XL COVER STORY

Musical adventures in Wonderland

Guitar in hand, Carolyn Wonderland connects with an honest, impassioned wildness of the heart

By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, June 05, 2008

When Carolyn Wonderland holds an electric guitar and feels the taut, steel strings against her fingers, she connects with a beautiful wildness. The shy inner child disappears, carried away on some gritty, good-time chooglin' blues train of positive musical energy. Wonderland concedes she feels something spiritual when she touches a guitar — a sensation like Reiki or the laying on of hands.

"I don't like giving it a name. But it's like becoming attuned to a study of feeling," Wonderland says softly, a little reluctantly, fearing she might be misunderstood. "Sometimes the best prayer that I have to offer on a given day is to share what I can play. ... There's an intention I put with it: May the 'spirit of good' go through what I do. Let the music be the vessel. Then get out of the way."

Wonderland feels the spirit in the best John Coltrane tradition. Have you had a chance to see her live? She's been singing and playing in Austin for more than 10 years now — drawing from the well of blues, rock, soul and gospel at places like the Saxon Pub, Antone's, Maria's Taco XPress, and yes, even at the Erwin Center, where she frequently jams with the University of Texas band during basketball games.

There's a bit of Janis Joplin in Carolyn Wonderland. You can hear it in her soul-cry vocal style, see it in her let-it-all-loose, fronds-of-red-hair-flying stage essence. But there's some Bob Dylan in her, too, for she's one of the most socially and politically active voices in the local music scene. She's played for anti-war protesters in Crawford; headlined the "Million Musicians March for Peace" in Austin; and even managed to get herself arrested at a downtown anti-war demonstration in the first week of the Iraq war.

Wonderland is no diva. At the Saxon Pub, she'll hit the stage in blue jeans and a subtle blouse, topped by a zippered-cotton sweatshirt. She's 35, with no major record label ringing at her doorbell, struggling week to week to pay the rent. Yet Wonderland is quietly acknowledged as one of the most selfless and authentic musical souls in town. She's taping her first Austin City Limits segment tonight. Dylan himself has sought her out and struck up a friendship; they've jammed together several times.

"Carolyn is phenomenal," says Ray Benson, the front man of Austin's venerable swing ensemble Asleep at the Wheel and the producer of Wonderland's fine new album "Miss Understood." "When I see her on stage, I think of Stevie Ray Vaughan meets Janis Joplin, plus. I mean, I met Janis Joplin. I saw her play. Carolyn is a better singer than Janis. And she plays guitar. And she writes great songs. And she's not afraid to work her butt off on the road. ...

"I'm amazed that she wasn't recognized for her talent long ago. But sometimes the long road is the only way for truly original people."

The pull of music

Carolyn Wonderland has been her own woman for a long time. Growing up in West Houston, she'd sneak out of the house at the middle of the night and hang out in Montrose rock and blues dives. There was a sense of artistry in her escape. She'd tip-toe to her Volkswagen Rabbit and let it roll downhill for a hundred yards or so before turning the ignition and hitting the lights — so her parents wouldn't notice her leaving the house.

Wonderland's father, who was raised in Chile, would sometimes walk into Carolyn's room at night to find a note on the pillow explaining she'd skipped out to hear Screamin' Kenny and the Sidewinders in some smoky bar. Her parents grounded her, repeatedly. But Carolyn's mother, Kathy, a special-education teacher from Waco, knew all about the pull of music. She'd once played guitar and fronted a band of her own. Carolyn's grandmother, from Corsicana, had been a champion fiddler. There was no arguing with destiny.

In 1988 — when she was only 15 — Carolyn Wonderland was invited to step on stage and trade a few songs with the poet laureate of Texas singer-songwriters, the late Townes Van Zandt. She was in a joint called Locals, a man named Cat Daddy behind the bar, peeling white paint on the walls. It was after-hours, maybe three in the morning.

Wonderland had never heard of Van Zandt. But boy, she thought, those tunes do sound familiar. "Listen to this guy and his cover songs," she thought to herself, sitting next to him on stage. After Van Zandt played "Pancho and Lefty" — everyone in the bar singing along — Wonderland said she liked that song, that her mother used to sing that song, years ago, when her mom used to play the bars around Bellville.

