Released 1984
Trail Of Tears
Fire From Heaven
Sleepers Awake
Gilbert Takes The Wheel
Ghost On The Road
Watusi Rodeo
Why DoThe Heathen Rage?
Pillow Talk
Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (Part 1)
Kumbayah
We were walking through the square one day in Marietta. It was the Fourth of July, and they were having a festival or something - a gospel group was singing something that sounded like "walking in the shadow of the big man" (John Poe, quoted in SPIN, 1985)
"Sun hangs low in the Western sky" shouts Murray Attaway, "I bow my head and I remember now - someone's lips pressed close to mine, her cool hand upon my brow." The chords are crashing around him.
Guadalcanal Diary always made a lot out of African imagery. The cover may depict a pair of Africans in some kind of ceremonial garb, but the music always evokes for me wide open plains - Texas? The Veldt? Maybe they're all the same ("Watusi Rodeo" would have it so). The songs drip with Southern Gothic. "Trail Of Tears," with its images of lonely war widows and weary soldiers ("Two girls wait at the railroad track/For their soldiers to come back/Knowing this will be their last") and figures of death recalls that old Twilight Zone episode about the Civil War dead parading past the house of a lonely widow. It's as full of mystery as the centuries-old cowboy songs it evokes.
Attaway was obsessed with ghosts and the realm of the spirit. "Fire From Heaven" uses a mournful, Byrdsy stomp (emphasis on STOMP!) evokes loneliness and despair and the turning to higher powers ("All the power of heaven, no moon on nights like this"). The picture may never be clear, but its a bleak one. "Sleepers Awake" is even more ominous, with its images of "dusty eyes" and its mournful tone. The sun is going down. No moon on nights like this.
A ringing guitar, more whomping drums and a stomping chorus, "Gilbert Takes the Wheel" an instrumental evocative of "Emotions" from Love's first album, may actually be my favorite track on the album. Like all great rock records, it makes perfect sense, transitioning the eerie spirituality of "Sleepers" into the sordid ghost story of "Ghost On The Road", a surf-like tale of loss, death and ghosts, as a man cruises the highway, night after night, looking for the ghost of his lost love: "Driver never sleeps, engine never slows, they say he'll stop one day and look back to see a girl who waits by the bend".
One side of ghosts and phantoms and dark religious imagery. In the wrong hands this would all be potentially pretentious, but what makes it work is the band's overpowering roots/rockabilly/folk/surf attack. Back in the day, people always compared Guadalcanal to R.E.M. (both Georgia, both jangly). But, aside from some ringing chords and superficial vocal resemblance, there was no comparison. GD had a sheer drive and power to their music - Attaway's furiously strummed rhythm guitar driven by John Poe's whomping drums (one review called them "ridiculously overmixed", but I think they sound great). Over it all the estimable Jeff Walls played lead guitar that would have done any band proud, and he and Attaway wrote better songs than the Athens crew ever dreamed of.
Side two shows the band's other side. GD was always possessed of a sly, often silly sense of humor their records never caught (for this, you had to see them live - they were an extraordinary live band). "Watusi Rodeo", the story of a cowboy seized by a flying saucer and dropped off in Africa, where he now herds water buffalo, is pure psychobilly heaven. "Why Do the Heathens Rage" is more of Attaway's strange religious obsession, and minor, except for the band's full-throttle delivery. But "Pillow Talk", a kind of updated Everly Brothers song, the tale of a jealous man with a sleep-talking girlfriend who "mention(s) every guy in town but me" during her somnambulistic oratory, is a gem. Another, lesser instro bridges "Pillow Talk" and the big finale.
See, I never went to camp. Never was a scout. I bailed on Sunday school at the age of five. So "Kumbayah" was unknown to me when I first heard this record at age 19. Hilarious that I, even then a muso extraordinaire, should be unaware of a song seemingly everyone else in the friggin' country knows by heart. Guess I missed out. Anyway, starting from its choked-chord opening, "Kumbayah" builds into power chord paradise as the band hit the choruses harder and harder, the sheer drive of its sing-along catchiness and the power of the playing become overwhelming. Recorded live, as they hit the "someone's shouting lord - KUM-BAY-AH!" verses you can hear the audience shouting back with greater and greater fervor at each turn. I saw the band nearly half-a-dozen times in the 80's, and this was always their encore, and every time, even when we knew it was coming, it whipped the crowd into a near holy-roller fever (my favorite rendition included a mid-song segue into "Stayin' Alive" before roaring back into campire-land). As an album closer, its genius.
Guadalcanal Diary made three more albums, this time for Elektra. All were enjoyable but none captured the fever the way Walking, all dust and mad southern preachers and ghosts, did. But they bought their into heaven with this one.
