Earl Scruggs Claw Hammers, Hippie Kids + A Grace Beyond the Moment

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I’ll never look at the Waffle House the same way. The one out by the
Assault & Battery Lane exit, 65 South out of Nashville, called Harding Place
before the name change.
It’s actually on Sidco Drive, a parallel runner that’s lower industrial strip
malls. There’s a Cracker Barrel for the more traditional Christian-types.
Then there’s our Waffle House, like an Island of Broken Toys for college
kids trying, sobering up from a benders, gay kids after whippets and
dancing, old Nashville remembering and the occasional country star.
Everybody sits tucked away in formica veneer booths or at the counter on
swivel stools, waiting on their Scattered, Smothered & Covered. Even him.
See, that’s the thing about Earl Scruggs, bluegrass royalty, generational
bridge, iconic artist and musical trailblazer, he was always at home with theSave & Close
slightly off-kilter.
You’d see him there. A lot. Especially after his lovely wife/manager/deal
squeezing wife Louise passed on. Or at first, you wouldn’t see him. He’d
just be. Maybe you’d go to pay your check, or else you’d notice how neat
and pressed his denim pants seemed.
Wouldn’t think much about the calm man sitting over his plate of eggs. Until you looked a little closer. Then WHAM! One of those only in Nashville moments: “Crap! That’s Early Scruggs – “ would exclaim the voice in your head.
Mostly people didn’t bother him much. Might stop and say a few words.
You didn’t bother stars at he Waffle House; you sure weren’t gonna pile up
on a legend trying to drink his coffee in the not so early morning hours.
I remember the first time. Sucked in by the demin pants. “Ahhh, what a nice
looking older gentleman,” I thought. I smiled, always a softie for serious
grown-ups.
Raising my eyes to gaze into the countenance of this lovely man, I felt my
jaw go slack. “Holy crap! It’s Earl Scruggs…” I hoped was uttered by my
internal voice. He didn’t really look, so the silence was my cover.
He looked up from his plate, met my eyes, smiled.
I smiled back. Dunce, yes, but not paralyzed with shock. Most likely, I was
so surprised, I scanned as someone who had no clue, no notion that this
was the man who invented the intricate 3 finger picking style that almost
eradicated claw-hammer playing.
It was a genuine moment. Quiet, unseen, but engaged. He didn’t need to
show me his Grammys, he offered his heart. Sincerity and warmth is about
as good as it gets.
See, Earl Scruggs might’ve been a master musician and innovator of the
same caliber as Miles Davis or Coltrane, but he was more a man who sought
to bring people together. As a player, his first break came in 1945 with Bill
Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys on the Grand Ole Opry, but it wasn’t long
until he and Lester Flatt teamed up and spent the 50s and 60s barn storming
the country – and creating a true frame for the Appalachian musical form
that was all ache and flying fingers.
 Flatt & Scruggs were icons. Standard-bearers. Gospel-carriers.
 The audience was white, lower middle class, worked with their hands, backs
hurting. But they found the Flatt & Scruggs sound vitalizing.
And then there were the hippies. When the 60s folk movement hit and the
hippie generation erupted, Earl Scruggs – in part at the behest of his wife
Louise – packed up his sons and took the Earl Scruggs Review to colleges
across the nation.
With the Viet Nam War in full throttle, college kids protesting and drugs
making their way into the mainstream youth culture, musicianship and a
yearning for authentic made Scruggs the hottest ticket with the hippest kids.
This was breaking ground and healing generational damage just by being
who he was.
And who he was transcended what he was. Always a player of high
execution and credibility, Scruggs also believed in music’s transcendence.
When country was as right as you could get and Jane Fonda the only woman
more radical than Joan Baez, Scruggs couldn’t wait to make music with her
-- recognizing the crystal clarity in her voice.
He also played with hippie sitar player Ravi Shankar, the folk-pop band the
Byrds and Bob Dylan. The Eastern music and inscrutable lyrics engaging
him in new and thrilling ways.
Which was really all Scruggs wanted: to be engaged, pushed, challenged, to
see how far music could go. He was there when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
recorded Will The Circle Be Unbroken and returned for Will The Circle
Be Unbroken, Vol 2, produced by his acoustic guitar virtuoso son Randy
Scruggs.
He was there at the Opry. With and without Flatt.
He was all about making music. When Steve Martin got serious about
bluegrass, Scruggs was there. When Elton John wanted to play with a banjo
man, he was there. Indeed, he was as comfortable with Billy Bob Thornton
as he was Vince Gill or Marty Stuart – and folks like John Fogerty and Leon
Russell clamored to play with the man who’s in the Country Music Hall of
Fame, has received the National Medal of the Arts, recorded Red, Hot &
Country for the Red Hot Organization, which supports AIDS charities , and
received a Grammy for his 1968 “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” as well
as writing and recording “The Ballad of Jed Clampitt” for “The Beverly
Hillbillies.”
It is vast this legacy. Marks left in places most would never think of, yet
when you pull back and consider… of course.
Like the Waffle House, where I don’t get around to near as much now that
my metabolism has slowed to a crawl. Its just one more all night dive off I65
just south of town, except that Earl Scruggs used to sit at its counter, quietly
eating his breakfast.
Always one of my favorite things to tell out of town guests!
“THIS is Earl Scruggs Waffle House!” I would proudly declare. Their eyes
would open wide. Sometimes they’d get lucky and he’d walk in, or I’d
signal with my own eyes where to look.
Now, of course, you won’t have to. He’s not there. Although my money –
once he gets sorted out in heaven – is that he’ll be back. You’ll find him
sitting there at the second or third stool, not quite present, but there… Just a
presence that will never quite leave.
Of course, when you make the musical mark Earl Scruggs did, you won’t
ever be gone. People will listen to his records and marvel; pick up their
instrument and practice the complicated three fingers rolls, the wildly
accelerated picking.
His mark shall last forever. So will his soul. A man from the same Piedmont
region in North Carolina – which gave us contemporary hipsters Carolina
Chocolate Drops – he was dedicated to his craft, pushing boundaries and
sorting out what the future held.
There’s no more sorting. Earl Scruggs is in heaven. With the angels. With
the Angel Band – and all is, though somewhat sad and slightly empty, alright
with the world, with the ones who pay attention, even as we’re sad through
losing Scruggs.

Amy Winehouse: No, NO, no... Fame Kills Harder Than Drugs or Sex or Booze

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            It wasn’t like we couldn’t see it coming, wasn’t like anyone was shocked. Yet, the news Amy Winehouse had indeed been found dead in her London apartment tore through my Saturday morning with the harsh ripping reserved for muslin I’m going to use for mustard plasters. Forceful, sick, weakening.

            Just as quickly, the romancing of the necrophoolishness began All the talk of the 27 Club, those tortured seemingly-beyond-comprehension-talents who also died in their 27th year Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. There’s nothing romantic about addiction – or the kind of pain so profound no amount of drugs or sex or booze can tamp it down.

            It’s an odd bargain we watchers of the bold-faced make. Reveling in the lip gloss and hair color, high heels and hobbies; but also voraciously consuming these creatures who capture our attention, For what reason do we watch? What gift? Does Snookie have any real value? The Kardashians? Paris Hilton?

            Beyond Amy Winehouse’s ages old voice, a delicious mix of sweat and ennui boiled in a flammable combination of kerosene, cocktails and bodily fluids, her biggest hit was the sardonic “Rehab,” a song mocking the thing that might’ve saved her – had she ever committed to it.

            Instead Winehouse’s notoriety was driven by a bobsled ride of trainwrecks, misadventure after trainwreck misadventure piling up like used syringes. Wandering around, clearly out of her mind, bee hive busted, eye liner smeared down her face, often in a state of near complete undress. Sometimes it was rows with tavern keepers; occasionally, her acting out coming via on-again, off-again husband Blake Fielder-Civil, a man quite possibly along for the ride on the reflected glory fame flume.

            A highlight of that combustive union pictures from the morning after a particularly brutal night, her bruised eyes, feet bleeding through ballerina flats and him, face clearly scratched madly, walking hand-in-hand down the street like post-soul Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. Placidity post-pound down.

            Insanity makes for good copy. The media can’t get enough of a disaster, and 5 Grammy Awards be damned, the high jinks meant more than the music she created. For having been raised on a strong vein of classic jazz and saloon songs – her first album was named Frank in obvious homage, and contained the gold-digger hating vitrol “Fuck Me Pumps” – and easing into a ‘60s soul redux that had a modern flair, equal parts wide-eyed innocence and street-wise irony, Winehouse told it like it was for a generation watching all social norms being melted down for greed and a brand-name-checking nihilism designed to validate from the outside rather than the inside.

            But it’s that raw ache, like a rope burn to the soul, that made her something more than the Brit-pop-soul thrushes – from Duffy to Adele – who came in her wake. This wasn’t about the pain of a relationship gone really bad, this was some other kind of soul-battering that had a profound darkness, no doubt heightened by addiction, at least one toxic relationship and the enabling that all pop stars attract.

            Because it’s hard to tell pop stars “no.” The second you do, five willing compliants pop up, validating whatever bad thing they crave as something deserves and often deriding the person voicing objection as “a buzzkill.”

            Being the one standing by, watching, helpless and knowing every outreach only alienates the addict, sex hound, boozer further. The debate begins: stay close and hope you can catch a falling star… or allow them the consequences of their actions, knowing the ultimate end could be the ultimate consequence.

            There’s a saying a recovering alcoholic I know – 20+ years sober – embraces, “Don’t deny me the dignity of my struggle.” Or in the case of record company people who need the next record, the agent and manager who commission, everyone else who gets their fees, the momentum of her fame and the money.

            Who tells someone who can still create a furor with next to nothing – her Tony Bennett track will no doubt be a stand out –they don’t have a choice? The tour’s cancelled. You’re off the road until you’re sorted out. REALLY sorted out, not a Band-Aid on the problem and a blind-eye to the fact that your treatment is a white knuckle kinda sobriety.

            Not to mention how annoying the incessant calls, problems, shady characters and questionable reasons become. Some of the handlers resent or mock the person behind their back; others join in – as part of the party or from the fringes rocking their own deal because the artist doesn’t know… and no one cares. They’re beyond that in the momentum of the meltdown.

            Those meltdowns, by the way, are awesome. Not only does it give the media a quick jolt of adrenal buzz, a way to hold people’s attention, it allows readers, viewers, regular people to feel superior – because they’d never be that messed up.

            Look at Britney shave her head…  Attack the mean paparazzi with an umbrella…

            Watch Courtney throw make-up at Madonna live on tv… see her wander into a Wendy’s almost naked… Fight with her daughter Frances Bean on Twitter…

            See Kate Moss honk up a white powder with her then boyfriend Pete Doherty, of Baby Shambles, a man known more for his drug abuse not music…

            Watch the indulged famous brats implode. Easy prey. Lost souls. Dumb luck. Hard work. Take this and be cool… Be an outlaw… Rock harder than a mere mortal… And hey, Icarus, if those wax wings melt cause you’re too close to the sun, don’t blame us when you crash to the ground and die.

            Shoulda known. All those chances.

            We consumed your pain, your freak-out and turned it into water cooler conversation.

            We drove our mini-vans or Priuses, wore our neat and clean clothes – or our pseudo-bohemian hipster looks, took out the trash and hit happy hour. We loved the music, but we loved the freak show more. And so the roulette wheel spins. Most make it, some don’t – but we, the Romans are entertained watching the stars face lions that look just like indulgences.

            What we lose is what that music might’ve been. There are plenty of great straight up soul singers, but Amy Winehouse hit veins – sometimes with razors, sometimes diamonds, but always with deadly clarity.

            Maybe not like Billie Holiday, another famous junkie the press is now rushing to invoke, but perhaps more like Judy Garland, a tragic figure propped up for commerce and lost in a pain we’ll never know.

            What kind of songs would Kurt Cobain have written? What would he have said about the state of his generation? The nation? The world?

            What kind of breakthrough playing would Hendrix have achieved? Where might he have taken the electric guitar? What might rock songs have become in his cosmos of groovy love and psychedelia?

            Would Morrison have recovered enough to find a societal matrix that would’ve broken through to the other side? Merged poetry in its purest form with the release and conquest that rock & roll is at its root?

            And Joplin? What soul-melting revelations could’ve come – a la Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time – had she found a little help? Could she have melted pain and defenses with her raging vulnerability? Maybe.

            It’s really the “We’ll Never Know Club.” We can’t say they could’ve been saved. But you can wonder what price does putting your foot down exact? Lose the friend, the client… save the life, possibly.

            Over the years, I’ve delivered a bunch of bad news. Starting with my own parents. People don’t like it. They get mad. They hate you. There’s never any proof what you stood down “woulda got’em.”

            You don’t know. You don’t. And the other person has to want to be more than a piss’n’puke stain on the floor. Tricky business, saving lives that are more valuable in any shape half-functioning. Yet, the ultimate loss is even more.

             We couldn’t have done anything to save Amy Winehouse. But participating in the tabloid speculation, the “ooooh”ing and “tsk”ing about “how awful it all is” creates a market for these people to be hounded. The worse it gets, the harder to cope; the harder to cope, the more likely they are to numb.

            It’s easy to say, “it comes with the privileges.” And it does. But it’s also about helping these people walk the line of fame in a way their sanity isn’t one of the first things to go,  replaced by the copious consumption based on rock star expectations.

            It takes special skills to navigate fame, the rush of everyone wanting a piece of you. It takes handlers who believe in humanity as much as money. It takes a long-eyed view of a flame burning awfully fast.

            When you hear someone’s sliding, express outrage and concern. Don’t sniger and laugh. It is funny: those humiliating, crazy things that happen when people can’t get right, but it’s something more, too.

            Like I said: we didn’t cause, couldn’t stop it. But we’re all accessories when feeding the beast that eats their lunch. What we lose, we’ll never know. Creativity is its own commodity, but a little bit of our humanity goes when we’re callous, mocking, eye-rolling, indifferent.

