Not P:] Robyn Hitchcock Salutes Gillian Welch And David Rawlings

[Allan Balliett]

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Robyn Hitchcock Salutes Gillian Welch And David Rawlings

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/09/18/441417024/robyn-hitchcock-sa
lutes-gillian-welch-and-david-rawlings

Robyn Hitchcock presented Gillian Welch and David Rawlings with the
Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting at the Americana Music
Association Honors and Awards Show on Sept. 16, 2015.

Gala event tribute speeches are often so much fluff—in the right hands,
however, they ascend to the level of the poetic. On Wednesday night in
Nashville, Robyn Hitchcock's paean to his longtime friends and
collaborators Gillian Welch and David Rawlings hit that high mark. Handing
them a Lifetime Achievement prize at the Americana Honors and Awards,
Hitchcock wove a tale that was also a dream history of American roots music
itself. It was so good we decided to publish it. Do they give awards for
awards show speeches? The man in the polka-dot shirt deserves one.



    "We live, we die. Our earthly remains become compost from which
eventually new bones may sprout; some demented gasoline for an as yet
unsoiled future. We live and we die, but unless we drown in our own
progress, or are pulverized by a whimsical asteroid, our culture goes on
forever. Aside from expressing her or his response to the shock of
existence, the artist gets to embed themselves in that culture: to become
part of our own psychic compost.

    "The artists we honor here tonight are a distillation of many before
them, and of their contemporaries too. The deeper your roots, the broader
your branches. Jimi Hendrix, the Louvin Brothers, the Pixies, Emmylou &
Gram, the Stanleys and the Alpha Omega that is Bob Dylan are all present
and roosting in their songs. Yet they sound like none of them.

    "They've distilled so much of what America herself has distilled
musically, time out of mind from the lake of mirrors that goes so deep you
can't distinguish anything. Their alchemy has refined it into something so
simple that nobody ever thought of it before, and now they're being openly
copied by their many admirers.

    "Like a jewel they have many facets. They may appear as an old time
Appalachian pair, stood by a wooden wagon. Or as '90s indie rockers,
finding the essence of a Radiohead song. Or they may strike you as a jam
band. I've seen barefoot kids Dead-dancing to them in Golden Gate Park.
She: the rhythm section, hair flowing like a Munch painting, slumped in
spent ecstasy over her guitar. He: spinning out a cascade of notes from
beneath his Freewheelin' Franklin hat, like an oddly sober Jerry Garcia.

    "They are two beings in one entity. They are what John and Yoko might
have been if they'd both played the guitar. They are whom I turn to for
late night insomnia texting, for three-hour conversations about Dylan, for
cover artwork and for high grade hoots in West L.A. Ladies and gentlemen,
they are Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings."
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