Review Summary: Two disembodied heads on skateboards talking to one another, one sporting an eye patch: head without an eye patch "People Like You are a Real Inspiration to Me!"
In many ways John Callahan seems like a perfect photo negative of Daniel Johnston; though they do share a simplicity in their approach to their art and a childlike quality to their voices, where Johnston was most renowned for his music ahead of his cartoons it’s the reverse scenario with Callahan. Of course both are perhaps best known now for having battled their own life altering disabilities, the details of which have been brought to the attention of a large audience thanks to a pair of well-received documentaries (and in the case of Callahan a 2018 film starring Joaquin Phoenix). The fascinating thing to note with both men is in each case their ‘secondary talent’ is so accomplished and unique in its own right you can find yourself spun around; I often picture a Daniel Johnston cartoon before thinking of him with a microphone and here after listening to the peculiar magic of ‘Purple Winos in the Rain’ I doubt I’ll ever be able to think of a Callahan cartoon ahead of imagining him singing a phrase from this album first.
Callahan was left a paraplegic aged just 21 after a night’s heavy boozing resulted in his drinking buddy crashing his car into a telegraph pole at 90mph; to add insult to injury the driver walked away unscathed. Still, this slice of ill fate pushed this young man toward exploring just how he could express himself in this life now he'd been left with a highly limited range of movement and an understandably cynical and morbid perspective. What he discovered was that he could clutch a pen in such a way he could still manoeuvre it using his shoulder with just enough control to sketch simplistic doodles - and it wasn't too long before he'd built up a reputation as an excellent, if decidedly risqué, cartoonist. Of course the other talent he could still make use of was his voice, and although he couldn’t achieve the purity he once possessed as a choirboy (yup), he was still capable of singing in a similarly stripped bare and brutal style to his cartoon artwork.
‘Purple Winos in the Rain’ is quite clearly the work of an artist who also works in a visual medium, with some songs having an obvious colour palette (‘Portland Girl’s swirling lipstick reds, the title tracks drunken purples) and others featuring highly detailed imagery and cartoon-ish observations. Unsurprisingly, Callahan makes plenty of room here to unleash his trademark biting humour, but more unexpected is that the medium of song allows him to reveal something only hinted at before; here he leaves his great big hurting heart unguarded, and it's this fragility which causes many of these songs to become almost unbearably poignant. The childlike, slightly strained and pained vocals lend some real emotional heft to the best of this material; in particular watch out for the four song run that takes in the devastating ‘Suicide in the Fall’ (’something ‘bout the hoarseness of voices as they call that keeps me from committing suicide in the fall’), the bittersweet majesty of ’Something Wild' (‘in the dawn I found her..feeding seagulls like a child, in my legs I felt a tingle and the start of something wild’), the simmering intensity of ’Sinner Saves a Saint’, and the nursery rhyme ballad ‘Portland Girl’.
It’s a nice touch that the nineteen tracks here found space for a cameo from Tom Waits singing Callahan’s own ‘Tears from Rain’ on his answering machine, giving the listener an idea of the type of company this man kept, as well as helping flesh out Callahan’s universe that bit more. It would be hard to make a case that ‘Purple Winos’ is as accomplished as the best work from an established song writer like Waits, or of his other big musical hero Dylan, but that’s not really the deal with these songs anyway. Sure the album is far too much of a sprawl, with too many below par songs in among the track list, and as a conventional listening experience it would have been greatly improved by trimming the six or seven weakest cuts. Still, as a musical document of the man’s creativity and worldview I can’t help but like it just how it is.
