Goshen's Trixie
Hot damn. This is cowboy music. And I'm not talking about any rootin'-tootin' Roy Rogers shit, either. I'm talking if William Faulkner was a cowboy poet, these woulda been his words. I'm talking if Bill Monroe had left Kentucky for the high desert and took to playing hot licks on his mandolin, these woulda been his melodies. If James Dean had a singing voice, maybe he'da sounded like Goshen's Grant Hayunga on a very good day.
Not that I'd know real cowboy music from a pair of lame pack mules?I've always considered the cowboy mystique to be one of the more chauvinistic aspects of American mythology, not to mention boring, but Trixie has made a believer out of me. Maybe it's because Hayunga, who is Goshen's front man and mastermind, is more of a metaphysical cowboy than a literal one. As it happens, he's a slightly eccentric artist from south of the Mason-Dixon line who's had a bad case of cowboy lust since boyhood. Hayunga's a RISD graduate from Louisville and when he's not playing slide guitar and singing about girls named Sissy, he's painting pictures of prairie animals, which he dresses in human hair. And despite his being a family man who now lives deep in sagebrush country 30 miles outside of Santa Fe, onstage Hayunga exudes a sexy understatedness more reminiscent of Jim Morrison than Hopalong Cassidy.
Maybe the real reason I can get with Goshen's particular flavor of cowboy is because I'm an elitist?really, this is arthouse cowboy music. Goshen's a soulful hodgepodge of steel guitars, banjos, its stark hints of bluegrass and Dixie?all carefully and self-consciously styled. Don't get me wrong, Trixie is not a self-conscious record per se. Hayunga's lyrics are real, resonating with a kind of degenerate dimestore pathos, conjuring up steamy visions of bourbon-soaked women, drug addiction, fast cars, slow sex.
Sometimes ambiguous, sometimes straightforward, each song tells a story. Sung with a riveting offhand grace, "Sugar Cane" is one of my favorites. It's a haunting tune about a diabolical individual called Sugar Cane who I suspect is the personification of addiction. "When Sugar Cane/Gets back on his feet/You know he's going to be/Tracing you in his sleep? And God helped him through the night/Through all his forsaken days... /Don't make me change my tone/I'm leaving well enough alone.../Till Sugar Cane/Gets back on his feet." "Sissy," on the other hand, is an upbeat number about lost love, pure and simple. "Down to the baseboards with alcohol/Bath salts and perfume/She says was your love for me a play act or a fake.../'cause I felt I was there at the house of your mercy/smoking in the closet."
There's some heavy cowboy cred on this disc due to the presence of the venerable Steve Ripley, lead singer of the Tractors and soundman and guitarist for the likes of Leon Russell and Bob Dylan. Recorded under his direction at his own Church Studio in Tulsa, Ripley helps save Trixie from the pitfalls of an artist trying to get back to his "roots" and lends the record some real grit. Unfortunately, the only place you can get this disc (pending a major label deal) is from Mister Grant Hayunga himself. His address is: Box 353, Glorieta, NM 87535. You can also e-mail him at [filo2001@aol.com](mailto:filo2001@aol.com), or, possibly, you can catch his act if you're on the West Coast?Goshen commuted from NM to L.A. for a biweekly gig at the Mint. Should he play there again, it's definitely worth the ride.