            Think about that, and think about being the change we need to see in a celebrity-obsessed world where too many are famous for nothing but the empty husk of not much more than gaudy consumptive lives

Gil Scott-Heron’s Gone

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Turn Around, Turn Around… I’m New Here, Again

He wasn’t like anything you’d think. A raw-voiced truth-seeker, crippled by addiction to where Riker’s Island became a return address. A provocateur working on a template of what came before – the Last Poets and Langston Highes – who broke ground for the hip=hop revolution.

            “We Almost Lost Detroit.”“The Bottle.”“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

The cracks swallow inconvenient black men. It’s easier that way. Give them smoke’n’something, let’em quiet their mind beyond the law, silence the nagging the truth they sell. ‘Cause coalescing the underclass is a problem. You don’t want that lightning rod, especially one laying down the real of how it is, how it’s wrong, how it’s gone, drawing the fire of the disenfranchised to a single spot…

 Gil Scott-Heron was just that kind of cat. He knew. Child of a Jamaican soccer player who wasn’t around and a librarian, who was a woman of strength and conviction. Born in Chicago and raised in Jackson, Tennessee by a Grandma who died when the boy when 12. Moved to the Bronx, ended up in a Chelsea project apartment that was mostly Puerto Rica – the marginalized have their margins, too – and ended up at a high WASP prep school on a full scholarship by virtue of his gift as a writer.

 College in Philadelphis. Signed to Arista by Clive Davis. A voice of a generation, a racial awakening, a revolutionary, a man galvanizing ecological realities, social injustice, enslavement at one’s own hand.

No Nukes, he was devastating. The coiled energy and fraught warning of “We Almost Lost Detroit.” You knew who the Doobies Brothers were, CSN and Jackson Browne… But the lanky black man who’s voice burned into you, haunted the furtherest recesses of your mind. Damn.

Damn. just damn.

The man could play football stadiums in Detroit. He was a superstar. Before superstars.

He was the messenger. Same way as Chuck D. As Rage Against the Machine. As Dylan, but more over than Dylan – more strident, less mercurial.

It was all so much, too much.

But it all fell apart, falls apart like too much heat and momentum can when not tended by sane minds working to a common goal and direction.

So Gil Scott-Heron disappeared. Gone into the shadow, into the night, into the ether.

In our louder, faster, bling-er culture, it was easy to not even miss the raw voice tugging at what you know is right, but just isn’t convenient, just don’t make you feel all fly and nasty.

The hip-hoppers, from Kanye West to Mos Def, even Usher Twittering about the news yesterday, acknowledge his power.

Even that, that kind of impact, that sort of acclaim, didn’t have the power of the “stuff.” The crack-poison he smoked to feel better, feel taller, feel like he matters… cause most addicts pick their poison for the way it makes them feel invincible or invisible, the way it pushes back the doubt and the things they don’t wanna know. Blotto is sometimes a good way to go.           Til you’re strung out, a forgotten junkie trading on what was, acting like it still is.

Gil Scott-Heron became the kind of classic cautionary reality he might’ve word-song’ed about.Books. Poetry. Records. Then a whole other kind of rap: a rap sheet at the local precinct.When word of I’m New Here came down the line over a year again, I wondered.What could it be? How could I feel? How bright would be a light lit with a propane torch?

Turns out there was nothing to fear. Like Rick Rubin, Brit producer Richard Russell came in reverence, but not awe. He looked around, assessed the situation, the reality – and crafted an album fraught with tension, but ultimately strung like wire to hold up the rhymes and the truths of Gil Scott-Heron today.

I’m New Here is a tough listen. Confessions from the edge of the slide into a Hell that isn’t completely unwanted. It is not a surrender Scott-Heron brings, but more a boastful sense of indifference, the denial of mortality and the rough patches that knowing brings.

Opening with a variation on Robert Johnson’s “Me & The Devil,” it is a collaborative work. As much between the artist and the demons as the producer and the artist. It is a bit of a wrestle and a bit of an elegy for someone still alive, yet half-dead to the addiction.

“New York is Killing Me,” “Running,” “Where Did The Night Go” – all haunted and haunting, the romance pf pain and fleeing tempered with the ache of how it really is. “I’m New Here,” a quiet acoustic track that’s almost a rural evocation, could be the siren’s call of the geographic cure or the topographic lie one tells to believe things change.

There us a middle ground, the romantic promise – all cello slices for punctuation, synth bed, piano chords rising and that voice descending in a low -slung cocktail jazz moan – of “I’ll Take Care of You.” It is a bankrupt warranty, more hope in hope than any kind of reality to embrace.  Kind of like the empty promise of crack cocaine, crystal meth, whatever alters your truth to something that don’t reckon.

Still, beyond the slippery slope on this patchwork of beats, sinister melodic lines, electronica, the occasional sample and Heron’s raspy wail and off-handed in-studio conversation (used as transitions between the actual tracks) a picture emerges of a gentle man grateful for the roots he was given. Equal parts tough Polaroid and soft-focus black & white field photograph, I’m New Here celebrates the women who raised him.

So for every admonishment like “The Crutch” or the spoken knowing the bill will come due “Being Blessed,” you have an interlude of “Parents” and “I’ve Been Guided.” Indeed, “From A Broken Home” and “From A Broken Home, Part 2” are a strong witness to the potency of strength, love and facing reality without flinching. No matter how rank his life got, he knew where he was from.

 “From A Broken Home, Part Two” is not a cop-out, but an homage. Beyond bromide.As he unrolls what he’s seen, what he believes, the language is bare, the beat right there.

“And so my life has been guidedand all the love I needed was providedthrough my mother’s sacrificesI saw where her life wentTo give more than birth to me, but  life to me

“This ain’t one of those clichés about black women being strong…cause, hell, if you’re weak you’re gone but life courage determined to do more than just survive& too many homes have a missing woman or man without the feeling of missing love…”

 “cause men die and lose their lustand they leave/“I came from what they called a broken homebut if they ever really called at our housethey’d’ve known how wrong they werewe were working on our lives and our homedealing with what we had, not what we didn’t havemy life has been guided by womenbut because of them, I am a manGod bless you, Mama, and thank you…”

 And so I’m New Here ends. The spoken utterance of grace and truth.

“No matter how far gone you’re gone, you can always turn around…,” Heron sings on the title track. “I did not become someone I did not mean to be/ But I’m new here, will you show me around?”

Turn around, turn around

You may come full circle

a new year

Again

Turn around, turn around, turn around

You may come full circle

every new year again

I’m new here… again….

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Matraca Berg: Dreaming in Fields, Falling & Chasing The Angels

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            I shouldn’t be writing this. It’s not right.

            You see, I first met Matraca Berg -- as Delbert McClinton wrote – in a warehouse in West L.A. She was, at 26, a wildly accomplished songwriter with several #1s, including her first written at 18 with no less than the legendary Bobby Braddock. She was on the verge of her debut record, and they’d called me to write the bio., to capture the story, the music and weave it into some kind of narrative essence.

            She was tall, thin, pretty. Giant eyes, brown hair tumbling down around a heart-shaped face – and when she looked, you knew she knew. Everything. She understood. It made her a powerful voice for young women self-reliant beyond their years, banging into real life and realizing the bruises that come with learning the hard way. Romantic in spire of knowing, willing to keep wading into the rivers of real life, she held a light on so many of the unseen: the late middle-aged beautician of “Alice in the Looking Glass,” the lost girlhood of “Appalachian Rain,” as well as the liquid desire of “I Got It Bad.”

            That was 20 years and several labels ago. A lot has happened. Life has deepened – to the good and the bad. Triumphs for certain – the first woman to write 5 #1s in a year, becoming a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame – as the tragedies deepend, too. Not that she talks about them, but they permeate many of the songs she writes.

          And I know. Of course I do… I’ve been there for all of it.

          See. Matraca Berg said to me in that parking lot that day all those years ago, as I was ruing moving to Nashville, knowing how cliquish it is and how not like the typical girl I am, “I’ll be your friend.” She meant it.

            I arrived July 3, my good silverware heavy in my carry-on bag – about the only possession I had of any real value – and the exhaustion all over me. Confronted with a sea of bad Christmas tree perms on the rush of women coming at me in the airport, I broke down crying in the arms of the man from Tennessee Car & Van Rental.

            July 4th, I was at her Aunt Sudie’s house for chicken and too much family. An only child, I wasn’t used to the tangle of loud talk, big laughter and people pecking at each other, It didn’t matter, they took to me like they take to everyone.

            Since then, we’ve been through everything. Bad lovers, a husband who I’d written about since I was 19, illness, broken engagements, career success, bolstering each other and taking up against those who would detract when the friend wasn’t there.

            Matraca scored 5 #1s in a single year, won the CMA’s Song of the Year for “Strawberry Wine” and made her network tv debut on the “CMA Awards” with the aching ballad of recognizing the harshest part of old age  “Back When We Were Beautiful” that same night from the album Sunday Morning To Saturday Night. By the end of the year, that album wou;d be on TIME, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, People, The Tennessean and The Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 Albums of the Year in ANY genre – and her label would be out of business.

            The best of times, the worst of times.

            An almost recluse, she’d had enough chasing the fame. She went home. Sunk into the complicated dynamics of extended family. Wrote more songs. Didn’t look back. Her ego didn’t need it; her soul couldn’t take the bruising.

            But, damn, she was still so good. Still a paper cut on your heart kind of wincing compositional proposition. As the best writing is, or should be. And so she remained. Even as she stayed out of view, hidden and thinking about what the Nashville she was raised in – one where the creatives only came out after dark, studiously avoiding the suits, Kristofferson had just risen from the janitorial ranks and Red Lane, Sonny Throckmorton, even  Mel Tillis who were regulars around her mother’s house – meant.

            See, Matraca Berg wasn’t raised like other kids. She was being dragged to recording sessions up and down Music Row by a single mom who knew her daughter had “game.” She was drafted for Neil Young’s snaggle-tooth hippie country Old Ways tour – along with Hargus “Pig” Robbins and Anthony Crawford , back-up singing with Mother Earth’s Tracy Nelson at Live Aid. She knows the difference, and she knows what’s gone.

            Which is why there’s The Dreeaming Fields, an elegy for too many ways of life. The title track is about her grandfather’s dairy farm – the scene of the virginity losing summerscape “Strawberry Wine” -- being parceled off for pre-fab houses, the family farm no longer a part of the America we live in, while “Racing The Angels” is a living person’s pining for one who has passed, palpable and passionate in the heartbreak and sustaining ardor and “Clouds” is the reality of knowing what’s coming, the tears and good-byes, yet willing the end even with the inevitable pain that’s comes with it.

            Matraca Berg has never been afraid of the pain. She recognizes the common currency among women is just thatL courage to move through it, to maintain dignity in the roughest places and the strength to withstand anything. On The Dreaming Fields opener, “If I Had Wings,” the long-suffering battered protagonist hits her limit: “Everyone knew one day it’d be him or me…” as she confesses, “My mother said call the preacher, I just said ‘Call the law…’,”

            These are hard scrabble women. They – like Berg – know no other way.

            It is not an easy life, but it is their’s, and they live it fully. On “You & Tequila,” the song’s heroine honors the hold that one certain someone has over her – “You & tequila make me crazy, run like poison through my veins/ One is one too many, one more is never enough…” – and buckles to the craving, knowing how bad the morning after’s gonna feel.

            Mortality, humanity, kindess, sadness. It is all part of the sum total. On “South of Heaven,” a mother whose son has been sent home covered by a flag sees no point in losing children to battles she can’t understand, for principles that have nothing to do with how she lives or holds her ground. “Father, You have given Your only son,” she sings as the voice of the woman whose truth is all recrimination and seering love for her child, “but you are not the only one…”

            To take a point and skewer it through the listener’s thorax is no small feat. To do it with an essentialism of how we all live is an art. Matraca Berg is a humanist, an everywoman, a seeker and the keeper of people’s secrets. That she keeps them is one thing, that she also recycles them into compelling glimpses of life – the quavering places, moments of doubts,  total surrender – is why she is, inspite of her hiding, so important.

            Not that it’s always dire. “Fall Again” is the fault=line of desire and desolation. You hear how brittle the love has become, and how much she needs to set it ablaze – not to burn it to the ground, but to rekindle what was there. The urgency is one of not losing something so vital, and it comes through in torrents of unquenchable desire.

            Indeed, even the piquant “Your Husband’s Cheating On Us” – a sketch of the other woman’s visit to the long-suffering wife – is a portrait of turnabout in the realm of betrayal. The irony of the hunter getting quartered by the game is a delicious send-up of the wronged being abetted by the betrayer.

            Who we betray, how we do it, indeed, how often the betrayer is ourselves… She understands. Indeed, the woman whose first album in 14 years takes its seeds from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, from Neil Young’s Harvest, from Emmylou Harris’ Pieces of the Sky recognizes how often in doing the seemingly right thing, we so sell ourselves short.

            The Dreeaming Fields contains “Oh, Cumberland,” a song that was originally recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Emmylou Harris for their Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol 3 – and it is a love song to a place one has left, but can never leave. In a place where the dream is theoretically to be had, there is that nagging sense of loss of self, a genuine feeling of ache for where one comes from, for places that make one feel whole and settled.

            It is not about the reality we’re sold – glossy Hollywood living, which mostly only makes one tired, but the roots of where we come from, rivers that barely move and places we can stop and just be. Exhaustion permeates the chase, comfort anchors where we’re from.

            Where we’re from is the whole point, Who we are at our core is everything.

            In a world hurling itself down the stairs of something so two-dimensional, so devoid of deeper meaning, but ooh the shiny high gloss coating of faux emotion and almost reality, we can forget who we are at our broken places – until the dazzle wears off and we’re even more empty than when we started, another cure-all failing us.

            It’s at those times that an album like The Dreaming Fields matters. It gently, humbly, honorably tells us the truth… wincing for us when it stings and encouraging us softly when we need the help to go on. Sometimes it is in the knowing that we can begin to heal, to climb, to seek.

            To me, those have always been the records that mattered. Why I return to Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates or Steve Earle’s Guitar Town, Julie Miller’s “Broken Things” or Alex Bevan’s Springboard again and again… in the lost hours… looking for equanimity and balance in the flood.

