"Apartment #9" Bobby Austin, Johnny Paycheck & Tammy Wynette-You're Good Girl's Gone Bad

I try so very hard to stay away from country on this blog, but like all music it comes back to country or blues.  There simply isn't anything else.  Dylan took from it, Springsteen, Elvis, Stones, present day hipster tunes; hell I'd even venture to bet there is a Daft Punk song out there that claimed inspiration from country.  In turn I won't make excuses for writing about it and simply get on with the smooth pedal steel and trickling piano that encompasses this song.  I've never met a man I've called a friend who didn't enjoy country and I intend on keeping it that way.  The reason being, if you don't get country then you haven't lived and while ships are safer in port they belong on the sea.  You have to get dirty in life.

And I use that metaphor both as such and quite literally.

Listen to that steel intro and try to help not being brought to a place where coal miners drink the evening away or roughnecks massage their aching muscles into bearable pain.  Picture "Urban Cowboy" without the Hollywood bullshit and if you can't then live it and know what I am talking about.  Move out into that land where the man who plays pedal steel is working on his fourth divorce and somehow the bud heavies he is drinking bear labels from 1973.  Walk out into the parking lot and make a call on the payphone with the neon of the honkytonk casting a shadow on the patina of the pickup trucks corralled and waiting for their riders, the kind of trucks that have the transmission on the steering column and only one mirror on the driver's side.  Look at the blond at the end of the bar who has shunned sancerre for a tumbler of watered down whiskey in a white tank top showing a rose tattoo on the top edges of her chest wearing a pair of hip-high waisted jeans with black cowboy boots as she tries to get lubed up enough to take anyone home.  Smell the worn leather of the stools of which thousands of lonely people have rested their souls and gave into the piano and transitory nature of life without hope or foresight of what tomorrow will bring.

Many of friend who has found their lives not working out as they thought I've recommended heading to that place.  In its misery there is a beauty.  A beauty I can't quite capture in words but feel every time I've been a part of it.  At times I long to go back there when I hear the siren's call of hard booze and women who are a shell of their former cotton queen selves and the music is anything but over produced and honestly pure.  When the swinging doors close I'll meander down the block leaving my car in that dusty parking lot and fall asleep in front of a TV that is locked to the dresser and put my keys down next to an ashtray that has actually been used.  Is this an over romanticized view of a white trash world?  It is.  But just listen to that piano solo and you'll give up your box seats at the Met any day of the week, shun Yo Yo Ma and call blasphemy on Miles.

One night on the road I recall driving into such a town and parking at such a place only to retire to said motel room sans woman and taking care of myself on the 50 thread count sheets watching infomercials of Girls Gone Wild on a tube TV with a whiskey buzz, then the next morning taking an hour long shower to wash the filth away.  If you are pensive and find it hard to contemplate a song such as this, put yourself there and know what it is all about.

Photograph by Ken Rockwell at kenrockwell.com 

"Good Ole Boys Like Me" Don Williams-Portrait

I spent seven years of my life living in the south in various locations.  There's a lot of reasons to like the country down there and some glaring things to not like.  Last weekend I had a buddy in from Boston, born and raised in New England, I lived there for five years myself, a place that has its own glaring things to not like such as the bitter cold, darkness at four in the afternoon and of course the obnoxious sports fans and terrible accents and slang. I guess all places have their drawbacks.

It was a real pleasure to see him however and we had a chill weekend in the city, a weekend spent with drinks and a lot of conversation.  He has been down south a few times for business and various trips, somewhere in the course of the conversation I made the statement that at one point in a man's life he should live in the south for some time, at least a year or two.

The last time I resided in the south I was pretty alone for a while.  I had the mates from the squadron but at the time most were married and could never be counted on to head out every night.  By chance I met a civilian, born in the south, mother from Kentucky, grew up in Savannah, college in Virginia and law school in Birmingham...he touched all the bases.  On a nightly basis he could be counted on to head out and like clockwork around eight every night I'd receive a text or a phone call and we'd be on our way.  At times we'd start at the country club situated on the St. John's River with low handing trees covered with moss and old time black staff who'd place "Mr." before your given name in historically southern class.

