Watching Bill Mallonee perform solo one evening at Eddie's Attic in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur, it's hard not to conjure obvious comparisons to his two heroes, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Peering out from his round glasses and down over the harmonica rack dangling from his neck, he regards the audience with a beatific smile and strums his way through another verse.
"And some will shake off the sloth of faithlessness," he sings, stomping his foot in a staccato marching cadence, "while others simply languish in their sleep. Me, I just fight to stay awake. Yeah, I've always had this black cloud over me."
Packed tight to the edge of the stage in this intimate, acoustic club that's been home to the Indigo Girls and Shawn Mullins, most of the crowd nods along as the Athens, Georgia, singer-songwriter reels off a string of tunes touching on subjects as far-ranging as baseball, 1930s Dust Bowl, the nature of evil and the persistence of grace.
For the past decade, Mallonee has recorded and toured in the guise of the folk-rock band Vigilantes Of Love. Over that time he has often written 50 to 100 songs a year. "It's amazing how much he writes," says Buddy Miller, who produced the latest VOL recording, Audible Sigh. "It's overwhelming to me, because none of them are throwaways; they're all good."
Audible Sigh is the eleventh VOL release and is being regarded by many as Mallonee's most fully realized work to date. Though Miller says he exerted a light touch, Mallonee says the wisdom and encouragement of the veteran musician, who's so intuitively (and literally) at home in the studio, permitted him an energizing degree of creativity.
It didn't hurt to have Buddy's wife Julie Miller harmonizing on several tracks, as well as many other "honorary Vigilantes Of Love," including drummer Brady Blade, organist Phil Madeira, fiddler Tammy Rogers and singer Emmylou Harris.
The result is a series of ringing vignettes, loosely tied together by Mallonee's musings on his life as an endlessly touring musician. The hard traveling translates to multiple metaphors for his longer spiritual journey. Without overt preaching, Mallonee explores faith and doubt, failure and atonement, moving from abject despair "at a club called 'the outta luck'" to reverently conclude that "love is a little bit of God, there for all to know."
Musically, the sound is elemental rock 'n' roll with shimmering layers of Miller's signature mando-guitar, filigreed bits of 12-string and Madeira's gospel B-3 bubbling up through the mix. Ultimately, though, the focus is on Mallonee's words, sung in a cutting register that underscores the searching, confessional nature of his artistry.
"I really think it's a record that people should hear," Mallonee says. "I've felt sometimes that the records we've made have been for the fans. But this album is definitely bigger than that."
Sitting at the kitchen table in the Athens home he shares with his wife Brenda, his sons Joshua and Joseph, and an indeterminate number of feline friends, Mallonee is by turns meekly playful and acutely serious as he attempts to explain the rhyme and reason behind the Vigilantes Of Love.
"I got into the music thing pretty late," he says. "I played drums all through high school. But I didn't pick up a guitar until I was 30 years old. And then it just kind of opened up this floodgate. I started tuning it all kinds of different ways, and I started writing songs.
"I'd always written poetry and prose, but when I finally started writing songs, I think I found a voice pretty quick. I have a lot of influences, but I think there's a big difference between influence and imitation. For some reason I think I was spared that. I just knew you don't imitate; you might borrow the soul if you need that."
Spending even a few hours with Mallonee, you quickly get the sense he not only enjoys what others might consider contradictions, but cultivates them. He's an evangelical Christian who once considered going to seminary and eagerly devours volumes of theologically oriented literature by the likes of Frederick Buechner, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. But he also thoroughly delights in downing a few pints of Guinness and smoking huge contraband Cuban cigars. And he will tell you in no uncertain terms that most contemporary Christian music is "crap," and that he recoils from the way much of evangelical Christianity has represented itself in this country.
For such a complex guy, Mallonee's back story is pretty simple. He was born in Martinsville, Virginia, and mainly grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, though because his dad was a chemist in the textile industry he "moved all over and never landed anywhere for very long."
After graduating from the University of Georgia with a degree in history, Mallonee stuck around Athens and eventually got a job teaching emotionally disturbed kids alongside his wife (who has remained in that field). "We'd come home at night and compare notes about how we were training the ax murderers of the future," he says with a laugh.
Eventually, Mallonee began performing some of the songs he was writing with local bands such as the Cone Ponies and Bed Of Roses. "When I was first getting back into music, my wife and I would go out and listen to R.E.M.," he recalls. "That was before they even had a record deal. They really were a huge influence on me. Michael's vocals have a melodic sense that's always struck a chord with me."
Mallonee says Vigilantes Of Love was something he quickly appropriated from the New Order song "Love Vigilante" when he suddenly got a gig one night and needed a band name. The first VOL album, Jugular, came out in 1990, evincing a breakneck acoustic style that's been referred to as "folk songs on speed."
"The funny thing about that record is that we just ran off like 500 cassette tapes," Mallonee says. "It was a direct reaction to what I call the beer politic in Athens. There was definitely a great music scene, but as it got bigger, it began to get more and more about putting 500 hard-drinking frat boys in a club. And we couldn't do that on a Friday night. So my keyboard player at the time, Mark Hall, who was classically trained, bought an accordion, and we just started playing on the side. Just acoustic guitar and accordion, that's all we had."
The second Vigilantes record, Driving The Nails, which came out in 1991, is not among Mallonee's favorites. But even its title points toward the kind of energy he would generate with what was destined to become a constantly shifting cast of players. Released the following year, Killing Floor was the album that brought VOL (which now essentially consisted of Mallonee and multi-instrumentalist Billy Holmes) to much wider attention.
