Bill Fox: Shelter from the Smoke (Scat)

From our own, Mr. Jim McHugh:

“I wasn’t hip to this when it first dropped [in 1997 via Cherry Pop, and quickly thereafter, spinArt], but I wish I had been. Bill Fox would’ve helped assure us, earlier and in real time, about the milieu and aesthetic this album illuminated, for sure, but should’ve helped to define: the 90’s lo-fi ‘Lone Auteur’ thing — typically arch as hell and too unctuously well-read, with all its elitist cult-of-genius micro-celebrity towing in kind a bourgeois sensibility and lame career-arcing intentions, which became nearly as damaging as the resultant releases across the decades. 

Powered as it was by individual notions of classic consumer-grade music and equally insular ideas of how the great records were made — refracted thru rarified homemade prisms into something nearly-new — the late 80’s and early 90’s songwriter (first at home, and as time and the music industry shifted, in studios) gave us shit-tons of albums reminiscent of totemic music, but rarely monumental themselves. Often pretentious, precocious or strident, sometimes just fine yet fashion-page fleeting in their appeal and/or oozing audible privilege of the ‘nanny-nanny-boo-boo’ type — but very seldom great. Shelter From The Smoke is GREAT for reasons worth taking a deep dive.

Recognizing specific foundational LP’s can make them more endearing — aspirational, even. F’r’instance: Guided By Voices is often called the Beatles to The Grifters’Stones and that’s the elevator pitch, but Bee Thousand’s beautiful econo anthems go upside your head even harder when you learn Bob Pollard’s aim was to recreate WHO’S NEXT in his Dayton basement. The chesty echoes of Daltrey are funnier and more charming, and land less like pick-up lines, while Pollard’s prolificacy makes perfect sense when viewed through that ‘Arena Rock in Miniature’ lens (but Bee Thousand rules from spin one, as it fizzes senselessly and shoots from the bottle — tinny sticky LSD-pop messing up your head). 

 Cleveland’s Bill Fox clearly loves Leftist and Appalachian Folk Music, and everything that communicates cleaves through these nimbuses of tape-noise and the Ohio ‘weird rock’ tradition and the heartland guitar hooks and the articulated Lennon-like sneer offers a fire-axe through speaker-cables. It also insures an outgoing benevolence that those 90’s records often sorely lack; it’s not ‘all about the sole brilliance of me, thank you please’ — a sentiment central to the shittiest ones— but rather it’s about us and the hardships that bind us: me and you; him and her him; those in the factory and those in the field; those alone in their apartments with their nearly-warm recording gear. 

This disc was a classic in every classic way: Fox, in a snit, broke up his popular garage band The Mice and made a set of idiomatic folk-rock on his Tascam using mostly acoustic guitars and his voice, but also his thigh as a drum when he needed. The clarion sincerity of his trad blue-collar bent makes for music devoid of all No Depression-style gingham-and-pearl-button playacting and its stock-in-trade of genre-trappings, barely understood.

Also redolent are all Byrds versions and Big Star (whose Tennessean Southernness is an underrated aspect of their output) and every so often a treble-blasted band appears comprised of brother Tommy and other Mice. The sheer variety of sounds, all home-recorded, keeps Shelter bounding along across two LPs; each passing song adds to our sense of the urgent link here of form and function— of why he recorded these songs alone at home — and any intimation of mere ‘style’ or, worse yet, ‘stylishness,’ is gone by Side B. The brash hissing and flash cuts and roughshod construction have us fully believing Bill when he spills some beans like ‘I’ve been bussin’ it down the coast, you’re the woman I need the most’ and rather than looking for dials to turn, we prepare for the end by flipping for Woody’s Struggle, Cisco Houston’s take of ‘I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore,’ some Peter Laughner acoustic boots, any Ronnie Lane ballad on any Faces record, or the Dylan alb with ‘Where Are You Tonight (Journey Though Dark Heat)’ and this, my people, is among the highest praise I could give.”