Discography Week #1

As this blog enters its dotage (although it's still in better shape than its guardian) it continues to evolve.  It started out as a travel blog, but as I began to do less travel it, again, like me, had to change course.  Presently it is much more thematically-focused, which is evidenced by all of the half-witted attempts to explore Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.  With this in mind, I thought it would be great to get a group of my best friends together and discuss their most meaningful songs, essentially creating a group discography spanning one year.  While we might have an occasional theme, generally it's just going to be what we're thinking at that moment.  So, with that in mind . . .

Dave Wallace

Lucero, Here At the Starlite

I discovered Lucero about a decade ago, and they immediately became one of my favorite bands.  For my money, Ben Nichols, their leader, is one of the best songwriters going today.  (Interesting side note, his brother, Jeff Nichols, is an excellent movie director.)  Lucero has a ton of great songs, but this one is my favorite.  It's classic Nichols - brooding in a dive diner over the end of a relationship.  I love how the guitar work is such a great compliment to his mood.  And the ominous instrumental build to the end of the song is brilliant.

Bob Craigmile

James McMurtry, Lights of Cheyenne

I think about this song’s lyrics all the time.  Musically it’s simple yet interesting.  But an artist does something special when they inhabit someone else’s skin.  In this case, James becomes a waitress in Wyoming in late middle age with a bad back and an abusive husband.  Yes, it’s all there in six minutes and forty seconds.

What is it about singer/songwriters that fascinates middle aged white guys so much?  Is it the allure of Dylan?  The curly headed rogue who took over New York’s early sixties folk scene with his midwestern jewish off kilter brand of decidedly earnest, but not sounding it, lyrics.  The man has become a myth.  Despite 50 some odd years of running in any direction he chose, people still revere that initial burst of genius.

Maybe you don’t need to know this (sorry, I’m a librarian), but there are at least 983 books on Dylan.  Look it up.  Why?  Why do we want to know?  What does it tell us about ourselves if we ask, much less answer, this question?  

I come not to praise or bury Dylan, but to blabber on about his musical descendants.  There are so many, and some who don’t even know they are.  James McMurtry may or may not disagree about his lineage (his literal father is Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove, etc.) and it’s really pointless in his case, because he shines in his own right, with his own light.

I’ve seen JM play several times now.  He uses a set list, and screams from the crowd requesting other songs are told “people know what they wanna hear, but no one knows what they’re gonna hear”.  He doesn’t so much sing as sneer the songs; like Dylan, he doesn’t have a singer’s voice (think “vocalist”).  But he criticizes singers who don’t enunciate properly.  He’s cantankerous as hell, and as opinionated as any Texan (see the track Max’s Theorem on Live in Aught Three).  Yet he knows what singling live is about (“I used ta think I was an artist...turns out I’m a beer salesman!”) and encourages people to dance at his shows.  And it’s hard not to.

And so.  Here we are at Lights of Cheyenne.  Not at all danceable, but the details in this song are exquisite:

Now take a crumpled up

soft pack and give it a shake

Out by the dumpster on a cigarette break

The imagery is just as amazing.  

Look off down the highway

at the glittering lights

Like windshield glass

on the shoulder tonight

As the diesels come

grinding on up from the plains

All bunched up like pearls on a string

Later, we hear poetry as accusation:

You stand in the sky with

your feet on the ground

True songwriting artistry can make you not only see what the creator sees, but feel what they feel.  It’s an amazing gift really.  If you, the reader/listener, need more proof, look at “Ruby and Carlos”, another vignette of a complicated relationship between Ruby (a veterinarian), and Carlos, a drummer (perhaps with chemical poisoning, if not PTSD, from the Gulf War).  She’s older, he’s sadder.  Neither can guess how it will turn out:

“You can't unclench your teeth

To howl the way you should”

James knows how to howl.  Dylan taught them all what howling was.  

Gary Beatrice

Guy Clark, Texas 1947

Initially I thought I'd send a Merle Haggard song but this Guy Clark song better captures my love for classic country music. This song has an infectious melody and is exquisitely sung, but it's all about the remarkable songwriting. Guy wonderfully captures the singer's innocence and youthful excitement, but more amazingly he manages to fully create a whole cast of villagers with simple throw-away lines around a simple event that must have seemed like a miracle in Texas circa 1947.