            To have someone who knows, who sees and who tells us it’s okay, and it’s up to us to change the dynamic, but also suggesting that we can: that’s everything. For Matraca Berg, who reached back into a dusty paradigm of resonant steel, guitars that waver, pianos that ripple and sustain and vocals that echo like they’re coming down a holler, it is everything, too.

            She knows the difference, and like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl, she has taken this album and held 11 matches aloft, hoping the flame will contain everything she loves about one of Nashville’s most fertile periods musically – so people will see, will know, will breathe and embrace something that matters so much to her.

            In the end, what she loves is what makes us strongest in our banged up places. All you have to do is listen. That’s how powerful these spare songs are. But don’t listen to me… I’m the girl she befriended straight off the plane, and surely I couldn’t be objective, even with all the years of writing for places like The Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, Trouser Press and CREEM, Musician and Tower Pulse, indeed so many great music magazines too long gone, but absolutely measures of the things in music that makes us more as people.

            Making us more is what music is supposed to do. Listening to this record, I remember that. I wonder about the futility of greatness cutting through the dissonance, and I don’t care. It’s why I’m writing about something I shouldn’t for people who might not be able to embrace passion for small rules that make them feel safe – but miss the hardest tilt of the best stuff of what music is, how songs can hit you and the reasons records like this truly matter.

 

 

Gone & Back: Nathan Bell’s BLACK CROW BLUE Lands

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Nathan Bell didn't mean to secede, he just didn't see the point. Having anchored the aggressively progressive bluegrass duo Bell & Shore and cast as the celebrated “iconoclast on the block” as a staff writer for a publishing company run by Alan Jackson's then managers, his rough-hewn lyricism, true blue collar sense and raw-boned masculinity certainly made him stand out on Music Row.

He even made a record with Richard Bennett, a chief architect behind Steve Earle's sound and the seminal Guitar Town as well as being the man Mark Knopfler calls when the Dire Straits icon wants to tour the world. But somewhere between the promise and acclaim of Little Movies and L-Ranko Motel and the flagellation of the country music industry, Nathan Bell lost his taste for it.

Hard Weather, the Bennett album, never came out. Not long after, Bell moved tto Signal Mountain, Tennessee, got a straight job, learned to play golf and raised a family. He didn't look back. He didn't want to.

“Fifteen years…,” Bell muses in the voice that's mostly stacked wood you'd hardly notice, waiting for a fire or termites, depending. “The guitar did not come out… AT ALL.  Other than one time at a company function, where I volunteered - and they had no idea. I completely hated it.”

Bell is the son of acclaimed poet Marvin Bell, so his intellectual acuity isn't like most people's - and his lyricism has the same hard edge you'd expect from Clint Eastwood or Paul Newman, perhaps a bit Jim Harrison. Unblinking, strong, true. Not tough in a brutal way, but more with the stoicism of realizing this is how it is - yet somehow also refusing to relinquish the notion that love remains.

Nathan Bell went about his life. Doing the work. Being a husband, a father.

Then one day, for no real reason, he decided to write some songs. Then he wrote some more. Then he did a few house concerts. He kept working his job at the phone company, kept close to home. Occasionally, he'd venture to Nashville and the fringe of that writerly world, but mostly the songs lived - sent out one-by-one - to people he respected and wanted to converse with, people he deemed “The Cult of 8.”

Somewhere between there and here, his one-man home-recordings morphed into something more. Now there is Black Crow Blue, a highly literal, wildly virile song cycle about how busted the American way of life is, how it lays waste to honorable men - leaving them desolate, lost, not clear what the next move is. It's a walk into the wilderness, for sure, and one that doesn't come with a map to get back home.

Bell, who punches a clock rather than the writers appointments regularly kept by Nashville tunesmiths, believes in the potency of the life he lives rather than life conjured in test tubes and Petri dishes, the illusion of authenticity brokered as some kind of Hallmark Card Americana. Not that he's preaching, he's just figured out his own line to walk.

“I was living in a world of enormous significance when I picked up the guitar again in 2007,” Bell confesses, “and I don't think people even realize. The lower middle class isn't high enough to be safe, nor low enough to be romantic - but they are the majority of the people in this country.

 “What they value is this: family, their community. No one sees how hard they work or how much of their lives they remember and hold on to, how important that is. It's neither romantic failure, not glorified common effort - it's just their life, and it's precious.

 “And I didn't see that until I stopped writing.”

But Nathan Bell doesn't wanna grand diva his way into “knowing the pain” through living it. He pauses, “They call folk music folk music for all the wrong reasons… It's not some Smithsonian thing, it's - to me - about chronicling a man in the world at a time when the world needs chronicling. And  I'm not necessarily that man.

“My truth, honestly, is reflected in the stories I tell about other people… way more than the stories I tell about myself.”

In the brink, songs tumbled out. “She Only Loves Blue” embraces a woman who finds that the records she loves are not only more faithful than the men who've passed through her life, but have emotional resonance in a way few people can. “Me and Larry” offers the refuge of looking back on a friendship with a pre-fame writer and what grace came from it. “Red & White” considers the gaps and overlaps between those trapped on reservations and the varying escapes and those destined to pen them in for “their own good” or just convenience.

And then there's the Crow. Bell deems him “a trickster, ambivalent about not having a home.” Equal parts High Plains Drifter, the best of Paul Newman, perhaps a little Kerouac tempered with kindness more than studied Buddhist nothingness. The Crow ultimately is a man in full.

The notion makes Bell - in a most Crow-like fashion - shrug. “You're not a man by what you admit to watching, by what you think about or pledge allegiance to… that's just ideology masquerading for personal truth. It's more about who they think they should be instead they're not being who they really are. If there's anything virile going on, maybe it's because (this record)'s without the pretense of being something it's not.”

Crow is the kind of man who gets rolled on the highway… left with a warm can of beer and one of the guy's worn out shoes… and still thinks he's doing okay. He doesn't even grapple with death on the side of the road, just knows he lived a long life and wishes it could be longer, that as many years as it was, 85 wasn't nearly enough.

“That's the thing about really living,” Bell says. “It doesn't so much matter where or what… it's that you're engaged. Crow was left with some guy's old shoes and a warm beer, and he figured he was doin' better than a lot of people.”

Half empty. Half full. All heart. Absolutely bankrupt. How we fall on the continuum of appreciation and the willingness to flourish where planted. It is a gift for some, futile for others - and vertiginous for people lost in the white noise, avaricious, new& improved supersized me mine more wasteland.

“Crow is the most extreme and there's nothing extreme about him,” Bell says of his recurring presence. “He just takes a step out into the wasteland and instead of turning back, he doesn't turn back. “American Crow' is the first few steps - and the courage of someone who knows he has absolutely nowhere to go, and keeps walking.

“It's the beginning of everything that eventually ends. And it does. 'Wherein Crow…' is how it all ends for himl 'We All Get Gone' is an elegy for him, for all of us really. You know, if he can see life as pretty okay in all of that, well, that explains the way these characters get through their lives.”

 “Stones Throw” is every family existing on the fault line a paycheck or two from being wiped out, tenuous from believing the things the mortgage brokers told then without truly understanding, disoriented from what their insurance doesn't actually cover, uncertain about the American Dream they're choking on, while “The Striker” is the highest level mercenary loved for his charm and cheered for the chaos he sows, even though that chaos is the seeds of these people's destruction - always drifting, always gone.

Even “Rust,” a clear-eyed consideration of a man's awareness that what he once could do will soon become impossible, offers dignity in the inevitable. That strength that comes from knowing there is no other way.

“Every day, he knows he gets closer and closer to not being able to take care of the people he loves… it's a  problem that he can't solve, he can only live with, find a way to maintain his equilibrium. And he's not gonna cave - or accept it. Instead, he tries to look less afraid by making other's look more afraid, and maybe they are…”

 Fear isn't something Bell has much of. Or the ballet dancing working man doesn't seem to flinch much. He'd tell you that you don't really get choices, but he'll also admit his father the National Book Award nominated poet raised the hard chaw shank of a son to man up and eschew the hysterionics.

“We were raised with a minimal amount of drama and the self-loathing that theoretically comes with the arts,” Bell explains. “It was very blue collar, very this is what you do next. And I can say I had wonderful role models as men. My father, the mentors, even the guy who taught me to play guitar who died far too young. They were steady, people you'd count on.

“I look around, and I don't see much of that now. I was raised on it, but it's fading.”

Which is what gives Bell's protagonists their bite. The what was once and now is growing smaller out there somewhere… Do we jettison decency in the name of getting our's? In spite of the headlines, the dire financial constraints of all but the wealthiest - and that includes a lot of flashy middleclassers leveraged for appearances who're sitting on a bubble of their own creation - Bell finds working people respond from a surprising place.

“In the end, it does no good to look back, to hold on to blame, to ignore that totality of who you are,” he starts breaking it down. “Personalities are absolutely different, but we as human beings are the core are basically the same. You know, in this life, how clever, angry or frustrated it may be at the heart of these songs, at the heart of all of them, there's kindness.”

 Certainly there are echoes of an urban Harvestcentric Neil Young simmering in “Pittsburgh,” just like the almost whispered “My Favorite Year” has the tender toughness of Warren Zevon at his most vulnerable: a detail-driven sketch of moments, truths and friendship.

“If I could've taken pictures or written novels, I wouldn't write songs. But I can't, so this is what I do… and the truth is a pretty basic thing. For me, it's been a quest to tell the truth the way Dorothea Lange took pictures. You know? Set the camera up, open the lense, expose the film and trust the image. You've got it… and you can move on.

 “Because I believe if you take a picture of the truth, you mever have to be embarrassed or back off it. You have to work hard to get the clarity, but if you do, it's always there - and it never changes.”

Every song has stories. Every song has the ghosts of the people who inspired them. Some are gone. Some are conjured. Some are still getting by. All, though, have some kind of valor that supercedes shabby clothes, personal fumblings, a lack of Madison Ave - or Music Row - ambition.

“You got a lot of guys pretending to be cowboys, troubadours, vagrants, outsiders, but there's not a lot of middle-aged working guys pretending to be outlaws… We're too busy working. All we can tell is the truth, but a lot of people are living that truth, too.”

He doesn't wanna preach - or tell anyone how to live. That's not the point of these songs, 15 years in the coming. “I don't know who to talk to about message politics. I mean, why do people make this stuff so important - which God is theone God… who you're having sex with… is this marriage gonna work…

“I've always been uncomfortable with the Marxist theory about art, that if it isn't doing something, it's not good. But because I was raised in the environment of academia and poetry, the artist, I do believe that songs need to carry the conversation further. To me, that's what's important…and not in an ideological way, but in a humanist way.”

Pausing to gather his thoughts and weigh whether to drop the seeming non sequitur in his Cormac McCarthy tableau, Bell exhales so you can hear him. Then he squares up and stands tall.

“I believe in love,” he says without irony, without flinching. “No matter how harsh I get or how frustrated, love is the only thing that matters. I've lived long enough now to know: hate will fade. It just doesn't last. But love? Love… well, it's the one thing that endures.”

There are no hearts, no curlicues, no cupids. Split rail, plain brown mud fence admission. It's all he's got, and it's all he needs. Bell is a tough guy who knows the only thing that redeems and keep the mean out is being able to hold onto love and kindness. It's shot through the manscapes of Black Crow Blue, and it opens the door to a post-Iron John reality where sensitivity and masculinity can be side-by-side without apology.

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For A Dancer Gary Wells Flies, Alex Bevan Shines & A Lost Girl Comes in from the Cold

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“I don't know if you heard about Gary,” said the local folk icon, sitting across the table from me in a tucked away downtown restaurant. There were two glasses of house red and a few hours before us… a few hours before his final gig of the year, a year that - for him - had been marked by a return to what makes him so exceptional as an artist.

I shook my head. I had come to Cleveland to celebrate my friend's new album Fly Away, to mark the pay-off of his risk, and to hopefully find some foothold in a world of my own recently torn apart. For those times when I do not know, home has always held the answers - especially to issues of dignity, honesty, humanity and the price paid to stay in.

Walking away is never something I've done easily. But I have. Sometimes there's no choice. For reasons that make no sense to anyone else. But in the songs of the folk singer, the hometown rock icon - as well as the scarred grey black top of Chagrin River Road - there are often answers, truth and stars to steer by.

“It looks like there's no brain activity,” he continued, falling quiet.Our eyes met. There was nothing to be said. We both knew. Everything. What was the point to belabor the painful? Especially for somebody like Gary Wells, the flamboyant, buoyant brash bartender with the Boston accent and far flung reach.

Gary was some kind of roots music Puck, who could never figure out Emmylou was a single name… who knew the words to too many songs… who would pour an underage kid tequila in a tumbler, looking to all the world like tap water without the ice.

Or maybe it wasn't a lot of underage kids. But he used to do it for me… a girl on the lam from a high impact life, finding a refuge in the folds of the Midwestern night, sneaking into bars to be where the songs were.

Gary Well was a lot like that, too. Always in the bars where the good music was, or where the people who made it flocked. He knew the difference between pop, pap, crap and art - and he studied the people before him to figure where they stood on the continuum.

Burned too bright, too high, too loud. Always. Big talker, big thrust, not so much the clarity of execution. But if you liked the notion of story-spinning Black Irish, looking like a cross between a pirate, a Mohican and a walrus, he was your guy. Or maybe a black lab as a man of libations, tail wagging, collected intensity waiting to spring… always enthused about everything.

Like I said: nothing needed to be said. We both knew. Gary Wells wouldn't want to be mourned, he'd want us to laugh, to talk about music, to dream of where we could go, take it. If Gary's brain was a flatline, that meant - in many ways - he'd already gone. Left his mortal coil, barely breathing, waiting to release its burden. And in that, he would want people to celebrate.

And that's what we did. With frites fried in duck fat, coq au vin cooked in brioche, curry pot de crème - and raised glasses of red wine, toasting what it is, what's gone and what will be. What else can you do?

