blues jams and playing in the street to make enough money to buy guitar strings to play in the street."

There's more material to Forsyth's career that you might imagine, but he's also had brutal lulls in activity.

He knocked out cassette albums and formed the Spankers in '94; knocked out a solo album called "High Temperature" for the tiny blues label Lizard Records. In '95 he began to work with Antone's Records, for whom he produced an album, "Needle Gun."

Then nothing.

"In the late '90s I couldn't get any traction," Forsyth says. His final two Antone's albums, "Can You Live Without" and "Steak," arrived in '99 and 2000.

Then more nothing as Sept. 11, 2001, did in the entertainment industry for a bit.

In 2005 he released "Love Songs For and Against" on his own Small and Nimble Records. This is where cleaning up comes in.

"One of the great American myths is that of the overnight sensation rock 'n' roller. It's the same as the model discovered sitting at the drugstore," Forsyth says. "Suddenly, you are chosen. Why? Just because. You are the new rock 'n' roll heir and it's not about hard work; it's about waking up one morning and finding out that your mutant power is that you're the new Justin Timberlake."

He shakes his head. "It's a great fantasy, like winning the lottery. We all want that illusion of freedom that comes from having other people clean up after us, a chance to insulate your position to continue to make money at the expense of others making money. But it's a myth, and I don't want to wait for that." So he started a label, produced another album, a double live one in '06. "It's so evident that the time is now. I don't want to miss it, I don't want to mess it up, and I don't want to wait for someone else to fix everything for me."

The new CD, "Calico Girl," features sharp re-recordings of most of the material on "Can You Live Without" in addition to a couple of new songs. As he notes on the loopy vamp "Where'd You Get the Music?," "These songs have been recorded before and they're available on iTunes, but none of that money gets to me." (Texas Music Group, the home of Antone's Records, did not return calls for comment.)

Yet, he insists it's not a political record.

"It's not aimed at anyone, but it says things that people want to hear," Forsyth says. "The reason I've continued to sing these songs is that I really want to communicate what they say, and they're songs that people request. I value my own identity as a positive person, so the album is about maintaining your optimism and realism at the same time."

Which, of course, points right back to the blues. "That music is a medicinal response to really difficult times," he says. "It's not complicated and it's the type of efficient it takes someone who is really tired to be. It's a music that says, 'Don't worry, let's play.' Of course, that's a little manufactured because you have to start worrying at some point."

Then we talk about comic books some more.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926