Gary Scudder

Drive-By Truckers, Lookout Mountain

Like way too many of the songs that I'll be contributing to this discussion, I learned about this song, and this band, from friends and loved ones who have a much broader and more sophisticated sense of music than I have.  If not for folks like my ex-wife Brenda or Dave Kelley or Gary Beatrice or Dave Wallace or Jack Schultz or Bob Craigmile or Mike Kelly (crap, almost everyone who is participating on this blog series) I'd still be listening to almost nothing but Neil Young.  Thank you for taking pity on me.  Over way too many beers in way too many bars I've initiated discussions over what band is the greatest American band.  The stipulations are that 1) they have to be an American band, and 2) that they have to sing important songs about the American condition.  After years of thought I've reduced my list to only two possibilities: Uncle Tupelo or the Drive-By Truckers. In the end I side with the Drive-By Truckers, partially because they're still out there somewhere performing as a band, and because they're just dark enough and angry enough to match my sensibilities.  I saw them last summer at Higher Ground here in Burlington for a whopping $20, and they blew the roof off the place as well as finishing the job of making me deaf.  I love this song, not only because it has a great guitar riff, but also because it, like so many of their songs, gets at the angry dark confusion at the heart of so much of the American experience.

Dave Kelley

Johnny Cash, You Are My Sunshine

     So my first pick is an unusual one and not representative of my future selections.  I have been thinking about simplicity lately (being a simpleton myself.)  While complexity, nuance, cleverness, and multiple layers of meaning are obviously all fantastic qualities in art and in life, there is also much to be said for simplicity.  In many ways, conveying something meaningful in a simple and elemental way is the hardest thing to do.  Whatever one might think of The Beatles, I find more quality in "I Saw Her Standing There", than in the entire Sergeant Peppers record.

     Now to my unusual first selection  (It is by no means #1 on my list)  "You Are My Sunshine."  I find both the lyrics and the melody to be very simple and yet very beautiful.  While I believe it was written as a romantic love song, I find that it is most often associated with the love of a child.  That is certainly how I experienced it as a child.  Both my mother and my grandmother sang it to me as a child.  I sang it to my niece and nephew when they were very little on the few occasions I was tasked with putting them to sleep.  When I am senile and drooling on myself (an event predicted for next February), I will probably not be able to recall very many of my future song selections.  "You Are My Sunshine"?  That I will remember.

     Therefore in memory of a great childhood and in an ode to beautiful simplicity, I make "You Are My Sunshine" my first selection. 

Jack Schultz

Lonnie Mack, Further On Down the Road

Shamelessly taking the easy route, I attempt to pay homage to a music icon we lost this week.  I am not speaking of Prince, but of the great Lonnie Mack.  He was a guitar player’s guitar player, revered by musicians but perhaps underappreciated by the public at large.  Ironically, his dying on the same day as Prince is keeping his legacy relegated to the back pages of public consciousness.
 

He brought the Flying V guitar to prominence in the early ‘60s, hitting it relatively big with instrumentals Memphis and Wham.  He did some work as a studio musician, including playing bass on Morrison Hotel by the Doors.  He was the one riffing on Roadhouse Blues.  He drifted back into obscurity during the ‘70s before experiencing a renaissance in the mid-‘80s, thanks to the support of Stevie Ray Vaughan.  SRV cited Mack has his biggest influence.  Many others, including Neil Young, Dicky Betts, and Rick Derringer have cited Mack as a big influence.

During the early 80’s, Mack was living in Aurora, Indiana and playing most weekends at a dive called The Sunnyside Inn.  Gary Scudder and I had the good fortune to enjoy Mack’s performances multiple times in an unusually intimate setting.  Gary worked summers at the local box factory, while I was at the local glass factory.  Many a night we convened after work at Sunnyside, long neck beer in hand, unencumbered by the attention of any local females. 

The clip I’m including is of Mack, Albert Collins, and Roy Buchanan at Carnegie Hall pounding out Taj Mahal’s Further on Down the Road.  My favorite Mack song is Cincinnati Jail, about an incident where Mack was shot and arrested in the Queen City.  I actually wrote the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago about how to get Mack elected.  I received a nicely worked form letter on the process, but did not act on it.  At the end of the day, I haven’t decided if Halls of Fame are intensely relevant or irrelevant.  

Mike Kelly

The National, Start a War

Knowing that there are still bands out there who can sing my life back to me is the finest surprising pleasure of my Dockers-wearing descent into middle age.  While it was never hard to find someone who could echo the urgency of 17 or the trepidation of 22, I thought that the blunted nuance of adult life wasn't something that translated to a song.  The National showed me how I was wrong. In "Start a War", the muted, but present passion doesn't need to be screamed or dramatized, but instead the subtleties of lines like "You were always weird but I never had to hold you by the edges like I do now" speak to the slow, but dramatic changes that happen over time as well as the unsexy ways people make shit work. 