That night onstage, Alex Bevan played to 35 people. Played the kind of set he did in the glory days of the Coventry Street Fair, filigreed acoustic guitar lines embellishing songs about silver wings, girls named Carey and gunfighter's smiles.

He played it straight. He played it true. Not a revel yell “Skinny (Lil Boy from Cleveland, Ohio)” bar brawl kind of set, but something gentle, paying homage to what songs mean, why artists matter and the power of the craft of musicianship well honed. It was a rebuttal to a cheap Chinese sweatshop machined world - and it was grown in the pages of his life.

Telling the story of coming back from a function for his wife's family - her teenage son asleep in back, she dozing beside him - moved from the grace of love in broken places to the memory of a bit of bad news hitting him not far from where his van now passed. The Lafayette Hotel… Marietta, Ohio… on the banks of the Ohio River, where he got the call that a soul-friend, wild-child, force of nature and tempter of fate had been killed many years ago.

“I quietly sang this song for the next 5 minutes. Softly. To myself,” Bevan confessed with tears shining in his eyes. “I sang it for myself…

”Like the little matchgirl holding her flame aloft to keep the Blessed Virgin before her, Alex Bevan spun a diamond web from the simplest of images: “Here's a song from a bottle of whiskey, here's a song from a Holiday Inn/ Here's a song for everyone, who's ever watched the daylight creeping in… Let it come from the other side of morning, let it come from the other side of light…

”He didn't say whether Gary Wells was in that song this evening. Not quite dead, certainly not ever to return. But this night, I finally knew who the gunfighter is. I asked about neither, but I found a semantic marvel. Was “morning” actually “mourning”? Because this night, “light” sounded a lot like like “life..”

We all stare down barrels of guns. Some of us know it. Some of us don't. Not sure who suffers worse, but we all do… from doubt, or anger about what mighta been, frustration over the breaks that didn't come, remorse over opportunities blown, mistakes made.It is the weight beyond the weight - and even the fools carry it, they just don't realize what weighs them down or the sideways moves they make trying to cope with what they don't see.

Gary Wells wasn't big on looking, more about charging. Head first. Full tilt. A manic toss, thrown down a steep range of stairs without the runners. Scraped, banged up, a couple scars for the sake of the story… and laughing, always laughing.

Consider the consequences later. Live now, large, loud. Reach for what you can take… If you miss the mark, maybe you tumble through nothing - or maybe you just reach again. He didn't really care. Gary Wells was living.

Living. In the cracks. Around the corners. Crazy wild stuff. Adventures had. Dashed. Miscast. Marveled over. There never seemed to be any fear with Gary, just a cockeyed sense that this time… this time, it was gonna be the one, the thing.

And what's amazing about him is… he had the same effect the last time I saw him as he did the first. You just stop… and you look. That hair. That moustache. Those eyes aquiver with too much thrust to be contained within skin.

Back in the day, the bartender in the denim shirt, maintaining his kingdom behind the upstairs bar at Peabody's - order in the court - as Deadly Earnest and Buckeye Bisquit, Mimi Hart, Charlie Wiener and Gaye Marshall churned out their singular brands of roots rock, leaning to the blues, to country, to comedy, to torch.

It was all open season, a mixture of covers by well loved bands and original songs that might never get beyond the 2-1-6. But Gary, pouring a little long and leaning over conspiratorially, took it all in - gave it all back over a series of local radio shows. Solid in his knowledge of being on the front lines, knowing that he knew the people making the music… and in that, his robustness grew.

Not always in the right direction. Missteps came, got caught up, moved away from. Always 6 feet from the next trainwreck or disaster, yet somehow topsy turvying back and forth on that tight rope… no net, not much balance, tights metaphorically torn, and yet, he was always leaping for some trapeze already set into motion.

Gary was never afraid to jump. Or tumble.I thought about that a lot, driving up and down the streets of my hometown. Or more out past my hometown, where the Chagrin River threaded some beautiful pastures, farms, parks. Hand out the window, holding onto the chill wind that kept sliding through my icicle fingers.

Jackson Browne's Late For The Sky was pouring out of the mosquito car's tinny speakers. An album that revolved around a death, and love and the potency of youth - as I understood it in my girlhood. Listening now, it was very much about who I was when I was young…

 “Fountains of sorrow, fountains of light/ You've known that hollow sound of your own steps in flight/ You've had to struggle, you've had to fight/ to keep understanding and compassion in sight/ You've had to hide sometimes, but now you're alright…”

There was an insight I'd never seen, an acceptance to the unthinkable.

I had come home to figure out how you can give your life for and over to something for over 30 years and feel almost nothing for it. When the coals go from glow to not quite cold, there is a different kind of chill… What little warmth is gone, and now the numbness begins penetrating your marrow.

All the things I'd felt so deeply, that I'd clung to, swung from, I just looked at them like strangers. That which had sustained me had now taken me all the way out the pier on a dark night, then crept off while I was looking at the stars. When I turned, I was alone - and there was no one to even ask “What happened?”

And it's not like they'd been faded or diminished over time. Alex Bevan had been a marvel. Focused. Playing as well as ever. Turning stories in films of picture postcards and feelings, drawing us together with a net of his singular life as a mirror of our own.

It wasn't the music… and it might not  have even been me. Maybe the lessons and the losses. My father died with his book unwritten - 18 years of research that was too intricate, too dense for anyone to untangle, basically lost to the universe.

You could argue who really needs a definitive book about American amateur golf? And yet, it's no longer an issue. That piece of history, of writing is forever lost. Forever…Forever is a long time.

Even longer than a life where the wrong values undermine realizing your dreams, exploring your real reasons for being. Just look at my Dad… Look, now, at Gary Wells.

Maybe the script doesn't look the way you imagined it. Maybe the treasons and betrayals are so profound you can't let go… the promises and perks so transfixing you can't quite walk away, Even when so much of it isn't all that, either.

There is a little section on Chagrin River Road, right before you get to Gates Mills where you can pull over. Just enough for two cars maybe to sit and watch the river run… This day, more the water trying to stay fluid beneath the ice cover that wanted to break up, sending large chunks to the drop in the waterline less than a mile away.

So many answers had been found here. My last engagement to end. Knowing a Junior League housewife future wasn't for me. Letting go of a friend who would certainly pull me under. Even just pause and exhale.I had been raised on right and wrong. Work hard. Keep your word. Playground justice. Maintain your standards. Always help. Believe in people. Know that if you see the good in people, they often rise beyond what they think they're capable of - and surprise not just you, but them. Believe.

Believe.That was my problem. I'd lost the faith.Somewhere on the road… on a red carpet… or a private jet… somewhere along the way, it had been bounced out of my pocket, and I didn't notice. Moving on momentum, heat, drama, the things we're all supposed to want. It was awesome, right up until it wasn't.

So I let go. But when you live your life based on centrifugal force, determination and a finger in the wind, it takes a while for the spinning to stop. My father died with his book unwritten. I had a novel that might never see the light of binding.

And I had lost my way. Even the things that bound me together were unraveling.

“Keep a fire burning in your eye/ Pay attention to the open sky/ You never know what might be coming down…” Jackson Browne intoned as I turned my car back towards the city, through the winding meander that turned to true suburbs. “I don't remember losing track of you/ You were always dancing in and out of view/ Must've thought you'd always be around...”

I had promised a friend I would go see Michael Stanley with them. Michael Stanley, local hero who wrote two of the best indictments of the business of music and the faithless way the promise of songs are bled out.     

“Today's for sale and it's all you can afford, buy your own admission the whole thing's got you bored,” he sang of the ennui and urgency on his second solo album, opening the truth up to follow with, “And the Lord uses the good ones, and the bad ones… use the Lord…”

It wasn't mocking, but there was unflinching truth. About the ones who hold on, because to let go would be to lose their hip ticket, their leverage, their access. It wasn't me, but man, I'd been ringside for an awful whole lot of that.

My stomach churned. Did I really wanna hear “Let's Get The Show On The Road”?  Or “Midwest Midnight,” the other accusatory pin through the thorax of those who'd betray what the music should embody.

So many people would be renewed at the annual year end altar call in a city desperate for heroes. They come looking for someone to believe in in a world where the jobs were evaporating, the unemployment was running out and the better days were long, long gone.

I believed in the fire of the Midwest. The Rust Belt smelter blast that forged that notion of against all odds getting by. Even beaten down, they never were beaten. And now I couldn't seem to remember the way back home… at least not to that home in my heart.

As a knobby kneed girl with a 72 Mustang, I used to roll up and down Mayfield and Chagrin River Road, obsessed about what was in those songs. How some woman could so wholly possess a man as in “Spanish Nights,” the utter awakening of “Somewhere In The Night,” the chill urgency of the inevitable that was “Lover.”

… I wanted to have those skills, but I went to a girl's school. Plaid skirts, Knee socks. Monogrammed sweaters. I had moxie, but not the requisite slow burn mystery. It would vex me, but oh how I wanted to live in those songs, churned from the rich dirt, sweat and musk of where I grew up.

“Chasing the fame keeps 'em all in the game, but money's still the way they keep score,” Stanley snarled in the wake-up-slam “Midwest Midnight,” “and nobody told you that you would grow old, strung out like some avenue whore…”

This was not the song I'd signed up for. This was not the life I'd imagined. And yet, that's how the story goes. That's the world I inhabited.

Onstage, Stanley and the Resonators played “Let's Get the Show On The Road,” the meandering Album Rock opus that's all venom, momentum and exhaustion. On a screen behind him, footage played of the same song performed 35 years prior on “Don Kirschner's Rock Concert” - with a band that included Dan Fogelberg, David Sanborn, a plantation-hatted Joe Walsh.

Michael Stanley was supposed to be a rock star. He held every attendance record there was in Cleveland, Ohio. Sold out the basketball arena for two nights faster than Led Zeppelin. Unless you're from Ohio, you've never heard of him.

Here he is, again, though, and so are the people. They come to believe in who they were and to cope with who they are. Tomorrow, it will be back to the bills and the problems, but right now, this is all they ever wanted… and they can forget and believe and fly on the best selves they ever had.

It was during “Winter,” a pensive song about the passage of time, what it takes and the awareness left in its wake. It's about acceptance and grace, recognizing what still is being much more potent than what's been lost. And in between the lines, there is the truth that shines: there is much to love and hold right where you are… all you have to do is hold it.

All you have to do is draw it close.

When I got home, I didn't go online. But when I got up, there was an email… from Alex… knowing me… knowing I'd wanna know… Gary Wells had past from this world around 10 o'clock, right about the time Michael Stanley was musing “It feels like winter's coming on.”

Of course, he had. Of course, he did. “Into the Mystic,” indeed.

For Gary, there was no reason to stay. He had other worlds to wander. It was time. He knew. He let go.

For the rest of us, certainly me, there is the challenge. What do you do when you lose the thread? How do you feel when you don't remember how that is? How do you remember that it just goes on and on - until it doesn't. Especially when every moment squandered is lost and gone.

Gary Wells was one of the icons of my childhood… a lighthouse blinking to where the music, the lost hours that mattered should be spent. He took the hill, shot the curl and never did less than hurl himself completely at whatever he was doing.

There is, no doubt, a time for rest, a place for stillness.

Right now, that may be. Watching Alex Bevan tell those stories… Michael Stanley still weaving those figure 8s with a guitar strapped low… It's obvious there are other measures, other stars to steer by.

Maybe everything they've sold us is bullshit, Gary Wells didn't think so - and he never, like Alex and to an extent Michael Stanley, never got to play the big room. Makes me wonder if maybe the big room - if you do it right - is actually in your heart.

19/20 December 2010

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Townes Van Zandt Facets, Faults & Fractures

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“There’s only two kinds of music: the blues and zippety doo-dah.”

 Townes Van Zandt

It’s 10 o’clock on an abandoned Music Row. The year is 1985. In a third floor office in an old house that serves as the offices for the Oak Ridge Boys’ Silverline/Goldline Music Publishing, Steve Earle brings the chair he’s leaning back in down hard, flipping his hair out of his eyes for emphasis.

He may be doing the very first interview for Guitar Town, an album that will bring the hardcore blue collar back into country music and fire the rock edges to a steely edhe, but there was a far more important point to make.Leaning forward, he announces, “Townes Van Zandt is the best damned songwriter in the world - and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

Swagger? Bravado? The brazen declaration of a young man about to explode? Absolutely. But for Earle - and the quote heard round and around the world - it was also a matter of homage to a man who set the bar for a maverick kid who couldn’t seem to walk enough of a line to get and keep a record deal.

Never mind that his record would be cited by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, Spin, The Chicago Tribune and beyond as not only one of the year’s great debuts, but one of the year’s finest records, period. Nor that Guitar Town - along with Dwight Yoakam’s Guitars, Cadillacs and the soon to be arriving Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith and kd lang-would ignite a progressive /traditional country revolution, which Earle would deem “the Great Credibility Scare of the late 80s.”

No, Earle was raised in the realm of the great Texas troubadours. For them the song was everything. The song was holy, the master to be served and honored. Indeed, the song was the reason for being. These were taskmasters pure and simple - and they kept their standards high.

“I remember Townes was in the audience one night,” Earle said of their first meeting, “and I knew it was him. He kept yelling for ‘The Wabash Cannonball,’ said ‘How could I be a folk singer if I didn’t know ‘The Wabash Cannonball’…”

And Earle, equally brash, silenced the sinewy songwriter with a dead perfect rendition of TVZ’s wickedly difficult “Mr. Mudd and Mr Gold.”  It was the beginning of a Captain and the Kid mentorship that was both tough love and exacting standards - two things that define who Earle is today as a man, an activist and an artist.

“Well, it wasn’t like Townes was gonna go down to Music Row and go ‘produce this’,” laughs Grammy-winning Texas expat artist/songwriter Rodney Crowell. “Those performances were moments - and the recordings were documents, not productions. That wouldn’t work, because you knew he was living that shit.

