Tom Russell sings of life from Hollywood to Mexico

LONDON (Reuters) - Texas-based thespian

Tom Russell

has led a picaresque life, from training criminology in war-torn

Nigeria

to personification support joints in Vancouver's red-light district.

He's lived in Spain and Norway, created songs for

Johnny Cash

, driven a cab and followed bullfighters in Mexico.

Such practice have given him copiousness to write about in his wry, smart songs that anxiety total from British author

Graham Greene

to Mexican insubordinate Pancho Villa.

"My career has left retrograde to many people. we didn't come out of a box with my best-selling annals and live off that for a rest of my life," Russell told Reuters in an talk in London. "I feel I'm in good figure to write a lot more."

With his skinny frame, grave voice and Stetson, he looks like he would be right during home in a cowboy saloon.

But notwithstanding his warm demeanor, genocide mostly lurks in his songs. He's lived for a past 15 years in a Texan limit city of El Paso.

"From nearby my residence we can see

Juarez

. The many dangerous city in a world. Right opposite a limit is a frontline of a Mexican drugs war."

The limit assault is one thesis of Russell's latest recording, "Mesabi," that he is showcasing on a fibre of dates opposite Europe this spring. It also deals with Hollywood, celebrity and falls from grace.

The pretension refers to a

Mesabi Iron Range

of northern Minnesota where Bob Dylan hails from.

"I went adult there a few years ago to play a gig and we got to see a residence in Duluth he was innate in and a auditorium where he saw Buddy Holly play when he was a kid. Then we went adult to Hibbing."

"I was only vacant that he came from this small mining city on a Mesabi Iron Range. Then we suspicion of myself as a child in

Los Angeles

, listening to his records. So that starts this record off."

The thread moves to

Los Angeles

, where Russell grew adult and examination Disney on a Saturday afternoon was a childhood ritual. The strain "Farewell Never Never Land" shows his knack for mining bullion from problematic sources.

"It's about Bobby Driscoll. He was a voice of Peter Pan in a Walt Disney cartoon. we found out that he died as an different junkie, some kids detected his physique in New York, he's buried in an unmarked grave. How mocking a story is that?

Another strain recalls Sterling Hayden, a tough-guy actor and star of "Johnny Guitar," who was wracked by shame for finking on associate actors during a McCarthy hearings in a 1950s.

Then an paper to Elizabeth Taylor, vital with father Nicky Hilton in an El Paso hotel, takes us to a Mexican border.

Russell has created mostly about a hardships of Mexican migrants and in "And God Created Border Towns" and "Goodnight Juarez," he laments a assault of a drugs wars.

"Americans tend to wish to forget about it -- 30 or 40,000 people have been killed in this drug fight that's fundamentally a billion dollar attention and these cartels are murdering any other in sequence to sell us a drugs."

"We're shopping a drugs and also offered them a guns. They're murdering any other and we have a lot to do with it.

EAST OF WOODSTOCK, WEST OF VIETNAM

In concert, Russell is a hugely interesting performer, creation wisecracks and revelation anecdotes between songs. On a new night during a Cecil Sharp House, home of English folk, he regaled a assembly with his off-the-cuff gonzo amusement before hushing them with songs of tough times and struggle.

The strain was fleshed out with flourishes from flamenco to Mississippi blues from guitarist Thad Beckham that evoked a Tex-Mex border.

As good as his low-pitched adventures, he has published a book of his art work -- "Blue Horse, Red Desert," writes essays on Western life for a ranching magazine. He's also published a investigator novel and a book of letters with Charles Bukowski and is operative on a novel about Juarez.

His life has mostly led him down different paths.

Just out of university in Santa Barbara with a masters in criminology, he took a pursuit training in Nigeria, afterwards wracked by a fight over Biafra.

"In 1969, we didn't go to Woodstock and we didn't go to Vietnam. we went to West Africa. It was an amazingly bizarre and aroused experience, where we grew adult unequivocally quickly."

"I was arrested removing off a craft since we had taken cinema out of a window and we had no thought it was fight section and we can't do that. There was a U.S. Embassy man on a craft who bribed my approach out of being thrown in jail."

It was during that tarry that he initial review a books of Graham Greene, whose domain also ran from Africa to Mexico.

"I was means to review a lot, review everything. Years after we wrote him a fan minute and he wrote me behind a note that we have on my wall in Texas."

But if like Greene, he has found himself a dangerous places and mostly championed a loser and a oppressed, he is not staking out a domestic position.

"I'm not unequivocally a domestic person. My songs positively aim during a subject though we don't have any sincere politics. The strain has to be a good song, rather than a strain about something that's presumably good."

(news.yahoo.com)