Notes
Or Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash, it's been a long road as well, a twisting trail, a two-lane highway, a road full of ruts, and it all led to Texacali. Texacali is a mythical place maybe, but it's real enough all the same. It's a borderland, la frontera, somewhere right near where San Diego meets Juarez, where Ensenada and El Paso cross paths. And like all the rest of these tales, like every story that happens in life instead of on a page, sometimes you don't notice the Mile Markers until you look up into the rear-view mirror. A quick look in the rear view mirror: Mark Stuart formed the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash on a whim, by accident, by chance. He'd been in a punk rock band but that was done, over, finished, and it had nearly finished him. He had a dream one night, and out of the dream came a band name: the Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash. The new name was a joke, sort of. And yet, soon enough, it wasn't a joke anymore. Soon enough, it was a band, and soon enough, it was enough of a band that Johnny Cash himself gave them his personal seal of approval, and Johnny Cash's own legitimate son helped produce their first album. It was a little like waking up alone and naked in a strange new country next to another man's clothes, and discovering that they weren't anybody else's clothes -- they were your own. That they fit you like nothing else ever had, and that it was more than just a new suit of clothes, that it was a new life. And it was yours. For keeps. 'I kinda got the calling like one of those Pentecostal preachers gets the calling,' Stuart says now. 'It came like lightning out of the sky. And Johnny Cash coming to me in my dreams wasn't weird. It was just that I had these dreams, and the dreams led to a body of work, to a bunch of songs, and they led to all of this.' For Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons, the last ten years has been a blur of miles and markers. BSOJC has played more shows most years than most bands do in their entire careers, and they've done it the hard way, piling their own gear into their own van, and then heading off into a dark night that's just a couple of hours away from day. A lot of indie bands have done a lot of this, but not many have made the long haul across an entire decade. And amidst that grueling schedule, Stewart has managed to keep writing, delivering two previous records, Walk Alone and Distance Between, that built a hardcore fanbase for the band and yet achieved a critical recognition that most singer-songwriters would slit their left wrist to gain. It was an enviable position, as long as you didn't have to do all the work that went with it. As a songwriter, Stuart is doing something very different than writing the songs that make country music whatever it is today. These are landscapes, portraits, silhouettes. 'This is just me trying to be a picture painter with words. Finding a way to turn a phrase in a song that is meaningful and unpredictable. My dad wanted to be a writer. He didn't get to be a writer but he had a bunch of books in the house. I still don't watch television. I read books. Exclusively.' Stuart heard about his dad's death before a show in Madison, Wisconsin. A year later, just about to the day, just before a show in Madison, Wisconsiin, he heard about Johnny Cash's death. Just one of those things, maybe. Mile Markers is pretty much what the name says: a set of signs posted to guide the way home, or maybe point out the direction that has home in the rear view mirror. Set in the West, it rambles and wanders and aims the steering wheel out at the endless horizon. A halfways unfolded road map, it passes through Austin and Tucson and San Ysidro and Los Angeles, through the badlands of both South Dakota and New Mexico, from Oklahoma and the windy Panhandle country around Abilene all the way to Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley. But Mile Markers is a spiritual voyage as much as a mere travelogue, a set of tales that turns into a single song of jo
