Duff McKagan was the punk rock
kid who
ended up in the world’s biggest hair-metal band, but it turns out he had
an outlaw heart all along.
Tenderness, his first solo album since Guns Ν’ Roses reunited, and his second
after 1993’s “Believe In Me”, forsakes the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and rock’n’roll in favour of Nashville and rootsy Americana.
Okay it isn’t quite a
cryin’-at-the-sports- bar country and western album, but its dialled-back
ambience, strategically deployed pedal steel guitars and gospel- tinged backing
vocals put it in the ballpark. There was always more to the bassist than the
Sunset Strip bozo caricature (it’s difficult to imagine Slash launching a
wealth-management company, as Duff did when he kicked the hard stuff), so maybe
this kind of departure shouldn’t be surprising. What is surprising is just how
good it is.
Duff has been talking up Mark Lanegan and
the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli as touchstones, and the nocturnal ambience the
so-called Gutter Twins conjure on their own work bleeds out across Tenderness. But the biggest factor here is
McKagan’s chief collaborator Shooter Jennings, son of outlaw country
frontiersman Waylon Jennings. Shooter and his regular backing band sprinkle
some authentic Nashville stardust across the album. You want haunting lap steel
guitar and a phalanx of fiddles? Shooter’s got ’em.
Any worries about cultural tourism are
dissipated in a few seconds of the opening title track. A slow-burning
semi-ballad that makes a heartfelt plea for a little bit of humanity in an
inhuman world, it’s got a reserved stateliness you’d never expect from a man
who shares a stage with Axl Rose. Similarly, the gospel-infused Feel - written in honour of Chris Cornell, an old
friend of McKagan’s from Seattle - snaps with the kind of honest-to-God emotion
his regular band would struggle to match. It helps that McKagan isn’t the
greatest singer in the world; there’s no artifice here. You can take the kid
out of punk rock...
If there is a problem here, it’s a surfeit
of conscience. McKagan has called this a socio-political album, and by God he’s
determined to mourn the world’s ills, from the opioid crisis to the unending
wave of police brutality. Noble sentiments, for sure, but undercut by
occasionally ham-fisted lyrics. The worst offender is Parkland, which is simply a litany of school
shootings that draws the conclusion: Oh shit, this is really bad.’ That’s
paraphrasing, naturally. But not by much. Yet the album transcends all that,
partly because it wears its heart so openly on its sleeve, partly because these
songs gleam like jewels in the desert sun. Hollywood’s loss is Nashville’s
gain. (Dave Everley)
