WRIT IN BLOOD Rainer Ptacek
Jun 20, 2011
A new archival release featuring backing from members of Calexico finds the late Tucson guitar maestro staring down the tumult of life and death.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
Speak with almost anyone from Tucson's fertile music scene and eventually the name Rainer Ptacek will come up. Despite his passing in 1997 at the age of 46 following a second bout with brain cancer, Rainer (talented enough to earn the first-name-only sobriquet) still casts a long shadow over the music community in Tucson and in some "musicians-musician"-circles far beyond its desert surroundings.
But nowhere was that shadow longer than in the Giant Sand/Calexico universe. For Howe Gelb, Rainer was friend and mentor, a guitarist and songwriter with an equally idiosyncratic blues-and-country rock vision informed by the heat, sand and cactus of the local terrain. Together they formed Giant Sandworms in the late ‘70s, which later morphed into Gelb's Giant Sand collective.
Coming piecemeal to Giant Sand but forming its best-known lineup, drummer John Convertino and bassist Joey Burns - now the brain trust of Calexico- joined Rainer in July and early August of 1997 at the Barrio Viejo home of journalist, author and activist Bill Carter to record these deceptively casual tracks. At the time of this recording, Rainer was in remission, having survived the stroke-like collapse and memory slate-cleaning that announced the brain cancer, the chemo and radiation, and the long hours spent relearning his own music and retraining his mind to understand what his fingers wanted it to do.
Rainer would spend the time between his initial February, 1996 diagnosis and treatment, and the recurrence that eventually killed him in November, 1997, putting down some of his most affecting music. In addition to this summer date with Burns and Convertino, he recorded what many consider his masterpiece, Live at the Performance Center, a stunning solo gig on the eve of his last birthday (June 6) in which every track seems a pathway to new guitar-genius territory.
He also appeared on The Inner Flame: The Rainer Ptacek Tribute, the Gelb-curated disc to raise funds for the insurance-less Rainer's staggering medical bills. The respect his peers had for Rainer is manifest in the lineup, which featured among its tracks Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, P.J. Harvey, Vic Chesnutt, Jonathan Richman, Evan Dando, Emmylou Harris and Madeleine Peyroux. Then, shortly before his death, Rainer recorded The Farm (eventually released in 2002), his final sessions before the disease forced him to put down his beloved National Steel forever.
So, then, Roll Back the Years, a victim until now of timing and circumstance, released by Rainer's widow with the assistance of archivist David La Russa and audio wizard Jim Blackwood (www.RainerMusic.com, www.rainer.bandcamp.com). Because of the release of his live date, and later The Farm, these songs wound up on the shelf for 14 years. (Three of the songs - "The Farm," "Oasis," and "Hard to Remember" - would appear on The Farm, a hint that perhaps this one was meant to be permanently shelved.) And while Roll Back the Years features Rainer and a combo, the music is not to be confused with Rainer & Das Combo, Ptacek's power-blues outfit of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (1993's The Texas Tapes featured an uncredited but prominent collaborator: ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons).
Burns and Convertino had recorded with Rainer prior to this date (a clutch of songs for 1995's DYO Boot, for instance, and a version of Stevie Wonder's "Pastime Paradise" released posthumously on 2000's Alpaca Lips), and they slipped right into their rock-solid sidemen roles here, sometimes with first-take succinctness. With Rainer exclusively on dobro or his National Steel resonator, Burns' acoustic bass and Convertino's brushed skins nudge the pace where it needs to go and then get out of the way while the bottleneck and finger-picking magic - a blend of Ry Cooder-blues and John Fahey-folk-meets-Mississippi John Hurt-finger-picking prowess -- takes place.
The songs range from chooglin' blues-rock ("My Honey"), boogie-woogie ("Now I Know Better") and traditional acoustic blues fare ("Tenish") to the desert-baked shuffles ("Roll Back the Years") and instrumental explorations ("Di Latin") familiar to the Giant Sand/Calexico songbooks. Sung in Rainer's Dylan-like nasal register, the songs nevertheless convey a wide range of emotion. Of course the narratives carry the specter of his diagnosis with them, but there is also urgency, appreciation and unbridled joy coursing through them and his nonpareil playing - the tumult of life and death, illness and remission, writ in blood and lived in visceral real-time.
Rainer encapsulates all of those conflicted feelings over the jaunty beat of "Hard to Remember" when he sings, "Sometimes I can't remember/the reasons why we're here at all/then it hits me, hits me like a big jolt/comin' straight into my brain/that the only reason why we're here/is to love away the pain."
It's a spine-chilling moment, one of many on a dusky gem that reminds us what an underappreciated Rainer meant to fans, blues-guitar geeks, fellow musicians, and friends - both as an extraordinary player and a humble, kind friend and family man.
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