There were a lot of friends with Mossy Oak hats, khaki pants, women with pearls, everyone smoked, shot birds, obsessed with ACC and SEC football...at times it was pretty annoying to be honest but then at other times it was fantastic and just felt "right".  This was a group of people who simply lived the way they have been for years and years without second guessing their plight or position in life.  There'd be fall afternoons eating oysters off of the grill drinking cold beers in Barbour jackets with the game on in the background, oppressive summer heat and full white linen pants and shirts.  I'd make trips up to Charleston and eat shrimp grits, drink gin and tonics at the bar out of one shot bottles (as was the law at the time) and watch cadets from The Citadel walk through the square with their dates under the Stars and Bars, head out to Kiawah, Sea Isle and Amelia and watch the sun come up over the marshy low country and the blue herons wading for their breakfast.

But the first time I heard this song I was shotgun in an old E class Mercedes driving down a particularly beautiful road in my town, moss trees creating a canopy over the road, century old homes with single pane lead windows and large sitting porches passing by slowly.  I had a roadie G&T in my hand and my friend threw this on saying it reminded him of his childhood and then jokingly looked at me and asked what was gonna happen to good ole boys such as himself.  I laughed because I never thought of him as such, he was more of the southern gentlemen type versus the good ole boy and I think he himself knew that.

However last night I was driving back to Manhattan and this song came on, afterwards I threw it on repeat over and over and again back in my apartment.  I started thinking about my friend and those days and gave him a call since it has been some time.  He answered and we chatted as this song played in the background. It warmed me and I felt the humidity even as it was 20 out and my radiators where clanking.  When I hung up I looked out my window and realized something I have always known but usually forget: It's always the people who make wherever you reside home.

"Holland Tunnel" John Phillips-John, The Wolfking of L.A.

There's a decent amount of bullshit in the late 60's, 70's singer songwriter movement.  This song is not a part of it however.  As someone who has traversed this country on the blue and red roads over the years, there is not a more liberating experience, a panacea for the doldrums of a life of consumerism played out within the confines of a cubicle with only a mild reprieve on the weekends fueled by booze to the extended family and a trip to Whole Foods before you turn in Sunday night to slave at it all over again.

And maybe there is some nobility in working towards a cause and the responsibilities of a family, extended or the nuclear kind, but like I'm calling Gordon Lightfoot out on his bullshit I am officially laying down my treaty on a way to live.  To embrace the Deus Ex Machina of that convertible Eldorado and then lose yourself within its confines and see the world that has slipped your consciousness while trapped under fluorescent lights and subways with fellow slaves in some sick Dostoevsky-Dantian hell of which there is no escape.

But that is what they want you to think, conjure up that spirit of the 60's, fuck the man and release yourself from their oppressive grasps.  All it takes is to make that first step, it is always the hardest part...you think you would have learned that when you were fifteen months, stop shitting your pants and grow.  Grow, let the blue skies of this grand land be your intoxication, the black tar of the highway your only sustenance, and the feeling in the pit of your stomach be your navigational guide through the badlands, the prairie fields, staccato Rockies, across the Continental Divide (take a piss on it and feel your excretions touch both oceans) and out to the glorious land laying on the Pacific.  The desert as lush and green as Eden itself kissed each morning by the mist of the cold currents that move south from Alaska.

Meet someone new and drink on the beach near a campfire until you discover who he truly is, flirt with that blond you were eyeing in the store while picking up a soft pack of Lucky's and a bottle of screw cap wine until you've tasted her and then smoked them afterwards while breaking off that cap under the stars, waking up after a night of spooning with sand in between each others' toes, watching her face in the morning light and brushing the sleep from her eyes.

And let this song start the adventure off, let it be the coaxing whisper in your ear and let it never forget that the chances you haven't taken are the ones that you lose, the ones that resign yourself to your Sisyphean existence under those cold, shitty lights and the nightmare of what laid out there if only you made your way through that tunnel.

Happy Birthday Elvis

I just did a post about Elvis a few weeks ago however I just wanted to say happy birthday to The King of Rock and Roll.  I've always thought that there are only a few performers out there who truly elevated music to the level of a religious experience.  He was one of them.  Watch the video below and the trance like state he, as well as the others on stage enter.  It reminds me about how the monks in the Gregorian chant days used to sing long, complex chants with no written structure because they syncopated their heartbeats and acted as one, in a mantra like way (this has been deduced by viewing old carvings of monks singing and they had their hands on each other's neck arteries thereby picturing using heartbeats as a metronome).

Rock, Country, Gospel...no matter what he threw down The King nailed it every time.  Happy birthday E, still taking care of business beyond the grave.