"Ugly but effective" It was the way my old golf coach spoke of our number one player. He had a low, slight fade which never apex more than fifty feet off the ground, a hideous swing which produced a ball that rolled on and on forever. Myself, I would rather hit high draws that sometimes turned into hooks which wandered into the woods and maybe that is a character flaw but I preferred looking like a player over actually scoring like one.
Lyle Lovett is not a handsome man but somehow he pulled one of the hottest movie stars in her day. His pocked-marked faced mouthed myriad fantastic songs based on a life experienced on the plains of West Texas in Rodeos, Ranches and Texas swing honkey-tonks. Like our number one he wasn't the best thing to look at but he got the job done. In a word he is legit, the real deal whiskey drinking madman riding, as his good friend Robert Earl Keen says "A car down the highway at eighty miles and hour and taking the steering wheel off". Many times he has broken bones on the back of a thousand pounds of twitching pissed-off muscle, so many times he has parlayed that experience into song. But also he has used his experience (such as losing the hottest movie star in her day) to write three minute long, epic Keatsian ballads on loss and the emotions involved in such sad scenes.
Farther Down the Line combines rodeo nomenclature, ideas and actions and mixes them with that most serious of all rodeos...the nightlife at the bar and the procurement of a mate for the night. It fits. Because just like at seven and a half seconds, at times you can feel her slipping out of your grasp, the rope around your hand loosening and her mentally bucking out of control, you try to hold on for just a half a second more and find yourself on the ground left dusty and worse for the wear only to move on to another venue and another bull.
It's a quick three minutes this song but it possesses enough gravitas to be covered by the man Wille himself; a man known to spin a few yarns in his day. Its a quick life spent in the bars, running around from town to town, bull to bull, woman to woman, and it isn't the most rewarding. Strolling away from the bar with rejection in your mouth only to be washed away with some warm whiskey, strolling away from that bull and sliding a snooze of Copenhagen between your gums. But you do it and you move on to the next because you are only eight seconds away from immortality, only a smile and a caress away from satisfaction. In the end it doesn't matter how one gets there, if it is a low, slow fade, a high scraping draw, or a pocked-marked face mumbling lines to someone out of its league. In the end all that matters is hangin on and surviving till that next buzzer sounds and the next casual glance turns into a drink on that midnight rodeo.
