Pat Metheny - 1979 [1985] "American Garage"

American Garage is the second album by the Pat Metheny Group, released in 1979 on ECM Records.

The album represented the most collaborative writing session between Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays up to that point in the band's history. According to Metheny, this yielded mixed results. He has said that the album's second track, "Airstream," is a favorite from this period. But both he and Mays have expressed less praise for the fifth and final track, "The Epic", which Metheny has claimed, "is all over the map."

The back liner photo gives the impression of a grungy Midwestern garage band, but no, that doesn't describe this sophisticated jazz-rock quartet, which was simultaneously breaking into mass-market acceptance and away from the contemplative ECM stereotype. The arrangements are more structured, the playing often more intense and searching, with a more pronounced rock influence. On the title track, Metheny digs in and displays some authoritative rock-oriented licks and intensity, and the rhythms on "The Search" have a slight, at times asymmetrical Latin feeling. The nearly 13-minute "The Epic" finds the Metheny group developing some real combustion in the improvised sections as Metheny, keyboardist Lyle Mays, bassist Mark Egan and drummer Danny Gottlieb grow tighter as a unit. In hindsight, some of the music seems a bit too tightly conceived to allow adequate breathing room, but this is still high-quality jazz-rock for its time.

When I received a copy of this album to review, I was floored by the creative writing and playing. Now, Many years later I decided to replace my vinyl copy with the digital cousin. This collection still breathes the creative genius that the LP exuded years ago. Listen to the dynamics and the melodic stories that Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays wrote for American Garage and you will have a good idea of many of the works that came later on. The title song is a rockin’ tribute to the 60’s bands that cut their teeth playing “Purple Haze” and “Light My Fire.” The final word on this album is that it is a must to have for anybody who thinks that jazz can’t rock!

With American Garage, the Pat Metheny Group solidified its signature sound. This album, the group’s second, took the Number 1 spot on the 1980 Billboard Jazz chart and spawned a legion of followers. Its virtuosic blend of jazz and roots rock evokes the heartland like no other and has withstood its own commercial success relatively unscathed.

The album opens with a wide view of the open road, and we are in the passenger seat. Metheny’s glistening guitar licks take the wheel, relishing the roar of Lyle Mays’s lively keyboard support under the hood. With Dan Gottlieb’s proclamatory drums and Mark Egan’s sinuous bass in the back seat, we’re good to go. Together, this quartet of talented musicians creates the ultimate musical road trip. There is a beautiful interplay between guitar and bass in the first track, swelling into a verdant wash of backwater splendor. The tone here is almost painfully nostalgic (all the more so for the album’s historicity), as if yearning for something that is only as real as its remembrance. As the car speeds along its journey, we see our collective past just beyond the windshield, somehow within reach. But we also know that as soon as we pull over and step out of the car, there will be nothing to grasp, to hold close, to stow in the trunk or in the glove compartment of our desires. There is only the empty air, the cloudless sky, and the sun beating down upon our backs, as if to say: “You’ve still got miles to go.” But neither do we care, because there is an unbridled joy to the process of travel.

“Airstream” feels undoubtedly like summer, a time of year when obligations melt in the heat along with our inhibitions. The only thing that seems real is the lack of definitive answers, the endless possibility that such freedom entails and which brings us closer to self-realization. It is our most formative season; one in which we observe, live, and learn at our own pace. Metheny captures this free spirit so clearly in his playing. Chord progressions roll off his fingers like change into eager hands at a lemonade stand, and we are reminded of those little moments of independence and security in which, from the merest clinking of coins, we came to assert our agency in a growing awareness of economy. We think also of young love that, while unrequited, also gave us a brief taste of a life lived without obligation. As the track fades out, it leaves behind a trace of itself, a memento of years never forgotten.

“The Search” is the soundtrack for a movie of the mind, a flashback that looks only forward. Alluring piano work lifts the spirits, ruffling the edges of our attention like linen flapping on a clothesline. We bask in the humid air, even as squalls threaten to break upon the horizon. Lusciously harmonized guitar lines blossom in the morning sun with the promise of a new journey.

The title track sounds like a theme song for a show that can never materialize, for its images are supplied by memories. We begin to recognize the value of those times when the self had yet to be formed but during which the future seemed so bright. And no matter how jaded we have become in our lowest points of adulthood, Metheny is here to remind us that it is precisely in these artifacts of sound that we can preserve our tired hopes.

The last track of this all-too-short album is called “The Epic,” and like its title it has an extensive tale to tell. Metheny and Mays both deliver with the most inspired improvisations on the album, drifting across the plains like steel-stringed tumbleweeds. We are driven through an entire day and night of travel. We find ourselves in vast stretches of daylight, but also experience nocturnal visions, wrapped in a sleeping bag under a canopy of stars in the dying embers of a campfire exhaling hot orange into the darkness. Their crackling fills our ears with a cacophony of sound, easing us into the lull of dreams. And in those dreams we relive the entire journey that got us to where we are now. We are drifters, alone and free of earthly bonds, loving every second of life’s uncertainty.

American Garage marked Mays' first use of the Oberheim synthesizer, which became an integral part of the Group's sound.

https://jazz-rock-fusion-guitar.blogspot.com/search?q=Pat+Metheny

Track listing:

1. (Cross The) Heartland 6:49
2. Airstream 6:14
3. The Search 4:45
4. American Garage 4:08
5. The Epic 12:55

Personnel:

Pat Metheny – 6-and 12-string electric and acoustic guitars
Lyle Mays – piano, Oberheim synthesizer, autoharp, electric organ
Mark Egan – electric bass
Dan Gottlieb – drums