The fact that it was produced by Peter Buck and Mark Heard was certainly a big part of the initial attraction. And in a sense the two perfectly defined the two sides of VOL. The late Heard (who died in 1992) was a Christian music iconoclast, while Buck's band R.E.M. drew the creative blueprint for much of what became known as alternative music. But in the end it was Mallonee's collection of contemplative lyrics and lilting mandolin and accordion-driven melodies that endured.
In 1994, Welcome To Struggleville marked both VOL's debut on Capricorn Records and the beginning of the more muscular roots-rock sound Mallonee would consolidate on successive recordings. The relationship with the label lasted for two more albums, 1995's Blister Soul and 1997's Slow Dark Train (a 1996 compilation on Warner Resound was an attempt to market VOL to the Christian music audience).
"I think Capricorn was pretty nurturing," Mallonee says. "But they didn't really know what to do with us. The protocol was make a record, jump in the van and do 160-180 dates a year, just getting into that grind. We became a critic's darling kind of band, I think. We just couldn't sell records. We sold no more than 15,000 records a year and it took 180 dates to do that, which to me is a formula for demoralization."
Over the past few years, Mallonee has managed to make another series of shoestring recordings he refers to as "credit card albums," because that's the way they were financed. Each of them -- 'Cross The Big Pond, Live At The 40 Watt and To The Roof Of The Sky --chronicles a new batch of songs and further evolution of the VOL lineup.
The new album, which survived a couple of false starts before settling at Compass Records, is under the name Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes Of Love, which he says gives him the freedom to show up in concert with anyone he feels like playing with at the moment.
"I've just learned not to think too much about it," he says of the vagaries of the music industry. "I really don't want my life to be consumed by all that nuts-and-bolts stuff. It'll make you go crazy. I found out that a lot of this business is perspective. It's a matter of how it looks from where another individual sits. I consider myself really lucky to be able to do it, and still have a marriage and family that's worked in the midst of it. I realize that's often the first casualty."
The latest incarnation of VOL is a kind of folk power trio, with bassist Jacob Bradley and drummer Kevin Huer building a rhythmic wall behind Mallonee's guitar and harmonica. Lunching one afternoon at a downtown Athens Mexican restaurant, the three tie into burritos and a bucket of Negra Modelos, while discussing plans for an upcoming trip to England and Scotland that will include an appearance on BBC radio.
Figuring out what to play is sometimes a problem, they say. "Bill just writes so many stinking songs," Bradley jibes. Among the new songs that are in the running, several stand out as distinctively complicated in their point of view. (Buddy Miller calls Mallonee's lyrics "both cerebral and emotional," the kind that "grab both sides of my brain.")
Mallonee says most of his ideas come from the journals he keeps on the road. "I don't write songs in a linear fashion. I can tell what a line might mean for me personally. I've written songs about Eleanor Roosevelt and Isadora Duncan and people like that, and those are a little more linear, but even those songs have some sections that are pretty surreal."
On Audible Sigh, "Resplendent", which features a haunting harmony from Harris, begins as a fairly typical story set in the Depression but veers into a much more complicated philosophical realm. "When I get into the historical side of things, there's a tendency for me to take a particular and move it more toward a general thing," Mallonee says.
"In 'Resplendent' there's this question looming over everybody's head about suffering and affliction, not just in the Dust Bowl, but in the world in general -- is it from God or is it from Satan? That's the big eternal question. For me, I can't come to grips with evil and suffering, but I can come to grips with how much I'm responsible for it."
"Hard Luck And Heart Attack", which ponders the flesh-and-spirit conundrum, was inspired by Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angel. "It was sort of his attempt to reconcile his Catholic upbringing with his Zen Buddhism," Mallonee says. "It's a bit like some of the stuff I'd read by Thomas Merton."
As for his own faith, Mallonee admits he's often been hesitant to talk about it in the mainstream media, for fear of being painted with the same broad brush as many conservative Christians. "The whole evangelical thing has aligned itself with these boilerplate causes," he says, "and the way it has gone about representing itself has been so loveless, and so cold and so lacking in compassion, it just makes me wary to discuss it with people.
"My Christian faith has been a shelter from the storm. It's been the thing that's literally kept me out of mental institutions over the years. But it's not an agenda as far as my music goes. I don't feel like I have to save anybody's soul, or even tell anybody about it. My songs tend to be confessional, in the spirit of poets like John Donne. They're really more like pep talks to myself most of the time. And hopefully my faith comes out in my music in a natural way -- sort of like Trent Reznor's nihilism comes out in his Nine Inch Nails presentation."
What is perhaps most refreshing about Mallonee's struggle to come to grips with the everlasting is the way he's able to wear his heart on his sleeve and still crack a joke. In a recent song called "It's Not Bothering Me", he sings: "God's love shines through a prism/I'm so confused by Calvinism/Honey meet me at my house/Kiss me long upon the mouth/Like they do in San Francisco." It's funny and poignant at the same time, a view of a good world gone wrong, where we all hunger for significance, whether we recognize it or not.
"To know that it's all really going somewhere is the key," Mallonee says. "So much of pop culture is in the other direction. It's only about the moment. You don't think about the future. I think eternity is in the moment and the moment spreads into eternity."
Bob Townsend lives in Atlanta, where he tries to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable while writing about music and gardening for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Stomp and Stammer.
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