Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard: One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Music from Kerouac’s Big Sur.

Jay Farrar and Benjamin Gibbard

Label: Atlantic Records

Jack Kerouac can be something of a Peter Pan figure for musicians- a constant reminder of adolescence adhered to very closely. Depending on one’s taste, this can lead to horrible prose or a sense of great romance that interlocks self and place. Admittedly, I believe in the former a little more than the latter. However, Tom Waits, Craig Finn, Jim Carroll and now Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar have adopted the same kind of controlled sloppiness that Keroauc was famous for, folding it into literate and affecting works. Unlike their Beat Generation idol, they get to sway and sing to fill in some of the gaps. They can make a book I’m not fond of into a song that becomes dear.

I was optimistic on my first listen of the soundtrack for the documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music from Kerouac’s Big Sur. Though it’s a collection of songs for a film I haven’t seen, I know the story well enough. Famously, Keroauc went to California’s Big Sur to shake off the demons of his drinking and find some peace from his celebrity. In a story that would later be novelized, he ended up tumbling further down the rabbit hole while preparing himself for a methodical self-destruction. Despite my own hang-ups on the author, this is a pretty good story for a song cycle. Kerouac has been Ben Gibbard’s obsession for quite awhile, from Death Cab for Cutie’s “Lowell, MA” all the way to last year’s “Bixby Canyon Bridge” on Narrow Stairs, plus a few songs and an article for Paste Magazine in between. In recruiting a co-leader in Son Volt’s Jay Farrar, there’s a clear attempt to channel that love into something of an extended West Coast country ballad.

The most glaring problem is that Gibbard can’t sing country music that well. There’s a good reason his voice has become synonymous with the popularization with catchy indie rock. His ease in settling into soft repetition isn’t just the best trait he has, but virtually the only thing. Asking him to stretch vowels and ramble on about Americana is a little ill-suited to his bright, sharp singing. On lead vocals he doesn’t add much color or variation to the cross-country laments of “California Zephyr” and “These Roads Don’t Move”. When he heads towards familiar pop territory on “One Fast Move or I’m Gone,” the results are more enjoyably melodic and at peace.

Songs where Farrar takes the lead fare much better. Truthfully, some of his work here is more simple and poignant than that last several Son Volt records. He imbues “Sea Engines” with the hubris of blown dreams, enhancing Gibbard’s standing on the album by fashioning him into a pretty good backing vocalist. On the opposite of the divide, Farrar turns in a solid barroom mumble for “Final Horrors,” while chronicling Kerouac’s relapse into drunken oblivion.

But One Fast Move or I’m Gone is a little too much like Keroauc for its own good. Everything is brought to the surface too quickly and not much in the production or the lyrics is left to the imagination. Whenever I read any of the author’s work, there are always two beautifully descriptive sentences followed by a real clunker to wind down a paragraph; a beautiful patchwork is ruined by overeager stitching. Farrar and Gibbard have matched that irritating habit on the nose and haven’t injected enough of their own talents to negate the flaws found in their influence. Plenty of steel guitars and brushed drums and used too liberally as a means to convince us that this is an honest to god Guthrie-eque effort, but the lyrics just aren’t there to go the rest of the distance. Shoddy romanticism wins out at the end of the day.

Mostly, I just wish that the story of Kerouac’s Big Sur was made less mythical. Farrar and Gibbard do a good job hinting towards a devastatingly human perspective, but they can never quite grasp it in the palm of their hands.

by Neal Fersko