American Bandwagon is an album from 2001. I had returned two thousand miles to a raw piece of land in Texas that I knew was my tomorrow, but I had no idea what that would be, or really, what to do next. All else was left behind me – live or die, going “back to the land” was my destiny and I had to show up for it to happen; I looked at it as returning to the earth to regerminate. I cleared a spot for Blue Moon, a housetruck converted out of a 1972 Ford box van, and settled into the cedars to start building my new life from there, truly the first days of the rest of my life. It started to come out in songs so in the cramped confines of my little ship of freedom, turning the space heater on between tracks, looking ahead to the unknown and out a small back door window to little glistening icicles on a branch, in seven days I recorded this album. Everything – acoustic guitars, bass, mandolin, vocals – was layered on an old Tascam cassette multitrack. You can almost smell the trees and taste the new dawn.
This would have been the album to launch a career if I had been in any shape to launch and if there had been anywhere else I’d have rather been. “Don’t be distracted buy the mountain / it’s only a trail in time / and the wise one with the answers you seek at the top / will be you after the climb”… I wasn’t at the top of anything. I just felt like I had escaped again. This time it would be different.
Tools: Tascam 488, Seagull parlor guitar, old Vega mandolin, prototype short scale “Dragonfly” electric bass I made the year before, and a borrowed Gold Tone banjo. Cheap SM58 copy microphone and Maxell XLII tapes.
1. Intro
2. Hard Land
3. That Kind Of Man
4. Mercy
5. Roadman’s Prayer
6. In To Be Out
7. Not For Sale
8. Leaving
9. Southbound I Ride
10. …And The Road Came
11. Do The Jerk
12. Gone South
13. Outro
All songs by Scott Beckwith ©2001 Parking Lot Music, BMI
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Selected Lyrics:
(Hard Land)
You burn to red and turn to brown
Shovel dirt as the sun beats down
Plan your work and work your plan
Dreams die hard on hard land
(Not For Sale)
My mailbox reached its limit only so much one can hold
Made up my mind I’d done my time – even killers get paroled
Fight amongst yourselves for whatever’s left of this dream that I’d been sold
I’m not for sale anymore
(Leaving)
We kissed and softly said goodbye
Leaving it to destiny and trust
But the miles let our love die to embers
And the time blew those embers to dust
We said she’d follow me to Texas
Who knew I was choosing between
Now there’s no one to blame for my grieving
Should have known when I left I was leaving
(Southbound I Ride)
Sometimes the hunters force you out of the forest
Like a refugee stranded with no place to hide
Sometimes all that’s left is a verse and a chorus
Southbound I ride
(Gone South)
Used to love to ride in that old truck
‘Til one day something got stuck
And it was gone, it was gone
Daddy said the engine went South
Every now and then I’d see something else gone
Some thing that used to be depended on
Another good thing
Given its all and gone South
Like a rusted pile of worn out parts
With a few hard miles and a broke down heart
Some things don’t quit they just wear out
Tell anyone who notices I’m gone
That I’ve gone South