"Why thank you," Van Zandt said. "That's one of my better tunes."

"You (flipping) liar," she said. "You didn't write that."

The man named Cat Daddy called out from behind from the bar.

"What do you think, Townes? Do we throw her out now?"

But Van Zandt just laughed kindly, then passed the guitar to the pink-haired girl beside him. "Play me another one of yours," he said to Wonderland.

Twenty years later, Wonderland sighs, then scolds herself, as she remembers the brass and certainty of her youth. She's self-effacing to a fault today, to the point of dismissing one of her best songs (the 2001 version of "Feed Me to the Lions") as "some clinkity-clink woe-is-me piano thing." Wonderland is clearly shy about her appearance, insecure about her talent in relation to her musical heroes, but that doesn't get in the way of her quick wit. ("I was born in Webster, between Houston and the water, where you have the most beautiful sunsets because of all the petrochemicals," she says. "It's a very cheap version of the northern lights.") Over a long, lunchtime conversation at Taco XPress, Wonderland riffs on subjects ranging from Joseph Campbell to world history to her long-held affinity for Herb Alpert. (Wonderland played the cornet as a child and still uses a trumpet in her live shows.) She tends to talk fast. Her laugh is a giggle with a lot of vibrato in it.

Wonderland's literary and historical frame of reference is impressive for a woman who dropped out of Langham Creek High School at 17 to pursue music full time, promising her father she'd go back to school if her life in the arts didn't turn out. "I always sang growing up, but I did not want to be a 'chick' singer," she says, fire in her eye, describing her beginnings in music. "I wanted to be the guitar player.

"I didn't wear makeup. I always wore big concert shirts. And at that age, I could have easily been a dude; it didn't matter. And I think that's why I played so well in the biker bars, too, because if anybody did think of me as a chick, they thought of me as a chubby kid sister. Nobody gave me any guff, and that was nice."

Wonderland moved to Austin in 1993, "maybe '94," and found a spiritual home at Antone's. She put out several independent records but didn't get the big break. While recording her CD "Alcohol and Salvation" in 2001, Wonderland lost her apartment lease when her landlord fell ill, and she decided to live out of her van for a while.

Two years later, she was still living in her van.

"I did not consider myself homeless," she says. "I prefer to say I was van-able. I figured why should I spend so much money on the rent when I could just be on the road anyhow." And at that time, she was playing 300 shows a year.

Wonderland brought a certain artistry to Van Life. Home base, a lot of nights, was the parking lot behind Ray and Shane Hennig's music store in South Austin. But every once in a while, she'd call ahead and make an appointment to park in a friend's driveway for a night or two. And then make another call, and move again. She'd volunteer to do laundry or clean house in exchange for a shower.

Some nights, Wonderland practiced a refined form of Dumpster diving at Whole Foods. "They're very good," she says with a smile. "A lot of cool grocery stores don't lock the Dumpsters. They put the good food on top. The trash is on the bottom. You got a pallet's worth of cardboard, then day old pastries, old oranges: It's totally edible." At any time, she could have called Houston and come home to her parents, but her pride was too strong. She didn't want to say, "You were right; I couldn't pull it off after all."

"I guess (in the end) the experience taught me to be a little less scared to be musically naked," she says. "As in: It's OK to show up and just do a gig with my guitar if that was all that would happen so I would get to eat each day. I came to realize: 'OK. I can do that. ... ' "

The call of peace

Wonderland's career in social and political activism began at Langham Creek High School in 1989. She helped organize a lunch-hour "walk-out" — students left campus, assembled across the street — to commemorate the bravery of the Chinese protesters who had risked their lives during the Tiananmen Square massacres.

"We didn't miss class," she says defensively. "We skipped a meal, together, and sat outside. That was it." Even so, young Carolyn Bradford — as she was known then — was suspended after the media showed up and brought attention to the event. (And yes, she says a little later, some kids did skip classes after the demonstration.) She soon dropped out of school, but not before making speeches on behalf of a more lenient dress code at district school board meetings in Katy and Spring Branch.

