Rod Melacon

Timeless voices in country music, scattered down through the years, are rare. For those who have listened and heard; the sound of those voices stay in your soul like some restless wind. Hearing Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings for the first time carries the memories and impressions which make country music universally great. The feeling of hearing an artist who has that natural gift in the resonate sound of his own voice is what it's like to hear Rod Melacon the first time. His voice flows clear and unforced with the deepest country soul I've heard in quite a while. While it may be tempting to call his sound, 'retro,' it's not a sound that has ever really gone away. He's just bringing the true soul of country music back to us. He's reminding us of where we've been and where we're going; which is possibly the calling of the best of roots artists.

It's easy to forget how young most of the greats were when they first broke on the scene. Hank Williams was here and gone before he was 30. Willie Nelson was 23 when he wrote, "Family Bible." Johnny Cash was 21 when he recorded "Folsom Prison Blues," and John Prine was 22 when he wrote "Sam Stone." When we've heard these voices in the past, they've been labeled, 'old souls,' which helps explain why someone so young can seem so world-weary. But, there's a deeper explanation, as though they can feel and hear the haunted rumblings of forgotten wisdom and the blue stories of all of those who have come before them. At 22 years old, Rod Melancon is poised to join their ranks. His upcoming EP, My Family Name is that good.

Recorded last year at Sonora Recorders in Los Angeles the six song EP is co-produced by bass player and mult- instrumentalist, Chad Watson (who has worked with the likes of Charlie Rich,Janis Ian and Delaney Bramlett) and Richard Barron (who engineered and also plays accordian on this disc and has worked with Elliot Smith, Joe Henry, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlelwood). The sound is spare, rich and as deep as the Louisiana earth of his childhood. With studio support from Dean Parks on steel guitar, Don Heffington on drums, Vern Monnett on lead guitar. The sound of this record sticks close to its roots and keeps the focus on Rod's rich voice and his lyrics laced with Bayou and south Louisiana imagery. The EP includes five original songs and one bonus track, an interpretation of Buffalo Springfield's classic, "Kind Woman." Each song weaves a story and uses characterization in the first person. A dark and brooding blues ballad, "Lord Knows," tells of the plight of poor sharecroppers against landowners and corrupt lawmen. The story is a dark tale of obsession, revenge with no sign of redepmption. "Louisina Nights" is a straight-forward song for the oil workers along the Louisiana gulf. It comes from stories Rod knows well from his family and small town roots. "Lay Me Down," is a song of surrender, hearbreak and hope for redemption. A simple melody is anchored by a haunting accordion and mandolin centered on his voice.

"Angola Blues" is Rod's own "Folsom Prison Blues," which pays homage to the convicts who wait their turn on death row at Angola, Louisiana's state penitentiary. The clever twist in the stylization of this song is rather than giving it a hard blues shell, it has a feeling of gospel celebration.

The strongest of the original songs on this new EP is "Reggie." A soldier in Iraq writes home to his friend and tells a universal tale of the cost of war and the everyday hope that must be kindled in order to survive. The added track, "Kind Woman," gives the stellar session musicians a chance to shine. With strong instrumental leads from Dean Parks on Pedal Steel and Vern Monnett's imaginative lead guitar spinning around the familiar melody along with Chad Watson's ever sturdy and inventive bass, Rod re-invents the vocal from Richie Furay's youthful vocal, with its sense of the discov - No Depression

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1980, I worked just down the street from the Columbia Drug Store on the southeast corner of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood. With a soda fountain that served up good burgers, fries and malts, it stood next to a room where giant jars of pancake makeup sat on the counters for the actors and artists that still came in from the Hills and Valley to shop. On the walls were giant black and white photos from earlier and more prosperous times, the early thirties and up through the fifties, when Gower Gulch was alive and well with four film studios within walking distance that cranked out westerns by the wagon-ful. I remember looking at all these cowboys leaning against the walls of the buildings, smoking, talking, laughing and waiting to be found, to be discovered.

Like migrant workers who today hang out each morning in front of Home Depot looking for a day job, young men from all over America made their way out west to California. And if they didn't want to work in the fields near Bakersfield or Modesto, or if they had dreams of being a star, they rented cheap little rooms in Hollywood and each morning put on their cowboy costumes, walked over to Sunset and Gower, and waited. Legend has it that the term "drug store cowboy" came from all these guys hanging inside and outside of the Columbia, and folks like John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were from the neighborhood. A B-movie was released in 1950 called The Kid from Gower Gulch starring Spade Cooley. In the film, singer Red Murrell sings a song called "Gower Gulch is Home Sweet Home". And in an old Warner Bros. cartoon, Porky Pig sings a song called "The Flower of Gower Gulch".

Today there is an expensive restaurant where the Columbia Drug Store once stood, and across the street is a strip center with places to get coffee, sandwiches, Japanese and Thai food, and to buy stuff. The developers who built it in 1976 said that to "preserve the history" of the corner, they designed the shopping center to look like an "old western street". Do you know what it really looks like? A movie set or some sort of Disney version of Americana that stands in contrast to the hookers, pimps, drug dealers, low riders and gang bangers who cruise at night...and the dreamers who still are drawn to this place called Hollywood.