“I mean, back in ‘72 when Townes‘d hit town,  staying at Amy Martin’s place, all us wanna be writers at the time would stand around roasting weenies, all wanting to write songs with him… and he’d be upstairs kicking dope. He seemed so exotic and hardcore.”Crowell had originally run into Van Zandt at Houston’s Sand Mountain Coffeehouse in 1970 “or 71,” where he was initially transfixed by his performing style. “He was a little dangerous, a little out on the edge - not in a Ramones bang you over the head way, but just that kind of brilliance he had was a little spooky. Just this snakish charisma that drew you in…”

And therein lies the enigma that defines Van Zandt’s legend. With two biographies - John Kruth’s award-winning To Live’s To Fly and Robert Earl Hardy’s A Deeper Blue-and a documentary ‘Be Here To Love Me,” the facts of his life are more than laid out. Yet even the concrete details can’t define or hold the man who wrote with a razor and howled like a soul lost.

No, Van Zandt’s gift was his ability to always pass through, to remain somehow transparent and yet unabashedly the most here-it-is person in the room. If you saw him, you couldn’t forget him… and if you heard him, you were going to respond.“Lungs,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Loretta,” “To Live Is To Fly,”  “If I Needed You,” “St John The Gambler,” “For The Sake of the Song,” “No Place To Fall,” “White Frieghtliner Blues” are the tip of the iceberg. With a Townes Van Zandt song, there was no way out - only down and through.

“I was driving through Southern Vermont,” recalls jam goddess/rocker Grace Potter, who’s been cited for her own allegorical and deeply personal writing. “It was the summer I got my drivers license, so this was a total freedom drive. I didn’t need to be anywhere and I was just driving.

“There was a cassette in this pile that said ‘Townes,’ and I had no idea. I didn’t know who’s it was… just figured it was some show at Town Hall. But I put it in and ‘Waiting Around to Die’ played, and I couldn’t even drive. I had to pull over because it was so full of pain, but so beautiful at the same time. There was no anger, just this voice letting it go, just put it out there… So poetic that suffering.

“I’d been digging Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, but this was something else. I mean, he’d bunk up at Motel 6s, eat at Denny every day, drink himself silly and sing until he fell over… he was that pure and that committed to doing it.“And those songs could have been played by minstrels in the Mideval days. It was that simple, you know? That basic truth was everything - and he sure owned A Minor!”

Potter is a B-3/Flying V-playing firebrand in her own way. Vivacious. Brilliant. Candid. With her band the Nocturnals, she has toured with Gov’t Mule, My Morning Jacket and the Black Crowes - as well as being a regular on the festival circuit. A world away form Van Zandt’s austerity, her devotion is a witness to the vastness of Van Zandt’s soul-baring connection.

“Success means… that’s never gonna happen to me,” Van Zandt confessed to writer Wm Peck, who profiled the elusive guitarist for  the now-defunct Look. “Heaven ain’t bad, but you don’t get a lot done. Selling a lot of records and getting to be a name, you end up knowing it isn’t the same - what you put in isn’t what they get out…

“To me, the music uncovers it all. I don’t even know what a problem is… just a lurking thing."

Much has been made about Van Zandt’s full-tilt wild side, his privileged background, his deep sadness, and yet, what struck so many who knew him was the brilliance with which he shone. It was a seeming contradiction, and yet it fired some of the most incisive writing into the human condition - be it the homeless soul who falls in love and watches her die “Marie,” the chilling, bristling “Snake Song” or the distraught “Cocaine Blues.”

“I met Townes in 67 or 68,” remembers Asleep at the Wheel’s anchor Ray Benson, as his erstwhile progenitors of Western swing enter their fourth decade. “It was the Second Fret, a club in Philadelphia where he was opening for Woody’s Truck Stop, which was Todd Rundgren’s band before the Nazz.

“There was a back room and I’d sneak in back there. One night, there was this guy from Texas who was really bright-eyed and energetic. So different from how he came to be known, you know? But then, it simple: I wanted to be a songwriter and he was a songwriter. But he was also a traveling troubadour… something, very honorable and necessary to really write the truth.

“In Elizabethan times, they were almost messengers who carried truths. In my mind, that’s what Townes did. In traveling, they pick up the stories of the people they meet - and they take them along, but they also influence the people who’re seeing them. In my mind, then, you have to be a troubadour to really be a songwriter.”

There’s a bit more to it than that, although Van Zandt was a big believer in being on the road, being amongst the people. It was also about applying standards that maintained the quality of the songs, the unburnished truths of the lives being captured.

“When we thought we were big stuff,” perhaps the most iconic of today’s Texas songwriters and arguably TVZ’s best friend Guy Clark remembers of the way they pushed themselves, “we’d sit and listen to Dylan Thomas read his poetry. Now that‘ll make you humble.”It was Clark who challenged a then 21-year old Crowell to delve into his friend’s songcraft.

“I remember Guy sitting me down and saying ‘One of the first things I gotta get you to do is understand how great Townes is… and he really worked to get me to see how poetically inspired his work was. Guy made me listen to everything, every work tape… to show me this is the bar.

“And that poetic nature that’s so richly inside Townes‘ work is like standing in front of a Van Gogh or a Renoir. You want to be able to access that part of any artist or writer or poet… They show you what a true artist is capable of doing.”For one thing, a true artist can melt time and genres.

Two dozen years later, at the Proctor School in New Hampshire, 14-year old Elijah Berlow turns his fellow students on. In a world of beats, processed vocals and big productions, Van Zandt’s potency cuts through to yet another generation.“He’s such a poet,” confesses the high school freshman who is also an acolyte of Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and Iggy Pop, “a really, really sad depressed poet. I tell my friends: ‘Listen to the words…’ cause at first, you know, they don’t; they’re about the sounds. But you put on ‘Flying Shoes,’ and they don’t have a chance.

‘I tell’em ‘Keep listening! Over and over ’til you get it’ and they always come back blown away. My friends are inspired. They wanna write songs, but then they realize this is way hard… And sometimes I’ll use Steve Earle, one of the songs he covered, then move to Townes straight, but it’s always the same thing.

“He’s such a realist, you’ve got nowhere to go. It’s complicated what’s in the songs…. Then he makes it so simple, the way he writes it all down, you can’t miss what he’s singing about.”

That poetry that translates across generational lines also translates across cultures. Israeli superstar/songwriter David Broza (see sidebar) - who has worked with the words of prominent poets  Percy Byshe Shelly, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop and Federico Garcia Lorca - recognized the essence in the singer/songwriter who would touch Broza’s career in the most startling of ways from beyond the grave in their one and only encounter at Houston’s Main Street Theater.

“I just sensed someone who’s very pure as an artist,” Broza marvels. “He spread around the chair where he was sitting all these charms, these lucky charms people had given him - and it was in that purity, that you got a real sense of what folk music is, what kind of a place it comes from.

“I was at a point in my career where I was still proving myself to audiences. I didn’t have a hit, so I was having to go from stage to stag working my way across the country. I knew I needed to impress him to keep him interested, so he wouldn’t go to his secondary songs., but then it seemed there were no secondary songs. Instead a Texas singer/songwriter/poet sat in front of me and showed me what that was with just a few words and the simplest melodies, but so much was said.”

Crowell concurs, looking at the way Van Zandt’s aesthetic sense informed his own writing. “With Townes, the words and melody are just seamless - and together they create this really visceral sense of place. I love when snogs evoke their subject matter so well, you’re there…“And it’s not that you can take that, but it inspires you to want to emulate that immediacy, to access a deeper part of you. Looking at my own songs, I know that without Guy’s tutorial, I would’ve probably never written ‘Til I Gain Control Again.’  I would’ve never reached that deep inside or tried to evoke so much of the poetry… and that’s what Townes brings out in people.”

“I’m more of a cheerful songwriter,” allows Potter, currently on the road with Brent Dennen. “But you hear a song like ‘Waiting Around To Die” and there’s such enormous despair, you’re consumed by it. Taken whole from a very few, very pure lines… and as a writer, who doesn’t want to do that? The way he does it so completely? Wow.“And it sets a standard.

Even his voice is poetry: the beauty is in the broken places! He always chose the perfect place, the perfect word to break… and he never overdid it. As a singer, that’s part of it, too: he knew his voice inside out, how to deliver his lines so he could deliver that pain and never let the emotion take over, but be so real because it’s true when he wrote it, you know that, but it doesn’t make it true every time you sing it. That’s the deeper poetry.”

Crowell, who can tell stories of Van Zandt’s inherent charisma and Puckishness leading girls carnally astray while their boyfriends toiled in the studio below, recognizes that poetry is as much how you capture the song.

“That was the thing about Townes,” says the man who got Emmylou Harris to cut her seminal version of Pancho & Lefty,” later a #1 country hit for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. “there was always an immediacy when he sang. It was always about the moment. To listen to Van Zandt’s records, it was like listening to Lightning Hopkins: very live, very there, very much this electric moment that you could feel.

“Townes was a gunfighter. He had electric reflexes - and he knew. He was always the fastest draw, period. If you ended up out in the street with him, you’d be shot through the heart, dead. End of story. It made him dangerous, but then he was also such a sweet, sweet soul - and that enigmatic quality is part of what made him so compelling.”

That unexpected sweet side. A man in love with his morning glories. A man who was okay to drift from friend’s couch to friend’s couch - and who would immortalize a pair of parakeets (Loop and Lil, who agree) in “If I Needed You,” also a #1 country record for Emmylou Harris with Don Williams.

“I’ve got a picture of Townes and me and Mickey Raphael (Willie Nelson’s long time harmonica player) from one of the early Farm Aids,” says Benson, “and he’s smiling this big smile. He’s just shining, and you can’t not look at him because that joy is all you can see.

“People talk about that dark side of him, but I never saw it. What I saw was pretty amazing, but it’s not what you ever hear mentioned.”John Prine - who covered “Loretta,” the perfect barroom consort portrait on the triple Grammy-nominated TVZ tribute Poet - has noted, “The last thing you want to do when you’re having a good time is stop and write a song about it. No, you wanna keep having that good time.”

Artists as diverse as Mudhoney with Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Norah Jones, Son Volt, Doc & Merle Watson, Evan Dando, Nana Mouskouri - in French, no less, Dashboard Confessional, Counting Crows, Glenn Yarbrough with the Jimmy Bowen Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Peter Rowan & Tony Rice, Cowboy Junkies and Robert Plant & Alison Krauss have all embraced his singular sense of lean lyric stretched over the essence of melody, the naked intensity of emotions distilled to their purest forms.“I hated it,” confesses the young Berlow. “I was maybe 11 or 12 and my Dad was on this kick where all he’d play in the car was Emmylou’s ‘Pancho & Lefty.” Over and over and over. Then when he stopped, I realized it had gotten inside me - and I missed it.

“The way he writes is more poetic than anybody… maybe even Dylan, but even more than the poetry, it’s how he makes you feel. You feel things listening to Townes in a way you don’t realize, but then suddenly you’re understanding things you don’t even have words for.

“Some of his songs - like ‘Rake’ - are about partying and whatever, but then they get so sad. It’s the way everything comes undone, because it does. For people who’re sad - or even depressed — you can see those things in these songs, then see it in your life and understand it a little better. It’s that simple, but it’s also beyond the darkness, the idea that it passes.”

Crowell, who lived on the same lunatic fringe as the great poet/songwriters, doesn’t want to romanticize the pain without stressing the quixotic and quicksilver nature of TVZ’s spirit - and also the ravages of a life lived beyond the limit.

“He died on New Year’s Day, the same day Hank Williams died… in practically the same way,” says the man whose last 4 albums have been a song cycle, core sample and meditation on the state of the world in which we live. “Knowing Townes, wherever he is, I’m sure he’d say going out like that was his greatest success. That he managed to live and pass like someone who was a true poet consumed by their art, which was lived completely… well, what else would there be left to do?”

For Van Zandt, who recorded eight albums for Tomato - including one held hostage due to nonpayment of the studio bill - and another handful for Sugarhill, there are the songs that burn even whiter, brighter and hotter than the man who wrote them.

 If his legacy is fueled in part by the legend, albums like Our Mother The Mountain, High Low and In Between, The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, At My Window and Deeper Blue offer fistfuls of greatness to witness what creation in its purest form can yield.Those albums - and the many live recordings, which show the combustible nature of art of the edge - offer a strong case for what can be created if one is willing to be a relentless steward of what can be.

The price of living that far from the shackles of expectation means a quicker fade, but as Crowell says, “If he’d lived and created any other way, we wouldn’t be talking about him right now.And it’s not the life, but what was created from the life… that’s what matters.”

Indeed. With nominal success in the commercial and financial success, 13 years after his passing, he remains the signifier of those who know the difference, those who’re willing to really go to the place where it all gets real. Or as the man himself was so fond of saying, “There are two kinds of music: the blues and zippity doo dah…”Obviously, there was only one way for Van Zandt to go. Boy did he.