Twenty years later, Wonderland's passions still run deep. Her CD "Bloodless Revolution," released in 2004, is her most focused statement of social conscience — an album of songs addressing pollution, consumerism, poverty, violence and war in Iraq. "Welcome to my dream," she sings on the title cut, imagining a day in which we "opened up our eyes, threw blinders to the sides (and) for the first time in our lives acted out of love not fear."

Wonderland has paid a price for her pacifist sentiments while traveling on the road. She's been slapped and spit on, had a drink thrown in her face, received threatening e-mail. "There was one night in Louisiana," she says. "Our drummer wore his 'Arrest Cheney First' T-shirt. And I swear, I didn't know if he was going to make it out of the bathroom during the break."

Like many in Austin's music community, Wonderland was heartbroken by the "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. It's no surprise that she lent her support to activist Cindy Sheehan's peace movement and played shows at the Crawford Peace House. But Wonderland also has visited disabled veterans. "Go play in a VA hospital," she says, "and you will hear more honest dialogue about peace than anywhere else."

"I think people are just beginning to realize who the enemy is, that the enemy is within," she says a little bit later, while munching chips and queso at Taco XPress. "Now I wish we could turn off our televisions for a minute and consider the possibility that everyone in the world is trying, that we want the same things. Everybody has to eat, everyone wants shelter, everyone wants to feel love. ... "

Wonderland's latest album, "Miss Understood," is emblazoned with "make love, not war" graffiti — but the music within has a more introspective feel, designed to showcase the breadth of her musical interests (Tosca strings, country ballads, soul shakes) and featuring some of her most nuanced writing to date. "I Live Alone With Someone" is a stand-out tune, a beautiful slow burn of a blues that riffs on the idea of separation. The barbed-wire song was born while Wonderland was on tour in the Netherlands. Leafing through her Dutch-English phrase book, she flipped to the "intimate conversations" section and saw the phrase: "I Live Alone/With Someone."

All the same, Wonderland cannot conceal her strong social and political passions — as songs such as "Bloodless Revolution" and "It Ain't Nobody's Fault But Mine" continue to dominate her live sets. At the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar, Wonderland brings the room to tears each year with her delicate, almost whispered rendition of John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)." ("I really believe this song is going to be ironic next year," she said in December. "I really do.") Yet she also performs on behalf of food banks and soup kitchens, on behalf of homeless shelters, and yes, (like Willie Nelson) on behalf of the legalization of marijuana.

"Carolyn has very strong beliefs," says her friend, steel guitar player Cindy Cashdollar. "In the same way that she's committed to her artistry, she's also committed to community and to causes. Some artists cherry-pick their favorites. But Carolyn does every one that she possibly can."

The feel of strings

Ten minutes before show time, Carolyn Wonderland sits with her band on the little porch outside the Saxon Pub and listens to the spring rain pound the roof above her. It's a chilly, gloomy night. Wonderland drags on a cigarette, nervous and apprehensive, knees drawn up under her chin, clearly worried that she might not measure up for the night's show.

But inside, when the lights dim, Wonderland straps on her Gibson Les Paul guitar — "Leslie Pauline" — and commands the room in the company of her power trio. The people in the crowd are so jazzed they roar in appreciation as she fires out several bars of warm-up riffs. You know that woman who was just outside, the one with the timid, little-girl face? She's long gone now. And in her place, Carolyn Wonderland launches into classic Bob Dylan:

"Throw my ticket out the window; throw my suitcase out there too," she sings, in a voice that embraces the notion of refuge after so many miles of hard road. "Throw my troubles out the door. I don't need them any more. 'Cause tonight I'll be staying here with you."

Wonderland sings in a way that we might imagine she's addressing a waiting lover or her two friends on the bandstand. It could be she's addressing music or her muse. She could be addressing Dylan himself or the friendly faces in the crowd.

What's beyond speculation is that the woman on the bandstand truly feels what she's singing and playing on the guitar. She feels life in the strings. And as the crowd roars in appreciation, Wonderland bows her head shyly as if she's never heard applause before in her life. Watch her; it happens every time.

"She'd better learn to get used to it," Cashdollar says. "Because that acclaim is only going to get louder."

bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967

Carolyn Wonderland plays 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. Friday at the Nutty Brown Cafe, 12225 U.S. 290 West. $7. 301-4648; www.nuttybrown.com.

On the Web: www. carolynwonderland.com