Rod Melancon is a good looking kid who three years ago at almost-nineteen years of age came here from Louisiana to seek his fame. The often-featured No Depression writer Terry Roland has written about the kid here on this site a few times, so I'll just cut and paste the backstory: "He came to L.A. to pursue a career in acting but changed his mind three years ago on a Christmas visit to his family home. It was during the holidays that he gave his grandfather a life-changing gift. A Hank Williams disc. When he saw his grandfather's tears as he listened to the timeless music, Rod knew he wanted to write songs that could bring the same feeling to others. Ironically and perhaps not coincidentally, his parents gave him an acoustic guitar that same Christmas. As Rod himself said, 'that was the moment in the movie of my life when I knew what I was called to do.' He came back to L.A. and began to learn guitar and write songs. The songs flowed out of him with a passion he'd never known before."

Terry has put his fingers in the pie, helping Rod take an EP he recorded called My Family Name and adding some tracks to make it a full album that will be released on June 5th. Getting veteran session singer and Chris Hillman's partner Herb Pedersen, who has probably sang on more hit records than Elvis Presley, to add his vocals along with Rod's for Richie Furay's "Kind Woman" was an excellent choice. While the album is pretty much straight ahead country, this track becomes the bridge to all those Depression-era drug store cowboys and the old days of the sixties in Laurel Canyon . Slowed down just a bit from the Buffalo Springfield's version, it's worth th - No Depression

When I first met Rod Melancon -- a little over a year ago at roadhouse Pappy and Harriet's in the high desert -- I thought, "What's this good-looking kid doing trekking all the way out to the alien-planet Joshua trees to see Mike Stinson?" Was there some commercial he was filming nearby? He was quiet. He hid underneath his dark overhang of hair. He respectfully listened and cheered.

A week later I put two and two together when I saw he was playing the back porch at the Grand Ole Echo -- LA's weekly Americana show as community celebration. I believe he had a guitar, but I didn't much notice. What I noticed was that he was singing.

Rod Melancon's deep rumble of a voice sounds as tumbled as Waylon Jennings, as if it came of age on a gravel road after a childhood in the desert (though he's from hurricane-soaked Louisiana), as if he's done a lot more living and soul steeping than you'd ever know -- and he's only 22 years old.

When I heard him, I found myself fighting his good looks, the dark James Dean pout, the stormy eyes -- how could anyone so striking know the troubles he sounds like he's seen? I walked closer... this has got to be good.

Rod's first CD, My Family Name, likewise draws you in. Like a great log-line of a must-see movie, each song makes you want to know the rest of the story. He drops you in the middle of a full-on saga.

If he sung just another verse, I'd maybe really understand. Rod wants to tell you, if only he could trust you. He'll give you a couple of scenes, but you'll have to take it from there. It feels like he's saying, "You know, we don't understand one another -- we're just guessing most the time -- but we keep guessing."

A lot is left to Rod's voice itself to communicate, in the rumbles, the catches, the vulnerability. The instruments -- as excellent a setting as the roster of star players provide on these recordings (with luminaries Chad Watson, Dean Parks, Don Heffington, Vern Monnett, Herb Pedersen, Matt Cartsonis and Richard Barron) -- are surprisingly incidental. "By Her Side," Rod's concluding a cappella track of the CD, is an astonishing dual shot of loneliness and love gone by in a mere one minute forty five. Yup, a cappella is all we need.

Though his songs' story lines could come straight out of a Gulf-Coast Justified, I gather Rod must have been a misfit in laissez-les-bons-temps-rouler Louisiana. The world seems a painful place for Rod. But I also gather the pain is not so much his own. What he feels is the ache in others: their confusion or regret, their inability to sort crap out in time to stop some unspoken tragedy.

It's a weight we all carry somewhere -- not being able to sort crap out in time.

Rod taps in and turns it into songs.

I confirm some of my theories in a recent conversation with him:

RM: "Most of these songs I wrote living on Beachwood Canyon. I had a living room and the top of a bunk bed. I couldn't write songs in front of my roommate, so most of these songs I wrote in the middle of the night -- 3 a.m. -- in the hall by the bathroom. There were beer cans everywhere. My roommate had a tiny little dog -- a post-apocalyptic deer -- and it was always peeing on my lyrics sheet.

"Now I actually have a bedroom.

"'Long Lost Friend' was inspired by this homeless family I would see -- they had two grocery carts and were scavenging around. The kid would be in one of the grocery carts... There's a line about heaven, I wondered whether they believe in an afterlife, an end to the struggle.

"A lot of families struggle. I was thinking about a lot of people back home who work their asses off -- my dad was on the road three days a week working for us -- especially the man of the house, working to provide for his family. He feels like it's not enough sometimes, being gone all the time, disconnected from the family because of it. I saw a lot of that growing up -- men gone for months on end on the oil fields.

"I want to touch people to feel something - - The Huffington Post