Greg Wood and his band of merry men known as Horseshoe slide into Under The Volcano Wednesday night for the late-'90s warhorses' second "reunion" gig since getting back together at Rudyard's three months ago. Wood has been described as a songwriter extraordinaire in the local press going all the way back to Horseshoe's beginnings in 1995. The band's first CD, King of the World, stood H-Town on its ear, but it took five years for the band to issue its second album, 2000's Moving the Goods, as it spiraled toward oblivion.
And what a mish-mash Moving the Goods was, like a 50-car pileup on the Southwest Freeway. Openers "First Car" and "Last Concert Café" seemed to pick up right where King of the World ended, our jaunty ne'er-do-wells finding the slippery, trashy old groove that was as comfortable as a smoking jacket and a good cigar.
But midway through the album, it quickly became apparent that we were no longer in Camelot but in some lower level of Dante's inferno. It didn't take a genius to figure out that there were serious problems. Serious, serious, serious problems.
And, just like that, it was over. There was no Horseshoe. Wood had a heart attack and other health complications that took him completely out of the picture. Guitarist Scott Daniels moved on to Carolyn Wonderland's band and eventually to Austin. The rest of the band - Ben Collis, Eddie Hawkins, Cary Winscott - scattered like scrap paper in a tornado.
Lonesome Onry and Mean recently caught up with Wood and asked him to explain five of the most fucked-up songs on Moving the Goods.
5. "Blue Shimmer" "Blue Shimmer"
Greg Wood: Since this one's about an actual person, etc, I don't want to say too much. I wanted to write a song about the drugs - heroin in this case - that didn't "glamorize" the whole stupid deal. But once this was recorded I realized that I was STILL romanticizing that ridiculous, sick lifestyle - the one I'd been living and hating for so long. (I don't remember writing this at all; since the words don't rhyme I assume it's "poetry" I scribbled down and then later figured out a melody.)
4. "Purgatory" "Purgatory"
GW: Another song all about drugs. I mean, pretty much every line is about where I had sunk and what drug(s) had sunk me. This is another song that started life as a cassette tape from Scott Daniels. He'd recorded these cool chords on a patio somewhere, and in the background of the recording you could hear a train whistle off in the distance.
Something about those chords and that melancholy train whistle inspired me. The words to this came pretty fast. No more songs about drugs after this one. Not too long after writing these words I got sick, had heart surgery, etc. I had played that shit out as long as I could. I was glad to finally be on the way out of that mess, as opposed to just being on the way out.
