Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

Two summers ago, when people were oohing and arghing about Johnny Depp doing Keith Richards as Captain Jack Sparrow again, Depp and Pirates director Gore Verbinski also presented Rogues Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys, a two-CD set produced by Hal Willner (the tribute album guy). Okay, so pirate-mania didn’t exactly extend to the revival of sea-faring songs, but among the upshots of the Rogues project was that it brought the name Baby Gramps into the homes of those who bought the collection for its rare and one-off Bono, Sting, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, and Tom Waits-doing-pirate tracks. (Waits’ fans may already know Gramps, and if not, you might appreciate his gravelly, old-time warble and barbed humor with a whole lotta heart.)

And yet, with all that star power (Richard Thompson, Bryan Ferry, and Lucinda Williams were also on board—yarr!), it was the Gramps track, “Cape Cod Girls” (recorded with Akron/Family, Bill Frisell, and Phillip Morgan from the Cutters), that got top billing (side one, cut one) on Rogues Gallery; he’s also the artist they sent to Letterman to plug it. Is it really any wonder? The pirate’s life was made for Baby Gramps.

Singer, songwriter, guitarist, and teller of tall tales, Gramps has spent a lifetime plundering the treasures of the old world, told and untold, ever since he was a young man—probably the youngest person on the planet to have ever gone by the sobriquet Gramps (that’s where the Baby comes in). These days, as back then, he keeps alive early 20th century standards like “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, “St. James Infirmary”, and “Big Rock Candy Mountain” along with lesser-known chestnuts like “Go Wash an Elephant (If You Want to Do Something Big)” and his own creations in the same spirit, like his live, showboat number, “Palindromes” (“Tarzan raised a Desi Arnaz rat”; “Ho hum, a hymn is in my ham. Uh oh”; etc.)

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