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Into The Great Beyond, Dan Fogelberg

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I was just a kid. The only time I hated the term more than I do now was back then. It wasn't a justification, but a dismissal - and being dismissed was for folks dispatched without further thought. But I was a kid… and smart and savvy as I was, I looked about 14 years old. Truth is that 19 or 20 isn't much older. Moxie and determination, as well as the matchplayer's notion of never cave in, gives you an edge. Dreams let you prevail where reason falters. After all, you never know until you ask. And there I was on the fringe of the Diplomat Hotel's Ballroom, watching the waiters setting the table, the band twirling nobs, changing strings, generally killing time 'til it was time. The Diplomat Hotel - an old school Miami Beach hotel that actually sat in Broward County - was the kind of place people held conventions, and the National Association of Record Merchandisers liked the sun, the overstuffed faux rococo grandeur that gave the hotel a veneer of luxury that suited their hooker'n'cocaine away-from-the-wives excess. NARM was a big deal. The time when various record companies trotted out their prestige and soon-to-be-best-selling projects, for the superstars to rub elbows with the people who did the tonnage of their latest records. It was that moment where the schleppers and the foot soldiers got their whiff of the rarified air of the people they sold in 12 inch increments of shiny black vinyl. If they would never be the same, there was a moment where the sellers were made to believe they were part of the plan. And a good NARM appearance - even if it was just cocktails in the lost hours of some distribution group's suite - could get the folks who moved “the product” on board with a verve and a passion that made all the difference. So it was that Dan Fogelberg, the Illinois-bred, Colorado-anchored singer/songwriter had made the trek to South Florida to flog an artistic indulgence: a heavily bluegrass-inflected album called High Country Snows. The record, secured by the success of albums like Captured Angel, Netherlands, Souvenirs, Phoenix and The Innocent Age, was equal parts returning the sensitive singer/songwriter to an oeuvre that had sustained him as an evolving artist and offered the nature-grounded lyricist new terrain to explore musically. If there were those who thought Fogelberg might be too wimpy to outright embrace, you couldn't prove it by the company he was keeping. On the record, the guests included Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Emory Gordy and David Briggs. On the stage, there was former Byrd/Flying Burrito Chris Hillman, wonder high tenor/harmony singer Herb Pederson, dobro revolutionary Jerry Douglas, mandolin man David Grisman and steel legend Al Perkins. If sound check is the smoothing out the kinks of setting sound levels, they sounded damn fine. Fine enough I knew bagging my call-out research internship was the right thing; fine enough that I was almost too intimidated to start scratching for that potential opening. Still Mark Shands, the music director who oversaw my college credit, deserved more than a faint effort, and so summoning my courage, I moved closer, sussing and wondering. I was sent to a woman named Roz Blanche, who made the special projects for CBS Records shine. She must've been amused by the ballsy girl with the decent pitch: freelancing for The Miami Herald, this is an artistic high watermark - or at the very least breakthrough. This is a record that should be talked about. Whatever it was, she bought in. She sent me to Charlie Fernandez, who tour managed the superstars playing with the superstar. She told me to tell him she thought this was something that should happen. Evidently her should was law - and the black haired man with the coal eyes and solid body took it all in, nodding and listening. Fernandez called a woman named Nina Avrimades over. She was a calm blond with the kind of grace, she seemed like the sort of post-hippie Madonna who might've inspired some of Fogelberg's work. But she was no muse, she was air traffic control for power-manager Irving Azoff. The tour manager explained to the management rep what Roz had said. I stood there looking sheepish, Suddenly, the magnitude of the reach hit me. Dan Fogelberg was never one of my favorites. I respected his writing. I loved the way his voice had enough muscle to arc up around the notes of the melody, but the suppleness to swirl almost effortlessly around the melody. But was it worth looking like some starstruck kid? Because until the rubber met the road, I knew what I looked like: a junior high schooler who'd snuck away from gym class. The very polished woman looked at me, knitted her eye brows, cocked her head, considering. It wasn't an awkward pause, just a moment suspended. And as the soundcheck ended, she walked over to her client and conferred. I don't remember ever being looked over exactly, but a few moments later, I was hightailing to the valet stand so I could get my little red car so I could chase Dan Fogelberg's limo to some hotel in the lower part of Fort Lauderdale's beach front. Nerve-wracking, really. Not wanting to tailgait, not wanting to get cut off or left behind the long stretch vehicle at a light that changed at just the wrong moment. My palms were sweating clutching the wheel as I watched the road and droned the song titles of all the albums my friends and I had owned like some talismanic mantra designed to take the edge off the moment. After all being young wasn't something I could help. But seeming unprepared, unaware, unable to string together an informed line of questions, well, that was the highest personal treason I could imagine. I muttered “Illinois,” “Part of the Plan,” “Place In The World For A Gambler,” “Crow,” “Lessons Learned,” “Long Way Home (Live In The Country),” “Old Tennessee,” “Days Gone By,” “Changing Horses,” “Morning Sky,” “Someone's Been Telling You Stories,” anything but the dreadful singles that somehow seeped onto the radio. Those hits weren't the essence of the man… the essence of the man… the essence of… My eyes had averted from the parking log jam at the next hotel, scanning the car for what I can't recall. I just knew there was someone standing outside my door, looking at me. I didn't want to hold the valet up, so I pulled on the handle and emerged… only to find myself looking straight into the face of a dark-headed man with a beard. “I'm Dan,” he said, friendly as can be. “I know,” I laughed. “I know who you are…” “Yes, and you are…” I'd assumed that he'd been briefed. After all, isn't that what they do? Warn them. Or suggest tolerance. The Miami Herald was one of America's Top 10 papers. I'd explained that I did a lot of their country music pieces. I suggested that the Knight Ridder chain was a good one to ship out on. The blonde lady got it; I could tell. But there was never any accounting for high strung sensitive types - especially not the swoon-inducing singer/songwriter stripe. “Uhm, oh,” I said, laughing and stumbling over my own verbal misstep. “I'm Holly… Holly Gleason…” I smiled. He was nice. Nice. Not just nice, warm and trying to be engaging. “Do you mind if we do this while we eat?” he asked. “No, no. Whatever works for you,” I offered congenially, thoroughly unhinged at the prospect of having dinner with… well… Dan Fogelberg. What would Tisha Floyd say? Joanne Parrino? Jayne Kundtz? Any number of the girls I'd gone to school with. This was surreal. “Okay, great,” he responded as if it was no big deal. “Nina, we can do this in the restaurant.” “Oh, you've worked it all out then,” she replied. “Perfect.” And that was that. Trying to look unfazed, we headed for an off-white room with a lot of stucco and were seated in a booth. Him on one side, me and the manager on the other. Just like people get seated every day. Menus offered, scanned, surrendered with an order. “Bluegrass…” I opened, wide-open. He smiled now. “Yeah…” And we were off. Tales high and low of how he'd heard it, what it meant, the fact that songs have their own tides and tempos. He was enthused. He was open to talking about the artists who inspired him, the paths that had crossed his, the songs that emerged from his life and his being. He told stories about people - about Emmylou as a waitress in Nashville before returning to Washington, DC with her little girl, about living in Colorado and the sentimental undertow that churned up the best songs. He spoke of the courage of mining one's life to tell the truest truths, the will to be the most compelling - even if it took you to awkward places -- and the fun of playing bluegrass. He'd not “gone country” as Alan Jackson would sing two decades later, but merely reclaimed a potent strand of where he'd come from - and his joy was palpable. We talked about records that were out. We talked about moments as a performer that mattered. Indeed, we talked about small things I can't remember. But we talked and talked, unrushed and connected over the notion of telling the story of this man, this record, this place and time. It seemed like forever and it seemed like a moment. But I know time had passed for the 90 minute cassette had been turned, and a second started. He smiled at me some more - not in the brazen “here little girl…” so many rock stars embrace, but in the shared happiness of a departure well realized. “Oh, I think I have to go upstairs,” he said, “I need to change for the show…” “The show,” I echoed. “Well, yeah, that's why we're here,” he teased. Somehow in the glimmer, I'd forgotten. And then he was gone. Nina Avrimedes got up as he left the table, then sat down across from me, waiting for the check. “He never does that,” she offered. “Does…,” I inquired in the shortest possible way. “He never stays that long in these interviews,” she responded. “He really enjoyed himself.” Wow, I thought, but didn't want to seem starstruck. “Well, good,” I volunteered. “I really try to stay in the moment, to ask good questions.” “You did,” she returned, then repeated herself. “He really seemed to enjoy himself.” We made small talk, the way people do when they're waiting on their check or their change. He was back quicker than you'd think a star would take to change. “You coming to the show?” he inquired. “Uhm, I'd love to,” I said truthfully. “But I'm not registered for NARM.” “I see,” he said indulgently. “Well, I think Nina can get you in there… Can't you, Nina?” She smiled. “Yes, I think we can. I can certainly see what we can do.” NARM, after all, was for big shots, and people who sold the records to the rest of us. Writer or not, I was a kid - and I wasn't necessary. But I'd heard the fire pour off that stage when they'd played Flatt & Scruggs' “Down The Road,” and I knew this was going to be one of those shows you didn't want to miss. Maybe I didn't know all there was to know about bluegrass. Okay, all I knew was what I'd learned (for the most part) from Emmylou Harris' Roses In The Snow and Nicolette Larson's take on the Louvin Brothers' “Angels Rejoiced,” plus Ricky Skaggs revved up modern country-bluegrass hybrid. But I knew enough to know that stage was going to be blazing, and I wanted to see it. I smiled hopefully. “Yes, we'll figure it out,” she assured me as their driver opened the door to that shiny black car. “Thank you,” I said breathless, desperately hoping to have some modicum of cool, but completely okay if I didn't. These were the moments that didn't happen to kids like me: children of the Midwest raised to be housewives and tennis players and such. And sure enough Roz Blanche was waiting to walk me in. asking how the interview was. “Good,” I offered, back to being the consummate professional. “He's very articulate.” Still, when the band took the stage and the picking pyrotechnics flew, my heart raced. Jerry Douglas sparking and flickering that dobro -- all kerosene and molten lava -- was like nothing I'd never heard. And as Fogelberg talked of the why and the how of this project, thanking the retailers and rack jobbers for supporting his vision, you could feel the room draw close and everyone embrace something akimbo to what they expected from him. I knew about outrunning expectations. I was a kid in a striped tshirt, trying not to be noticed thereby jeopardizing my ability to be in the room. I just wanted to blend in and listen because it was the listening that mattered. Still there was an after party in yet another suite. “You coming up?” someone asked me as the attendees filed out. “Uhm, I don't know…,” I said, never considering it. “Well, after that dinner, I'd think he'd want to see you.” It was Roz Blanche, bringing me back to the there and when. She had that look of someone who'd vouched for an unlikely person and been proven right. It wasn't elation, nor was it told you so, just genuine satisfaction in making something good happen. “I guess I could, yeah,” I affirmed. “Of course.” And in the elevator, the local CBS Rep was appalled to see me. He'd not had to deal with the country artists, so he had yet to have to deal with me. He just knew I was that college girl who seemed to be everywhere - and now everywhere was here, under his nose at a very special performance, one with a band that very likely wouldn't be convened except for the most special circumstances. It was exactly the kind of scene the record business is so good at supporting: Open bar, too many people preening and talking too loud, posturing over who knew whom better or longer. It was shucking and jiving and jockeying for carnal pole position in the nocturnal sprint of “what goes on on the road stays on the road?” In the din and the swirl, there was Dan Fogelberg, post-show and very much in the moment. He looked regal. It had been the kind of evening most artists hope for - and he'd pulled it off in front of the very people he needed to champion his digression into an archaic musical form on some counts. “You,” he said when he saw me halfway across the room. I'd not wanted to interrupt. I'd only wanted to see what one of those whispered about parties looked like. “You,” I said smiling back, crossing to him - very much aware of the eyes following me, judging me, thinking I was charging the guest of honor. “What did you think?” he inquired, truly interested. “It was… incredible,” I giggled. “Those guys plays like monsters: so fast and so hard and with sooo much feeling. I couldn't believe how good it was.” “Really…,” he asked, not quite doubting, just making sure. “Really,” I said. “It was amazing. Thank you for having me… It was fun.” “Yes, it was,” he agreed. “It was a lot of fun. And it was nice talking to you this evening. It really was.” I blushed. Someone said get a picture. I didn't know which way to look, the whole night rushing up at me. But I smiled and pulled away, knowing he had a room to work, a record to sell to the people who sell records. I spoke to his manager a bit more, got her information, promised a tear sheet. I found Roz Blanch and thanked her profusely, knowing that without her endorsement, I'd've most likely been blown off. I took it all in, marveling at the empty freneticism and glad-handing that was the antithesis of what had happened on that stage. Watching the room fade into a whirl of bodies and words run together, I laughed. So this is what it was… and I'd seen the songs and spoken to the man who wrote them… and now I was unobserved and more than happy. He had been engaged, had proven to be kind and thoughtful and willing to share what truths he'd found along this creative sojourn. There was nothing else to do or say. Raising my hand to no one in particular, I moved backwards undetected and descended to the lobby below. Another valet stand, another tip, and then I was gone… window rolled down, sea air filling the car, I could think about how the most creative people seemed the most willing to share how they got there. I never knew if it was the wish to truly be understood or merely the generosity of someone who touched people and recognized the power of that mainlined musical connection. It didn't matter. It was one of those nights. He was one of those people. Sometimes you find a gentleman at the roughest places. Though the stakes were high, the soft-spoken musician was willing - and it came out in the way he gently sat and talked to a kid. It wasn't that it was farflung or fancy, but more that it was real… perhaps the rarest commodity of all. A few weeks later, a picture arrived in the mail. It was a beaming Fogelberg, basking in the afterglow of a satisfying show and a girl beaming in the knowledge that she's just done an interview that could hang with anyone's. There was a note included: “Figure you'd like to have this. It was the only picture where he was really smiling. It was quite a night.” Indeed, it was. But then again, magic comes from the hearts of the ones who're willing to dream, willing to reach, willing to be. Even in the throes of the cancer, Dan Fogelberg never ceased being -- and that was the throughline of a life that touched so many lives. I was trapped in a blizzard in an airport hotel when the news reached me. I didn't know who to tell or what to say. What can you say? Beyond the way a grown man gave a kid dignity and the respect of real answers. Its the kind of grace that makes the songs ring that much truer -- and in the case of the man who'd moved to Maine, it seemed like "The Sea & The Foam" he once sang of, some things never truly drift away.
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Emmylou Harris

