I'll admit it: When I first read about Clay Ruby and James Toth's Zodiac Mountain project, I steered clear. The descriptions presented by the two made the group out to be some sort of ZZ Top/Skynyrd Southern Rock thing. "Cool," I said, "Good for those guys! They're spreading their wings and exploring new avenues on their musical map! I'm not buying any of those CDs." Deep Fried Boogie ain't really my thing, you know? But a few weeks back, I read that Ruby was hitting town with Wooden Wand and they were to play a set as Zodiac Mountain. Being the absolute Davenport freak that I am and never having seen Ruby in any configuration live, I made the quick jog to the venue (read: "totally a bar") to catch him. I didn't really care if I was about to see some bastardized attempt at Marshall Tucker; I just wanted to meet Clay Ruby. However, the set was a complete surprise. It was merely Ruby and his guitar covered in buckets of fuzz; drugged singing over slide guitar. It was gorgeous and enveloping. I had a genuine experience on a wet night in a tiny dive bar with the utterly confounded regulars. I loved it. It was nothing like I'd expected. I immediately got everything they had with them by Zodiac Mountain (as well as an album Ruby put out under his own name); ready to right the mistake I'd made by not trusting the man. Talking to him after the show, he punched me in the SOUL when he informed me that the decision had been made to put Davenport to rest. That I truly couldn't believe. How could he do that? Davenport was, in my opinion, the darkest, most intense, most brilliant group of the CDR underground and in its short career produced several of the most vital albums of modern American psych-prefixed music. To commemorate the death of the 'Port, here begins a trilogy (maybe, like, a... pentalogy if I get my hands on the initial Zodiac albums that came out a few months back, Come and Gone) of reviews chronicling the inaugural phase of Ruby's post-Davenport work.
So, does this album live up to the set I saw? No. But it does do something else: Confirm my inital Boogie suspicions. To a degree, at least. The Toth-supplied description that evening was "It starts out like ZZ Top and ends like Keiji Haino." Well... It certainly starts like Top but it ends more like... Davenport in drone mode. And, thankfully, the dynamics of the album are plural and not a single arch. The album is only 5 tracks strectched across nearly 70 minutes; obviously Live in America is predominantly drone-centric. Opening and longest track "Shake" runs nearly 25 minutes and starts excruciatingly Top-esque. Even Ruby's signature unintelligible vocals can't save it. His inflection loses its standard melodic chant in favor of Gibbons imitation. A beer bottle can even be heard breaking a few minutes in. Luckily, the rote copy soon gets pushed to abstraction as we all knew it eventually must, having the length and, more importantly, players it does. Drums go clatter, guitar goes scree but retain a hint of Top. It all coasts to a stop. "Talkin' Blues" is the shortest track and closest to what I witnessed stylistically but is probably the weakest song here. It's 6 minutes of overly simplistic beats and genuinely uninteresting guitar licks. "Unholy Medicine" is straight guitar drone; no drums, no vocals, no interest. The drone is merely to simple; nothing going on. "Shamen Noodle (Pts 1 & 2)" is the strongest track. It features Maya Miller of Double Leopards on organ. It starts with a slow-build drone reminiscent of Miller's full-time gig that's riddled with creepy vocals that eventually crests with how Ruby and Toth should always be interpreting their Roots. An insistent single-note bass throb carries spidery guitar figures; Ruby's vocals are characteristic and the whole thing gets shot with a heavy dose of Spacemen 3-style euphoric repetition. "I Know You Rider" closes the album out with the boys trying their hardest to bring the Heavy Boogie but to no avail. The drums are manic and the the guitars are masturbatory with no voices in sight. They lose you on their quest to project themselves to 1977 and keep their buddies from ever stepping foot on that Convair 240.
Live in America is spotty but what can you expect from a live album by an improvising Dixie-Drone three piece? Something interesting is definitely flitting around in the headspace of Zodiac Mountain but this record only rarely allows it to come forward. They're at their best when droning, when staying true to their decidedly psych pasts, and when not trying too hard. Stretched to album length, the highs contained on Live in America could be a genuinely amazing album but the album falls victim to itself; it is, after all, a live album and comes with all the stereotypical pitfalls. Luckily, it's the weakest of what I got that night.
