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
