John Lincoln Wright New England Country Music Icon - Dead at 64

[piks11]

Having moved to Boston from Memphis and living in a borrowed apartment
in Cambridge, I felt a bit less homesick when I discovered John
Lincoln Wright playing country music in Jonathon Swift's, his home
club located in Harvard Square, about three blocks from where I was
living. John was relatively young back then and proud as a peacock up
on the stage performing with his Sour Mash Boys. May he rest in
peace.

http://www.patriotledger.com/entertainment/x536735765/MUSIC-SCENE-John-Lincoln-Wright-was-a-country-icon

New England Country musician John Lincoln Wright , Age 64

“Too old to die young, too young to go, How I ever got this far, the
good Lord only knows, I’ve been around the horn and back so many times
that now I’ve found, I’m too old to die young now.”

– John Lincoln Wright, “Too Old to Die Young Now”
http://tinyurl.com/7fwuhlu

By Jay Miller For the Patriot Ledger December 12, 2011

“They say at the end John Lincoln Wright was just fighting a losing
battle with the bottle. If so, that’s the only country-western cliche
he ever dealt us.

Wright, 64, died Dec. 4 in Cambridge after a series of strokes, but it
had been a few years since he’d performed gigs. His two-and-a-half
pack a day cigarette habit and his drinking took a toll. By about 2003
even, his flawless baritone voice was showing the effects.

“I’ve been on the losing end of all my dreaming, All my dimes are gone
into a wishing well, And I’m one drink closer to heaven, Lord, take me
out of this hell.” – (“One Drink Closer to Heaven”)

For a couple generations of music fans, Wright was the man who brought
country music to New England – and also brought New England into
country music. If you like Americana or the alternative country played
by New England acts like The Swinging Steaks, Girls Guns & Glory, or
Highway Ghosts, you’re hearing some of Wright’s influence.

“Honky Tonk Verite,” his 1991 album, was as gritty and potent a
collection of roadhouse music as anyone ever recorded. Whenever people
talk about timeless New England music, we just point music fans to
that album and to 1990’s “That Old Mill,” which was Wright’s acoustic
portrait of New England. Earlier albums, like his 1973 debut, “Closed
for Alterations,” or “Takin’ Old Route One,” were on vinyl and are
probably long out of print. Baseball fans have probably already heard
some of his more comical gems – often done under the nom de plume Pine
Tree John – like “Blasted in the Bleachers,” “The Red Sox Song,” and
“The Ballad of Oil Can Boyd.”

Wright played at a variety of venues, from the old Ranch House in
Marshfield, to the Commercial Club in East Bridgewater, even to the
Charlie Horse in West Bridgewater, and he had a sizable South Shore
fan base. The fact that the Massachusetts Country Music Awards
Association was based on the South Shore didn’t hurt. Wright, by the
way, won so many of their awards they eventually had to take him out
of the competition to give other musicians a chance.

We tracked down a couple of members of Wright’s classic band, The Sour
Mash Boys, to get their reflections on the decades they spent playing
together.

“Lincoln’s unique style was his greatest strength, and also his
weakness,” said guitarist Larry Flint, a songwriter, who fronts his
band The Road Scholars, and also plays in numerous Irish bands like
Devri. “John had a firm vision of what he wanted to do, and he really
didn’t care if anyone liked him. If they slammed him or complimented
him, it was all the same to him. Whatever else he had been doing all
day, when he hit that stage at night, he was for damned sure John
Lincoln Wright.”

Said fiddler Matt Leavenworth from his New Hampshire home: “I think in
the later years, after the gigs had dried up, John just wasn’t feeling
it. But I did speak to him last summer, and he sounded good, and was
talking about doing a couple shows again. I was really hoping we’d do
a couple at some of our old haunts.”

An unlikely country star from Maine, Wright attended Boston College in
the the mid-’60s and started a band, which became The Beacon Street
Union.

Wright drifted into country music, although Flint said he and Wright
also shared a love of jazz, and the singer was a big Frank Sinatra
fan. By about 1973, a tiny underground bar in Harvard Square, King’s,
was letting the country-loving musicians play on their stage, for
free. Eventually that bar was sold, remodeled and reopened as a music
emporium known as Jonathan Swift’s. The Sour Mash Boys would be
regulars until it closed, late in 1986.

Said Flint: “We played together pretty consistently for 40 years. When
I first heard that voice it ran right through me – and he had that
voice sounding just that good night in and night out.”

Wright’s debut album “Closed for Alterations” helped break the band
all over New England. Wright could pen affecting music that also
didn’t take itself too seriously. “Takin’ Old Route One” in ’73 kept
the ball rolling, but Nashville was never going to completely warm to
the cowboy from Maine.

“John’s songs would never contain a pickup truck reference to try and
sell himself in Nashville,” Flint said. “I think instinctively he knew
he was never cut out for that scene. We’d go to Nashville a couple
times a year in the early days, but he was never a schmoozer. He had
his own style.”

Said Leavenworth: “John was a very politically aware and active guy –
and loudly liberal. As a country musician that set him apart, and
probably didn’t help him in Nashville. But it also got him a niche up
here, so that we got a lot of gigs on rock shows and stuff like that,
because people knew he was not your typical country musician.”

Throughout, Wright’s music was unique, not quite traditional country,
and surely not the homogenized, corporate Nashville sound.

“I would think, in retrospect, John and I are both essentially
Americana,” said Flint. “We were both not quite folk music, and not
all country.”

Leavenworth agreed.

“For all his country leanings, John still had his rock ’n’ roll
sensibility. There were a lot of nights when the band was slamming
pretty hard. But John also loved to be a crooner, loved to get deeply
into a ballad,” he said.

There were some great nights along the way, like the time country
fiddle legend Vassar Clements played Swift’s, and Wright managed to
get the Sour Mash Boys hired as his backup band.

“By the end of that night it was more like Vassar backing up John
Lincoln Wright,” said Leavenworth. “Then around 1996 or ’97, we got a
gig playing in Singapore in the middle of the winter. We got a week in
a five-star hotel and had a blast. Then we played one night in Santa
Fe with Billy Joe Shaver, and Townes Van Zandt came down and sat in
with us. All those guys knew John and respected his music.”

But by the time the 1990s were ending, clubs were closing, gigs were
drying up, and Wright was beginning to have health problems. His
marriage was also on the rocks.

“It was hard to find good bookings after the mid-’90s,” Flint said.
“We had to focus more on special events, like fairs, or private
parties. In our heyday we’d had a lot of college gigs, and traveled a
lot – we were very big in Toronto. That all petered out. It wore him
down, you could see it. But still he had that voice, and you’d know it
within a couple notes.”

In 2003, Flint was producer for Wright’s last album, a project titled
“October Days” after its title cut, yet another Wright gem. It was
never released.

“John was in pretty bad physical shape, and even his voice was going,”
said Flint. “By then he was separated, living on his own. His wife
(Victoria) refused to divorce him, because she wanted to make sure he
stayed on her health insurance, since it was obvious he was going to
need medical care. I can’t say enough about how good she was to John,
finding him a place and helping support him. But he was battling a
demon, and he couldn’t beat it.”

Flint figures his last real performance was in 2007. Maybe it’s too
easy to say the music business broke his heart.

“It was the intelligence of his writing that got me,” said
Leavenworth. “And he really was talented – a lot of people might’ve
missed that, but he was an amazing, very outgoing front man.”