Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance - One for the Road

Although this is is my first Ronnie Lane review, One for the Road represents the tail end of Ronnie Lane's remarkable 2-year stint as a solo artist--one last blazing home fire of an album before his dreams of surviving in a traveling musical caravan (see the back of the album cover below) buckled under financial pressure and criminally poor album sales.  Excepting the pretty good Pete Townshend collaboration Rough Mix, this is Lane's creative and energetic swansong.

Even more than its two predecessors (Anymore for Anymore and Slim Chance), this is an album of struggle against the pressure to live a mainstream life and an expression of the pure joy of living in connection with nature and self-developed values.  For all his skills as a songwriter and lyricist, Lane's words are deceptively simple.  At times he rants and raves like a man pacing around in a prison cell--"Give me just one wish and leave me be," or "I'd rather have a bad time than no time at all" from "32nd Street"--while tossed off observations like "I've just been where I been/Just seen what I seen/Nothin' more" ("Don't Try'n' Change My Mind") belie the hard wisdom his working-class background and financial struggles must surely have earned him.  Elsewhere it's the simple pleasures he extolls, like a rural wedding ("Steppin' and Reelin'"), waking up with the sun ("G'morning"), and the slow burn-out of late summer ("Burnin' Summer").  Despite his obvious frustration with the societal pressures he so concertedly contradicts, Lane never sounds bitter.  His voice, at times a rough growl and at others a soulful croon, is an ever-present reminder that this is a man laying his passion and struggle bare for all to see.

Ronnie Lane's earlier contributions to the Small Faces and The Faces certainly hinted at the direction his solo career took, but who would have ever guessed his sound would ever get as organic, joyous and soulful as it is here?  Slim Chance not only employs typical rock band instrumentation, there's also fiddle, accordion and mandolin--not bad for just five dudes.  They're also able back-up singers, making songs like "One for the Road," "32nd Street" and "Nobody's Listenin'" some of the most raucous shout-alongs Lane ever laid to tape.  In my mind, Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance is about as close as anyone else has ever gotten to the Band's confluence of soul, genre-blending, songwriting, earthy feel and purity of feel--and Slim Chance only has one lead vocalist.  In today's musical era of anachronistic old-timey so-called "Americana," trumped-up agrarian costumery and forced vocal affectations, more than a few performers could learn something from Lane's authenticity, both as a songwriter and performer--he uses simple instruments not to look backward, but to conjure the timeless energy of a group of friends playing and singing together, and his songs still sound fresh because they tap into his passionate self-expression, not some imagined sepia folk world.  With simple music that sounds as instantly familiar as this, that's what separates the few kernels of wheat from the god-awfully huge piles of chaff--even though the system eventually battered Ronnie Lane into submission, he's got at least three shining albums of beautiful defiance that escape commercial surrender and stand proud on their own distinctive spirit.

You can get this (nearly complete) album here, along with almost all of Slim Chance.  Also highly-recommended is The Passing Show , a film documentary that follows Lane from his Small Faces days to his tragic MS-related death.