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"If you live by the charts, you die by the charts," Emmylou Harris, the silvery voiced roots songstress who dissolves genres and owns a dozen Grammys, says conspiratorially. "Let me tell you…" There are a lot of things Harris, whose Songbird is a 4-CDcollection of rarities, demos and collaborations, can tell you about American music. Whether it's being the acolyte Gram Parsons left at the station when he OD'd, the muse for Bob Dylan, Conor Oberst and Willie Nelson, the nurturer of writers and musicians ranging from Rodney Crowell, Patti Griffin to Ricky Skaggs or Lucinda Williams, Harris has been siren for much of what is good about the music that exists beyond the mainstream. It's mid-afternoon in Nashville, and the sun pours into a living room filled with chintz upholstery and floral wallpaper. It is a cozy, welcoming place -- where Harris, now 60, lives with her mother Eugenia and daughter Hallie from her first marriage. Three generations under one roof bustling with cats and dogs, guitars and the last of a second photo shoot that's gone on earlier in the day. Harris, who's been a major part of records with Neil Young, Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello over the past year, is taking a year off. Laughing, she confides, "Sometimes just changing your routine is the same as taking a sabbatical, Johnny Cash told me once…" Though she toured this year, the time between her own albums has given her the opportunity to consider the breadth - and magic - an odyssey across American music. From embarking on a folkie path out of college - including Gliding Bird on indie Jubilee Records - to being swept up in Gram Parsons' iconoclastic hippie-hard country axis through her run as the woman making country safe for the rock & roll masses, the Linda Ronstadt/Dolly Parton Trio projects and the ethereal Daniel Lanois produced or -influenced post-Nashville projects, Harris has walked a line of her own muse. "Look what she's accomplished: she freed country music from stereotypes and showed rockers that country was okay," says Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Director Kyle Young flatly. "And she showed country people rockers weren't infiltrators… She sang country without irony when country, rock and folk were worlds apart because she does it without fear, without an agenda. It's just the things she likes, the cast of musicians, songwriters and artists she brings with her… whether it's the Louvin Brothers or Buck Owens, Sam Bush, Buddy Miller, Gillian Welch or Patti Griffin. "Because Emmylou likes it, you know it's good." Abandoning studying theatre for long nights playing music in cafes and fellow pickers' homes, Harris embraced the communal nature of life in the service of songs. Returning to Washington, DC as a single mother with a baby, she was playing 4 sets a night - sometimes in different clubs - when Chris Hillman told Gram Parsons she might be the girl singer he was seeking for his hard country solo project. Their collaboration is now legend. Yet Harris cautions, "It was very quick… that time… We did GP… we did the tour… we recorded Grievous Angel… and he was gone…" Ironically, the woman who kept hearing reasons why the initial sessions kept getting postponed and at the initial sessions found herself thinking, "What is this?" because "He wasn't very together; he was drinking a lot and I couldn't believe this was going to turn into a record…" didn't get it initially, though she loved the Louvin Brothers' songs he turned her onto. Finally, it clicked. "One day, I really heard the genius of his voice, the beauty - and all that music opened up to me. 'Angels Rejoiced' just did it… I was gone, so converted." Their last conversation was about the song, which appears for the first time on Songbird. "He knew 'Angels Rejoiced' was my favorite song; he called to tell me it didn't fit the album, so they were putting it on the next album. We hung up, he went to Joshua Tree… and that was it." The woman, named a Beauty by celebweekly People, pauses for a moment, "It was very unresolved. There was no proper way to grieve - just throw yourself into music." So she did. Returning to the vibrant folk/bluegrass scene that was Washington, DC where her friend John Starling, of the legendary Seldom Scene, suggested, "Come here and make your mistakes where you're safe and people care for you… then when you're ready…" Rodney Crowell, who'd been flirting with Nashville as an "understudy" ex-patriate Texan alongside Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and a kid named Steve Earle, found himself on a plane from Austin to DC to meet the woman whose harmonies on Gram Parsons' solo records stunned him. Originally Crowell's demos were given to Brian Ahearn for Anne Murray, stumped for songs the producer played the unknown writer for Harris. "She was doing something edgy," Crowell said, about learning it was the new girl, not the hitmaker, who'd expressed interest. "I knew how good that stuff was… the music was just passion. It was more folkie, too, which is was more Texas -- and after I met her, she came through Austin with the Angel Band. "After the gig, she said, 'Hey, I'm going to LA tomorrow and I've got an extra ticket… You wanna go?' "I went the next day, and stayed for seven years." Her muse took Parsons' hard country of "Country Baptisin'" and "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes" and seamlessly applied it to the Beatles and Paul Simon. That same equal opportunity truth generated her blazing Hot Band and a creative hotbed surrounding her Lanai Lane home where everyone from John Hartford to Mickey Raphael to Snuff Garrett came to jam. That spontaneous combustion gave Crowell open door demo reality -- catching the ear of the Dirt Band, Mary Kaye Place and Bob Seger. That musical curiosity energized everything -- as long as it had passion. "Nicolette (Larson), Linda Ronstadt was there," Crowell recalls, "I remember Bob Dylan calling, saying 'Emmyloooouuuu, you've got a song on the hit parade…' Then she went off and did Desire with him. It was like that. And she did everything she could to push all of us out front, too. "Emmy inspires such loyalty," Crowell continues, "because she has so much integrity. She's a poet -- even before she started writing songs -- and that's what we all respond to. Even more than that voice and the passion is the poetry, the timelessness, choosing the heart over commerce." Harris' choices have at times defined conventional wisdom. When country was slick, she made the unbending Blue Kentucky Girl, then followed it up with the Ricky Skaggs/Whites-laden bluegrass triumph Roses In The Snow. Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and the Glyn Johns-produced The Ballad of Jesse James, she made her own self-penned concept Ballad of Sally Rose. Sally Rose came on the tail of a string of gold-certified Warner/Reprise albums, but "It was a huge commercial disaster… I literally did not have enough money to buy a house." Producer Paul Kennerly gently suggested returning to building a record around her voice, and the acoustic gospel Angel Band - featuring Vince Gill, Emory Gordy and Carl Jackson - was born. "You have to pay attention, not set your agenda in such concrete that you miss what's really supposed to happen," Harris - who continued to tear up the road with Chuck Berry's "C'est La Vie" and Hank Snow's "I'm Movin' On" - concedes. What she did best was wearing thin. Starling suggested unplugging, getting acoustic: the Nash Ramblers, featuring New Grass Revival's Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and a young man named Randy Stewart (now CMA Song of the Year writer Jon Randall) was born, recording At The Ryman, another Nashville legend fallen on faded times. A move to Asylum Records - "where they thought they could put people like Guy Clark and I on the radio," she marvels - led to more closed doors at country radio. "There comes a time when you're no longer invited to the party," Harris explains. "It happens… to other people, too. But if this is what you do, who knows what it'll be?" That album -- Cowgirl's Prayer -- caught the ear of Melodie Ciccone, Daniel Lanois' manager. Harris, who'd been hooked on Dylan's Oh Mercy and Lanois' Acadie, was game. Wrecking Ball, their collaboration, sold poorly, racked up raves, won a Grammy and opened the door. "There were these very turbulent rhythms in a live situation. The first thing we cut was 'All My Tears," which was just dripping with soul and atmosphere -- and I didn't know that kind of experience existed," explains the woman who'd recorded with George Jones, Neil Young, the Band and Waylon Jennings. "I didn't know what it could be, but I wanted to find out…" Again set free and afire, Harris wrote the emotionally excavating Red Dirt Girl, recorded with friends, created Spyboy, helmed by Buddy Miller and a few unlikely but potent players. "Her openness is revelatory," says producer/guitarist/artist Miller. "Ten years ago when I joined up with the band, she was always listening to something -- and not just in terms of what we were playing, but just music. "And she gives of herself in a way nobody else does. I actually met her when I asked her to sing on my first record and was told she couldn't because of a European Hot Band Reunion Tour," Miller remembers. "Then I heard she really wanted to… and then, literally the day she was leaving, she came and sang on my record. Over 10 years, that's her over and over again… You can hear it in the music, in the shows: every night, the set would change because she wants to make it about the music and the moment…" "I do believe like souls attract like souls," Harris says of the collaborators who've crossed her path. "I was fortunate in that I had this creative safety net, people who trusted my instincts and supported me… You've got to believe somebody's in charge, writing the script for you… and when I look around what else could I think: If I wrote this stuff down, no one would believe it could've happened that way." The weekend prior Harris had been at a wedding in Canada where Linda, Camy and Teddy Thompson sang "Dimming of the Day" on a tiny stage. Just talking about it, the woman fourth decade into making music is aglow. That essential joy in the songs still gets her; making the quest to illuminate songs that "maybe weren't singles or played live, but made my records what they were" as something special. "James (Austin, the project's A&R anchor) kept sending me things I'd not heard in years and years… 'Mama's Hungry Eyes' with Rodney, Chrissie Hynde and Beck on the Gram Tribute record we did, a version of 'Immigrant Eyes' that was Guy Clark's 60th birthday present, the stuff from (The Legend of) Jesse James, 'Softly & Tenderly' from the Trio sessions from a project that didn't come out in '78, the demo of 'All I Left Behind,' 'Sonny' with Dolores Keane and Mary Black which was a #1 track in Ireland…" Her voice -- every bit as iridescent in conversation -- trails off. These aren't just songs or moments: Harris can tell you every detail about where, with whom, what happened for each. "Looking at the tracks," says Jed Hilley, Executive Director of the Americana Music Association, "the breadth of experience she had, the songs, the music… it's so vast, yet it's all such pure integrity. There's that siren voice, and then there's what she does with it." "It's really the same thing as in the beginning," Harris says. "You know when something's right, and you'd be upset if you lost that… The devil is the voice inside your head telling you something different, that you can get away with it. "It always has been about the poetry…," she continues, defining how broad that can be. "There's poetry in my mother's poundcake and her pie crust. I am 60 years old and have been doing this for a long time -- and it's harder and harder to get inspired in some ways, and in others, well, all it takes is one song." One song is cutting it pretty short. Songbird alone contains 68, each sparkling in its unique beauty. These are the songs that've never been part of a compilation. These are obscure treasures, not-obvious moments - and with a new album slated for sometimes in 2008, there is still more to come. Watching her talk so gently, so warmly about her journey, the notion of music as refuge is as obvious as the sweep of snow white hair that curves around her pristine jaw. She recognizes the Cinderella nature of her story, too. "Maybe I'm guilty of glossing over the facts," she begins, then resolves with the quiet firmness of a true Alabama belle. "But when I really look at all of it, well, this is what happened."
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Wash Me Away….Willie Nelson