Miranda Tavares

Frank Turner, Love, Ire & Song

I had my first installment pretty much written in my head, a nice, solid, classic song with a nice, solid, classic theme.  But then I binge-watched 2 weeks worth of The Daily Show and had to call an audible. My pick of the week is Frank Turner's "Love, Ire & Song." It depicts the conflict between the pull of idealism and the pull of cynicism, each of which is not just a philosophical idea but has become, I would argue, a thought process necessary to survival. Frank writes about being older and looking back on younger days. He insinuates the young are stupid in their black and white thinking, labeling everything right or wrong, good or evil, being unwilling to compromise. Not only that, but the young believe (also stupidly) that they can change the world, right the wrongs and rid the evil. As one gets older, experiences teach that this is impossible. But he realizes that losing the hope that one has as a young idealist takes quite a bit of joy out of life. His chorus sums it up:

Oh, but once we were young, and we were crass enough to care
But I guess you live and learn, we won't make that mistake again, no
Oh, but surely just for one day, we could fight and we could win
And if only for a little while, we could insist on the impossible

It's hard to be an activist today. Change is hard to come by, and in fighting for change you lose more than you win. And when you do win, you are inevitable greeted by hate. The "smart", practical people take a good look at the odds and give up. But against all odds there remain people who never grew up, never lost that idealism, and truly believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that change is possible. I give heartfelt thanks to those people. And I give heartfelt thanks to Frank Turner for writing this song that helps keep my mind open and my hope alive. 

Nate Bell

Gangstagrass, Two Yards and You Can Go Home Again

Gangstagrass is a wonderful little band that captured many people's attention by authoring the theme song to Justified.  As a mash-up of urban "gangsta" hip hop and bluegrass/traditional, it seems long overdue to appeal to the shared struggles and common themes of 2 our country's major groups of poor underclass:  urban African Americans and rural Appalachian poor.  It helps that the driving force behind the traditional folk element is Rench, a strong proponent and advocate-songwriter in the style of early labor and economic freedom songs

That said, much of their music is just lyrical, catchy and fun.  But frequently, the group touches on very strong shared cords of economic hardship and desperation.

2 songs in point/counterpoint:

2 Yards describes perfectly and infectiously the desperation of the dispossessed and the anger and powerlessness of poor folks everywhere---one that results in a disturbingly catchy little ditty about a bank robbery

"laid off one year today/they won't take my resume, so kiss my a$$ MFer, you're gonna pay"

The chorus refers to the nihilistic conclusion that the singers will either become rich from their heist and

"have a big backyard, sippin' on champagne, or a gravel yard and a number for my name"--all vocalized in almost gleeful anger.  Desperate acts from desperate poor men...

The Counterpoint song is "You Can Never Go Home Again".

Here Gangstagrass describes the life of an ex-convict.  It is sorrowful and penitent, offering no excuses for the unnamed prior misdeeds.  Nonetheless, it is exquisitely painful and mournful as it describes the many after shocks post-prison, from family disintegration, impossibility of finding work, friends dead and passed, opportunities missed and finally, what is sung as almost an inevitable conclusion---suicide.  This song really opens one's mind and speaks to the very real consequences faced even by those who have "done their time", and how their time is never served.  Something to keep very much in the forefront of one's mind when thinking about prison sentences for victimless crimes, property crimes, and prison times for drug possession and the ilk.

Dave Mills

Over the Rhine, Ohio

I discovered the band Over The Rhine when I was a sophomore in college, in Ohio. They were friends of friends, and they often played a hole in the wall bar/laundromat in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone's. If you entered the bar, you paid a cover charge. But if you entered through the laundromat, there was no cover; you just had to do your laundry. As a perpetually underfunded college student, this was an attractive scenario. I was going to pay to do laundry anyway (eventually), and at Sudsy's there was good music thrown in for free. So we sat on the dryers and listened to Over The Rhine play. They were a new band and eager to develop fans, so they would often stay for hours after a show, talking philosophy or whatever. That connection made the music more real and personal for all of us. Some years after those days in Sudsy's, Karin Bergquist, the vocalist, and Linford Detwiler, the songwriter/pianist/bassist got married. They continue today as romantic and musical partners, and have built a music studio and performance venue on a farm in the middle on nowhere down by the Ohio River. Their music has gotten deeper and richer over the years. I could have chosen any number of their songs to share here ("All I Need Is Everything," "Spark," and "All My Favorite People are Broken" come to mind), but I chose "Ohio" because it's where I first discovered their music, it's where I spent my first 20 years of marriage and college teaching, and it's where I attended probably 20-25 of Over The Rhine's concerts. It's a minimalist song -- only Karin's voice and Linford's piano -- so it highlights her vocal talents and his songwriting. Other songs in their deep catalogue draw in a wide range of highly talented musicians to amplify what Karin and Linford have to offer.