Pitchfork

Everybody stand up. Come on, all of you. Don't worry, I'm not going to make you hold your hat to your heart and sing our national anthem. You're standing-- okay, probably not-- to salute an American folk hero: Woody Guthrie. Indisputably one of our best singer/songwriters ever, Guthrie was the voice for those who didn't have one: the abandoned poor and the hard-working middle class, the despondent and the dreamers. In fact, Woody Guthrie is so historically important that the Smithsonian currently has an exhibit about him, named after his most famous song, the anti-"God Bless America" number, "This Land Is Your Land".

But as the existence of such an exhibit would suggest, Guthrie is a cultural icon only to older generations or the well-informed. The exhibit's video presentation shows how desperately the curators are trying to expose a new generation to his work. The video opens with Billy Bragg praising Guthrie as a "lyrical poet" who brought a personal edge to his socio-political songs. Then comes Billy Bragg & Wilco's version of "California Stars", culled from the first Mermaid Avenue album. Throughout the video, we also hear from Bono, Ani DiFranco, Corey Harris, Bob Dylan, and The Bruce (as in Springsteen). Of the twelve songs on the video soundtrack, only four are actually performed by Guthrie, including a repeat of "This Land Is Your Land".

This attempt to contemporize Woody Guthrie began in the spring of 1995 when his daughter, Nora, approached British singer/songwriter Billy Bragg with over 2,000 sets of lyrics her father never put to music before dying of Huntington's Disease in 1967. She asked Bragg, a politically charged musician himself, if he would like to choose a handful of songs and put them to music. Naturally, Bragg accepted the honor, asking Wilco's Jeff Tweedy to collaborate with him (Tweedy's background in the alt-folk/country/rock group Uncle Tupelo made him a perfect candidate). The result was 1998's rightfully critically acclaimed Mermaid Avenue, named after Guthrie's street on Coney Island.

Between the two of them, Billy Bragg and Wilco had twelve songs left over from the Mermaid Avenue sessions. So now, in 2000, they've decided to issue a second volume, only three songs of which were recorded since the original sessions. Perhaps this explains why the sound isn't much different this time around, and why the songs aren't on par with the previous album. Volume II is like an unnecessary b-sides compilation, and for the most part, there's a reason why these songs didn't make the cut the first time around.

Since Guthrie's lyrics are just as exceptional on this album, ranging from the romantic to the playful to the political, one must look solely at the music for comparison. Unfortunately, nothing on this album is as beautiful as "California Stars", as saddening as "At My Window Sad and Lonely", or as touching as "Another Man's Done Gone." In some cases, the songs on Volume II are the embarrassing cousins of songs from the first album. As an album opener, "Airline to Heaven" gets the foot stomping just as well as "Walt Whitman's Niece", but you can't sing along to it. And in the battle of songs about cultural icons, the plodding "Joe DiMaggio Done It Again" makes "Ingrid Bergman" seem much more pleasant than it really is. What's more, the weak moments here are even less passable than they were on volume one.

Nonetheless, the album does have its high points. Driven by an unvaried, chantey organ straight off Dylan's Time Out of Mind, "Hot Rod Hotel" is a haunting auto-biographical song about Guthrie's dreary jobs as a youth. On "My Flying Saucer" and "Secret of the Sea", Bragg and Wilco use lofty, wandering guitar notes to capture the fantasy in Guthrie's lyrics. On "All You Fascists", Bragg is accompanied by a driving guitar and raucous harmonica. When he belts out, "I'm gonna tell all you fascists you may be surprised/ The people in this world are getting organized/ You're bound to lose," he does so with an intensity that befits the lyrics. And on the final track, "Someday Some Morning Sometime", Tweedy's vocals are perfectly paced with Guthrie's lyricism.

If it weren't for the first album, I might really enjoy Volume II, but as it is, I'm corrupted by the greater artistic success of its predecessor.