Texas singer/songwriter James McMurtry’s new album, The Black Dog and The Wandering Boy, opens with a menacing, corrosive tune called “Laredo (Small Dark Something).” It’s a true stomper, a natural fit for opening an album: A four-on-the-floor nihilistic rocker that chain smokes Camels and doesn’t like your face.
“We shot dope ’til the money ran out,” McMurtry sneers repeatedly at one point as the grinding music falls away.
The song is a natural album-opener. It’s also a natural concert-opener. So watch out for it at McMurtry’s show at the Charleston Pour House on Sept. 23.
A song like that is typically recorded best on the first take, and that’s what you’re hearing on McMurtry’s new album. In fact, it’s not even really a take, per se.
“It was a complete accident,” McMurtry told the Charleston City Paper in a recent interview. “It happened our first week in studio. We used to perform ‘Laredo’ in our live sets, but we hadn’t done it in a while, so we decided to rehearse it. We’d already set up in the studio, and we had the drum sound dialed in. So we figured we’d just record the rehearsal.”
Now it’s the intro to a brilliant new collection of songs, McMurtry’s 11th. Artists from Jason Isbell to the Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood to John Mellencamp (who produced McMurtry’s first two albums) have praised his songwriting. Author Stephen King went so far as to say, “James McMurtry may be the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation.”
That gift is on display on the title track.
“The black dog and the wanderin’ boy/Come around every night,” McMurtry intones over a slow-burn, creeping rocker. “The wanderin’ boy never gets any older/The black dog doesn’t bite/They oughta both go away when I take my meds/But they don’t.”
The song, about a man’s eerie hallucinations as he dies, is loosely based on James’ father, acclaimed author Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), who died in 2021. He began hallucinating before he passed, and there was one vision that kept recurring that inspired his son.
“After my father passed away, my stepmom asked me if he’d ever talked about his hallucinations with me, and he hadn’t,” McMurtry said. “She asked if he’d ever mentioned the black dog and the wandering boy, and he never mentioned that. And I used that image to create a fictional character.”
The album’s tough, wiry sound comes courtesy of producer/musician Don Dixon, a key figure in the Athens, Ga., music scene of the early 1980s. A couple of albums ago, McMurtry said he needed to go back to “producer school,” and Dixon’s bare-bones approach and decades of experience as a musician made him the perfect fit.
“If I’m producing myself, I can’t always tell what’s happening while it’s happening,” he said. “I have to go back into the control room and listen to it. What I like about working with Don is that he saves you a lot of time. He likes to cut live in the studio and so do I.”
In addition to Dixon, who pitched in on everything from baritone guitar to trombone on the album, and guest musicians like Americana star Sarah Jarosz, McMurtry brought his tough-and-tested road band into the studio to record the basic tracks.
Drummer Daren Hess, guitarist Tim Holt and the bass player known only as Cornbread have played with McMurtry for years, and the lived-in feel they bring to the music makes them sound like the ultimate garage band that just happens to feature one of America’s greatest songwriters.
That’s the unit that will be on the Pour House stage.
McMurtry, in his typically dry, taciturn way, is slyly affectionate about that longtime band.
“I guess Cornbread is the new guy,” he says. “He’s only been in the band about 15 years. We hadn’t done much in the studio together, but it really worked here.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Doors open at 7 p.m., Sept. 23, Charleston Pour House, 1977 Maybank Highway, James Island. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door: charlestonpourhouse.com
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