The white stuff

Everlast sings the blues

by Jon Garelick

The voice has that smooth gravelly texture, and in its best moments -- on a slow or medium-tempo blues -- it conjures white New Orleans voodoo men like Dr. John and Coco Robicheaux. (In fact, "Next Man" from Whitey Ford Sings the Blues sounds as if it wanted to be Dr. John doing Allen Toussaint's "Life.") When he raps, there's the vinegary nasal bark of Ice T.

Strip Everlast of racial politics -- and of lyrics -- and he commands authority. His syllables and chord changes click into place with a satisfying inevitability. In fact, the new Eat at Whitey's is a step up in sophistication from 1998's Whitey Ford Sings the Blues (both on Tommy Boy). You can hear that in the opening rap, the 12-bar verses all underlined with a long, repeated, deep scratching cello line that matches the grain of Everlast's voice. And in the ominous piano figure and strings in "Deadly Assassins," which are worthy of Dr. Dre. Or the killer '60s-vintage organ solo on "Mercy on My Soul." Or the overlapping of kora-like harp plucking and bowed cello on "Graves To Dig."

Then it's a matter of how credible it all is, how much you believe it. The music and the voice of "Black Jesus" sure sound great. But "They call me white devil, Black Jesus/Heaven closes, Hell freezes" -- I mean, Jesus. Isn't a guy named Erik Schrody who calls himself Everlast playing a character named "Whitey Ford" taking himself a bit seriously? Of course, since his heart attack, as Schrody keeps telling us, he sees things differently. He's looked at life from both sides now. He's sincere. No Beck-like intellectual gamesmanship here, with its cut-and-past ironies. The irony of Beck (or for that matter, that other famous cardiac patient, David Letterman) is not at hand. Neither does Everlast abide the party-boy assholery of his old band House of Pain. But the swagger's still there. How can you swagger and still be sincere and introspective? Is there such a thing as introspective swagger? Fred Durst never had it this tough.

The thing is, a lot of the time Everlast pulls it off -- the music is that good. "Love for Real" goes for Otis Redding broke. It opens with guitars -- light wah-wah single-note figures, then chunky upstroking rhythm and some Barry White strings. The woman who offered herself to him, salty sweet with sandals on her feet, asking (or getting him to ask himself), "Do you want to be loved for real?" And Everlast's simple, self-lacerating regret: "But I just played the role, broke the heart I stole/Cause I was young and dumb and fucked up in the head." For a moment, Erik Everlast Schrody is as real as real can be, as true to his new sincere self as to his hip-hop blackface persona ("young and dumb and fucked up in the head"), as real as Dylan lost in the phantasmagoria of desolation row, Tom Petty soaring into the great wide open, Peter Wolf walking down Green Street, Q-Tip purring, "One-two, one-two get it on." The song builds to a climax, those strings quivering with tremolo, N'dea Davenport chiming in with soul on the chorus. "She fit me like a glove, she taught me how to love," Everlast sings as we nod along, and then: "And for some ass I watched it all go up in smoke."

For some ass? It's not the behavior that jars but the language. If not for Erik Schrody's sake, then for the song's, I wish he could be more delicate.

It's like that all through the album. Everlast's the straight-talkin' white bluesman who's been to Hell and back, but sometimes he just leans a bit too hard on the point, throws off his own balance. It's not that he doesn't have the right to some hokum. Some of Dr. John's best stuff is blessed with a bit of hokum ("Walk on Gilded Splinters"). But it's sincerity Everlast's selling us, remember? He sings it himself: "If it ain't from the heart, then it can't be art." And at times, you feel he wants to break into the grandest schlock of all, Led Zeppelin. The opening acoustic chords of "I Can't Move" lead you to expect Robert Plant to come swooping in with one of his banshee "ooo-eee!" howls. In "Babylon Feeling," I swear it's Aerosmith who nearly come to the fore in a "Dream On" chorus, replete with an actual Carlos Santana guitar solo.

But the sound always wins me back, and those times when music and word comport perfectly. "I Can't Move" (with the aforementioned Plant intro) is fear itself ("I'm not scared, but I can't move"), with those ever-present strings, that spooky organ, and those folky chord changes. The production and the arrangements are so spot-on that the singing and the raps flow into each other without much trouble, and it doesn't hurt that folks like B. Real are helping with the raps and Santana and Warren Haynes with the bluesy guitar licks. Come to think of it, Everlast's own guitar playing is pretty tasty. He hasn't invented folk hip-hop -- I think Beck did that, or maybe Dylan himself. Listening to Eat at Whitey's, I had times when I was ready to write it all off. What do I need this for when I've got plenty of real blues, real hip-hop, real Dylan, and the authentic fakery of Beck right at hand? But then I'd find myself singing along to Everlast's own "one-two" countoffs. Fred Durst never had it so good.