The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: 16 Horsepower
September 2000
After the first, furious number on 16 Horsepower's hands-on-your-throat Secret South (Razor & Tie), the sound drops off like a flaming arrow extinguishing itself in a lake. “Whoooo-HA!" bandleader David Eugene Edwards has shouted in "Clogger"—the word means "one who makes wooden shoes," but here it seems to mean the man Edwards is singing to, someone with iron shoes, or anyway "iron feet."
"Clogger" is a warning to someone who doesn't understand the deal he's made with the devil—"You think you got away with something, boy?" Edwards says in his strangled, desperate voice. "Well, see his hand and feel his staff"—and Edwards's cry is a cry of fear, glee, and power. You can't untangle it. It shoots through the air, you just try to track it for the second it lasts. But there's a sense that the force of the moment comes from how close to the devil the singer gets just by telling someone else to watch out, and meaning what he says: even in the negative, how much of the devil's power he gets to use.
Out of that maelstrom, though, comes Edwards's gentle, hesitant, even clumsy banjo picking on the traditional Southern ballad Wayfaring Stranger. 16 Horsepower is a Gothic country-rock quartet from Denver, but their version of Wayfaring Stranger feels so fated, so instinctual, it spreads the South all over the American map, a dusting of damnation on wherever you might be as you listen.
Edwards is a brilliant banjo player: His sense of rhythm is as irresistible as it is elusive. On Wayfaring Stranger, brilliance means the ability to play as if the player is learning the strings as he makes the notes. You can imagine the singer as the hero of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, the soldier on his trek back to his North Carolina home as the Confederate Army falls apart at the end of the Civil War, stumbling over an abandoned, half-busted banjo on the road, picking it up and discovering it comes with a song, this one.
Though nothing could be more prosaically American—a believer who has wandered through this land as a witness is ready to "cross over Jordan"—the uncertainty of the player's touch makes you feel the man isn't telling all he knows. Singing from inside the folk character, Edwards doesn't tell you what he's seen, but you can guess: "I'll drop this cross of self-denial," he says, and suddenly a mystical groaning, now pressed by guitar as well as banjo, comes out of the ground. The war that was taking place in "Clogger," the exultation in getting so close to the fire you can stir its embers as easily as you can pour water on it, seems very far away. But after only one verse, in less than a minute, the old song stops. It seems to break down into a modern void, into abstract, disembodied sounds that don't connect to each other; you wonder what happened. Then out of that suspension, the man returns, his scratchy, everyday voice insistent that death is the last promise he will keep: He will die with this song on his lips. He'll sing it over and over for as long as it takes.
In just two songs, then, only one of them original, 16 Horsepower has made good on its promise of a "secret South," and well before Edwards has gotten around to sticking the phrase in a song. The old-time religion the music is made from—the belief that the devil is ever-present but in the deepest sense ephemeral, that God is hard to find but absolute, and that both are part of the landscape, in the air, in the swamp, running through the woods—encloses the performers, and they seem very old.
This is all new for the band: Edwards on all manner of stringed instruments, Steve Taylor on electric guitar, Pascal Humbert on stand-up bass, Jean Yves Tola on drums. On the 1995 Sackcloth 'n' Ashes and the 1998 Low Estate, 16 Horsepower tried to call up the same drama, but they were playing dress up, posing as grimy hillbillies in the pictures on the first record and nineteenth-century Savannah dandies on the second. Their music was all conceit. Despite childhood travels with a preacher grandfather, Edwards sounded less like a sinner who knows how to get out of his trap but isn't sure he wants to than the old celebrity evangelist Marjoe: a fake, all moves, nothing behind them. Now you might feel you'd better get out of the way.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, September 2000