“I hit the bottle pretty hard last night” declares Michael
McDermott in the opening lines of title track ‘Hit Me Back’; “and I couldn’t
feel much lower”. While peddling personal despair has been very much a standard
singer-songwriter default for forty years, McDermott’s own back story suggests
his musing is more heartfelt than cynical. His is the misfortune to have been
just one of the many rock and roll casualties seized on by a desperate and
greedy music business as the ‘next big thing’ only to be discarded just as
quickly. Tasting instant acclaim when his first release was likened (in the
oldest and most tedious of clichés) to Dylan and Springsteen he was
subsequently snatched from the coffee houses of his native Chicago and into the
unforgiving clutches of Warner Brothers, MTV and full throttle media promotion.
It all petered out just as quickly and (as he says himself) “by the time I was
24 I was over”.
In 1998 Barry Koppelman, the very A&R man responsible
for McDermott’s initial launch had turned Hollywood scriptwriter and borrowed
the tale of his downward spiral to create an out-of-luck character for his
treatment of cult-classic ‘Rounders’. Two decades on recent releases have seen
a gradual but markedly more durable level of interest in his work, and the
self-released ‘Hit Me Back’ follows well-respected predecessor ‘Hey La La’ in
turning his life experiences into a varied collection of gritty country-folk (‘Dreams
About Trains’, ‘Italy’), haunting ballads (‘A Deal With the Devil’, ‘The Silent
Will Soon Be Singing’) and up-tempo rockers (‘Ever After’ in particular) that
suggest earlier references may not have been misplaced after all. If long-time
fan Stephen King’s claim that he is “possibly the greatest undiscovered showing
of the last twenty years” is somewhat ambitious, this album sees him squaring
up as the equal at least of contemporaries Jessie Malin, Alejandro Escovedo and
Dave Alvin, no mean feat in itself.
Neil B.
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