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Sometimes the moments just ripple… lap in at the shoreline, and then fall away. When you learn that you can't hold them anywhere but your memory, you learn to sink into the beauty of a few seconds completely. And so it was somewhere south of Nashville that Willie Nelson did what he does best: pour that quivering tenor that reeks of turpentine on fence planks, liquid heartstrings and vulnerability steeped with dignity over songs that're almost as good as he is. Because when you're one of the truest stylists of modern American music, it's hard to find songs that can meet your gift square on. Kenny Chesney is an unlikely source of inspiration. Big time newest wave country star who's tearing up the country charts, melting the concert trail and setting every record set on fire. That someone who blows it up as loud and ferociously would be the last guy you'd think of to tenderly minister to Willie Nelson's tremulous haiku vocal sensibility -- and yet, there are few who hold the Texas treasure in such high esteem and deep understanding. Willie Nelson is a reason to believe in how much can be said between the notes… the way he pauses, collects the sentiment without even seeming to think about it… Willie Nelson is the master of slight of breath… He takes your hand, your thought, your soul without you even realizing how he's elevated your very being before the next word is delivered with an ethereal gravity that defines Nelson's gift. Not that Willie Nelson ever set out to be Buddha. No, that just happened -- based on a clarity that transcends judging. Willie Nelson is able to embrace the world as it comes, always present, always there, yet not weighed down by the need to weigh in. But in that quiet, storms seethe… and rage… and resolve. Farm Aid, trying to make sure the American family doesn't go the way of the buffalo, and a way of life that is what this country is supposed to be about -- more than profit margins, chemicals to maximize growth and eradicate nutritional value. Bio-Willie, to heighten awareness and raise consumption of ecologically sounder fuel sources in a world of Hummers and SUVs as a means of expressing how great thou art (screw the rest of you poor slobs in your compact cars). Willie Nelson just is. Like water. Still. Imperturbable. Cool. Much swirls around him. All that motion, yet the tranquility emanating from the man who is a hank of tobacco, a bit of sinew and raw fiber is palpable. So it is, with the musicians scattered around big room -- each in their assigned area, yet instrumental parts weightlessly rising and mingling and merging like wafts of smoke effortlessly climbing towards the chandeliers. There is reverence for sure; this is holy work. The lunging back and forth of the parts, the rising and falling of emphasis as the band moves through a collection of jewels from the best of the Great American Songbook. Kristofferson. Dylan. Randy Newman. Guy Clark. Dave Matthews… Kenny Chesney understands about songs. He grew up eating meat'n'three lunches as a young Music City hopeful, starving for the wisdom of the elderest vintage songwriters -- Whitey Shafer, Dean Dillon, Bill Anderson -- as he was for the three side dishes that rounded out those meals. Kenny Chesney also grew up on Willie Nelson, hanging on to the way those notes would hold suspended in the air with no means of support, yet do things more obviously muscular singers couldn't. The Red Headed Strangers' talent wasn't so much about riding the trends, but floating above them… oblivious to how the wind blew and maintaining a sense of zen beauty to even his raucous clips of music-making. “Whiskey River” bumped and thumped and throttled… “Stay All Night” cooked with a certain good-timing rambunctiousness… Even the clambering “Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys” had a certain manifesto manifest that made it more than a cautionary flex. That was the beauty of Willie Nelson -- he could haunt you even in the tempest. And then there were the ballads. “Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground.” “Blood Mary Morning.” “Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning,” “Always On My Mind.” “Seven Spanish Angels” with the spirit-stirring Ray Charles and “Pancho & Lefty” with working man honky tonk poet Merle Haggard. When that's the Willie Nelson you're raised on, you're gonna pick your songs with care. You're gonna wanna maintain a standard of grace and feeling that stands apart. You wanna bring your very best game: both in terms of what you stand up for and how you wrap the gift that is a Willie Nelson record that matters. It's tricky fare, recording Willie Nelson. With that voice and that sense of timing, the delivery that stretches out lines beyond reason, or clips through what seems to be a slow ride, he transforms what was written and turns it into something more. Gifts like that make song selection deceptive. Anything will sound good… even lackluster or average. It is about finding the songs that allow the gift to be more instead of the other way… and it means paying attention rather than becoming intoxicated by the highwayman's ability of distraction that is what pours from the elder statesman's mouth. Sometimes it means forgetting the rules. Thinking outside the box and coloring outside the lines. It's about embracing the obvious, too, the things that've been discarded because, well, it's been done. And it can also entail taking on the writers you know to be good, to trade in the mainstream, but to mine the jewels that fall closer to the banks than the middle. Kenny Chesney, a fan of music of all kinds, is uniquely suited to the job. As new fangled as the multiple Entertainer of the Year may be, he is old school when it comes to country music. Old school enough, too, to know how to make the oddest candidates resonate like jukebox tears wept back when it was vinyl skipping because the dance floor got too full. In that strange alchemy, though, the best of what makes Willie Nelson special emerges before you even know what's happened. It is in that louche slouch of the mind-altering stress melter “Worry Be Gone” that slinks with an almost marching band beat and the wafting bacon-in-the-air pungency of longtime Family member Mickey Raphael's harmonica. As good as the laconic track is -- and it's a week in the Jamaican sun poured all molasses and cane syrup thick over the laidback shuffle -- Willie Nelson turns it into an instant vacation. Just exhaling the melody, cresting along on the waves of acoustic notes, it's a cork on the ocean -- bobbing up and down light'n'easy. Willie Nelson doesn't need any more than that to find the solvent for the turmoil, the torqued up mess and the gridlock that's somehow encroached upon his piece of mind. Politicians, sad songs, people not treating each other right, not to mention tv, dumb celebrities and the rest of the list can all just be damned, this is about release and relief, not stringing oneself up on a laundry line to stuff that's beyond one's reach and ability to do something about. The best singers wear songs like their most broken in clothes: flannel shirts, old leather boots, jeans that mold and fold to one's backside. When it's that natural, you don't even notice what someone's wearing -- just how good they look, and you can't help but be drawn to them. So it is on the sorrowful, yet sinewy “Gravedigger,” the darkly inviting yet foreboding force of melody from Dave Matthews. In Nelson's supple throat, it's almost an exhortation -- “dig my grave shallow, so I can feel the rain,” he bluesmoans -- a challenge and an embrace of something so dark and yet so inevitable, fear can't be a factor. Standing it down, Nelson opens up a whole other sense of the future. It is what it is. Something to respect, but not to live in response to. Caution, yes, bondage by way of mortality, no. Just as “Moment of Forever” is less about the pain of what happens when it fails then the revel of what there is in the most euphoric moments. Kris Kristofferson knows how to sow details as a way to anchor the elusive nuances of emotions… the little things that invest what in so many others' hands is mere cliché. When Nelson celebrates what's worth surviving the pain for, love becomes noble rather than doomed. The glory of connection so alive, so vital, so revelatory, that the singe of one's wings which is as likely as the transcendence of “making it,” one gets the feeling there's no real risk involved. Hearing that song sung so well, it's the moment of definition… a chance to feel more alive for four minutes than most of us do in a year. Willie Nelson isn't just a sorcerer, he is a witness to life lived in full, wholly inhabited and absolutely taken full frontal. One of the reasons “Moment of Forever” works is because Nelson has obviously loved that deeply, that fiercely, that softly, that completely consumed. That he gets to feel that way at all -- even for a matter of moments -- is exactly what we should hope for. Sustainability is obviously desired, but not required. A taste is enough to know it's real. Confirmation, the sensation, can sustain one as they journey through the vastness -- because it's in knowing that one can swing freely. There is much that can be said about these sessions… much to remember about the things that matter when it comes to make music. The notion of camaraderie and laughter.. the idea that the instruments will push each other on, inspire magic and even silence when necessary… the dynamics of building and ebbing… and especially that simple works incredibly well when you're dealing with the best of everything. Paul Craft's “Keep Me From Blowing Away,” a centerpiece of Linda Ronstadt's seminal mid-70's Heart Like A Wheel, takes on a genuine pathos in its lean, almost tumbleweed barren performance. To hear Willie Nelson intone, “Lord, if you're listenin'/ I know I'm no Christian… and I ain't go no money, I know…” is to genuflect at the altar of blind faith in the human wasteland -- because as the chorus moves on, the faithless recognizes belief may be the only chance there is. Chance as something that isn't random, but rather as an opportunity is something Willie Nelson knows too well. No matter what has befallen him -- from being sewn into a bed sheet and beaten with a broomstick, selling “Family Bible” for $50 and thinking it a fair trade “because my family was hungry, and that bought us groceries…” in the moment rather than being embittered about the lost publishing, the IRS snafu in the early 90s, the occasional arrest for counterculture proclivities -- there is always another day, another side of the question… That other side seems to inspire him. Willie Nelson & Family played 132 cities this year alone -- and he'll start 2007 off in Amsterdam. The world spins, the man makes music with a gut string guitar with a pick-nicked hole beneath the pickguard. It is that passion for songs, the road, the fans who keeps him ablaze, questing for the next great performance… and showing the jam bands how easy it is to be real. Being real grounds the man who is a legend in ways that make him everybody's friend. Easy in his walk through the world, eyes crinkling in the warmest of smiles, he is a witness to all that goes by, yet he's also quick to embrace people from a welcoming place. But that doesn't mean he's easily spun. To that end, the man with the almost waist-length ponytail trailing down his back can embrace a 30 year old song and find a deeper truth in it -- one that illuminates modern problems in very concise, yet direct ways. “Louisiana (1927)” is a Randy Newman song about the flood that engulfed New Orleans early in the 20th century, It is now prophetic in the grandest ways - right down to the verse about the government man who blows in, proclaims it a shame and then moves on without looking back. The song is very much post-Katrina New Orleans, the rest of Louisiana and Mississippi -- and Nelson's quietly ruminative interpretation is as melancholy as you'd expect. Listening to the piano gliding up, Raphael's harmonica bleating in a mournful, desolate moan, it is a prayer for grace, relief, hope.. It sweeps you away, the notion of the Pontchatrain River swollen, swallowing an entire city whole -- you can almost see it when you close your eyes and Nelson twists the notes with honest pain and helplessness about the situation. It is Spanish moss scraping waters as high as the oaks and cypress trees that grow tall and spread broad throughout that most fetid of states… and in the slow, steamy arrangement, one can feel that thick, muddy water rising well past the point of reason. That would be enough. But that is not all. No, no. When Nelson gets to the repeated “They're trying to wash us away,” it's not so much about the toll of the rains and the bloated rivers, as it is the government's willingness to let these communities drown. The flooding becomes a means to wipe away these poor and struggling places -- a clean slate where poverty once stood, never mind the lives and people and families destroyed in this solution of neglect labeled “an act of God.” Willie Nelson is nobody's fool. Nor is he ready to be anyone's God. But he misses nothing, and when he tackles that line, his cognizance seeps through He recognizes that the solution as delivered may well be about an unspoken reality -- and his interpretation puts a light on the true bottomline of motivation for a government that just couldn't get it together in a way that offered real help or meaningful answers. He -- like Chesney -- is a real person's populist. His revered status has never eradicated his feeling for common people, but he also is wise enough to realize that his celebrity means that he can heard in ways most of the unseen people can't. He brings his gift to boil in a way that gives art an added truth… a truth that illuminates that which the powers that be would prefer obscured, offering the overlooked a voice for their truth, too. Thankfully, he does it from high enough ground, his witness is unassailable. When Willie Nelson turns his heart inside out, there is nothing more chilling. The level of bare revelation is riveting… and here it is about the unseen American populace, reduced to grids, columns, stats and gross generalizations being given their due rather than written off by what's convenient for the powers-that-be. It would be easy to call “Louisiana” a lament, but it is far more emboldened. An elegy if what is happening can not be turned around, perhaps; certainly a cautionary song rendered with a sadness that indicts the innate greed of the haves in the face of a genuine disaster. Yet for all the reckoning, this is not preachy. It is almost straight reportage of how it is -- right from the banks of the devastation. It is a great, big round truth that can swallow the moment completely and absolutely, and in that, the seeds of solving the problem are available to be sown. That's the beauty of sitting, knees to chest listening to playbacks… The compassion and kindness floats to the top. You can feel how moving this performance is -- and marvel at a song's capacity to carry so much emotion in such tiny dimensions -- a few minutes, 10 notes, some musical instruments. Kenny Chesney gets that, too. It's not about how much you glop on, but more how much it can make you feel. In a world where the truth is often measured out in drops, the more concentrated it can be, the more potent its message. Sometimes, you just play the song… You let the singer sing. But perhaps as importantly, you find material that is worthy, seek out the licks and riffs that best support that vocal performance, give it plenty of room to stretch out and breathe. It's a simple thing, but you gotta understand what you're trying to do to embrace that notion. After all, in most instances, it's faster, harder, shinier, glossier, slicker, more -- or so they think. Willie Nelson is the greater reality, though. For him, it's simpler, clearer, easier. Let the voice and the heart do the work… find the songs that live up to it… get out of the way… know when enough is plenty… recognize magic when it happens… laugh more than you ever have… believe in what stands out rather than second guessing. It takes one to know one… to celebrate one… to push one, even as you recognize how great the basic self is. Kenny Chesney and Willie Nelson are in many ways odd bedfellows, yet listening to the songs rolling out of the studio's monitors, they make more sense than just about anything anyone's heard coming out of Nashville in years.
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Rogue’s Reward, Danny Joe Brown Meets His Maker’s Mark

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Ain't nothing quite like a wild-eyed Southern boy hell-bent for destruction. And so it was that a scrappy band of redneck Floridians tore it up in the name of a rebel yell and no damn good. "Flirtin' With Disaster," "Beatin' The Odds," "Whiskey Man," "Gator Country." They were named for a whore who hacked up her customers, and were everything my parents warned me about. Molly Hatchet, whiskey-snortin', stage-pawin', corner-on-two-wheelin' Southern rawkers -- in the full "R-A-W-with-a-K" sense, were the haywire, total voltage pay-off on the die that Skynyrd cast. Loud guitars, blazing singer, swagger like a dagger, they were full-tilt bravado wrapped in Confederate bars. Blaring out of the smoked'n'tinted windows of Camaros, Mustangs and various muscle cars. They were for girls with feathered hair, looking more like Cherie Currie -- the too-fast, glossy-lipped lead singer of the Runaways -- than Cheryl Ladd, and sweaty boys with greasy hair, sweat-stained t's and tires squealing through dead end lives. WSHE in Miami -- "She's Only Rock & Roll" for those who remember the great Southern rock stations -- rotated them like a daily special, alongside Zeppelin, AC/DC, Mott the Hoople and Aerosmith. A veritable jewel in the slightly askew, dinged and dented crown of Southern rock, Molly Hatchet didn't necessarily get their props with the hipsters, but they ruled the summer concert sheds. For many, it wasn't life-altering, remember-where-you-were-when-you-heard news that Danny Joe Brown, the tempest with the buzz saw in his larynx aimed straight for the core of the song, was leaving the band. Perhaps only the true believers cared when he came back. Me, I was somewhere in the middle -- a college kid, nose to the grindstone, trying to eke out a name as a writer who might matter, recognizing proximity and the REAL second oldest deal on the books: who ya know. Seems Molly Hatchet used to make their records in a little studio outside Orlando called Bee Jay. Seems the man who owned it -- a blindingly stunning Adonis named Eric Schabacher -- used to listen to my radio show on WPRK, the year I spent stranded amongst the rich kids killing time at Rollins. Seems when it was time for the big reunion, the warm-up gigs were gonna happen at the Hallandale Agora, a mere 35 minutes from the University of Miami, where I was toiling to get that degree. And so a call to my old friend, who called his old friend, who let the tour manager know that the kid should be cared for. And so, an afternoon of cut classes, decamping in the seedy bar of the Holiday Inn adjacent, carpet reeking of mildew and spilled drinks, probably unintentionally spilled bodily fluids and sweat. It was anything but glamorous. It was also the last place to leave Lois Lane in full-rut on a quest for her critical bones. When forty minutes turned to an hour-thirty, the little girl turned into the baby cheetah - hacked off has never been a look I wear particularly well. Marching to the house phone, sure that circumstances were conspiring against me, the tour manager's room both politely and sweetly requested. The almost irritated tone suggested interruptus of some manner, but my patience was gone. "Look, you said 40. it's more than double that. you figure this out NOW." The response was the typical dismissive, "Well, things change. You'll have to." Before the word "Wait." could escape, it was countered with the equally thrusting, "Let me tell you, pal. You obviously don't know how I came to be in the lobby of this shithole, but let me drop a name on you: Eric Schabacher. KNOW it? Good! 'Cause he's my next call. My guess is his next call is Pat Armstrong, and it's all down hill from there. "Now, what exactly do you need to tell me?" There was a pause you could drive a double wide through. "Good. I'll just stand right here for a few moments, and let the desk know you'll be calling me back." Receiver to cradle, eyes blinking in shock. Nothing like the rage of a black Irish woman convinced she's been affronted. Yet? What if the grandstand play didn't work? And yet, what was being gained by playing it safe? Just then, the phone rang. It was tour manager-in-full-quake. Was it drugs? Fear of the home office? Recognition of what a jerk he was being? Didn't matter. The next utterance was a big chunk of what I'd come to hear. "Dave Hlubeck, the lead guitarist [I knew who that was, for the record] will be down in a few minutes. Danny just jumped in the shower." I waited. "Uhm, kid." "My name's Holly." "Right. Uhm, do me a favor. Don't get into this with them." "No problem." It wasn't. Revenge is for the weak, not the winners. Getting what one needs is more than enough, taking down the people who get in the way of that is a waste of energy. Even then, I knew that much. Not much longer than my return to the barstool, where a ginger ale, light ice, lay flaccid and dying, a long haired, thick-waisted guy in a black tank top demi-waddled up. He'd brought a baseball cap, an offering to calm the foot-stomping brat he must've been told I was.. I just looked at it. "Don't know what you said to our tour manager, but you lit a real fire under him," he said with an uncertain laugh, extending his hand. "I'm Dave Hlubeck." "I know who you are. Creatures of the road understand each other. He underestimated me is all. You wanna do this here? Or go to a table?" All business. All the time. It's the only way a 19, 20-year old girl can keep the natives respecting. He took the bar-stool and we took off in dizzying conversation. The serrated edge of a brutal guitar, the bias against Southerners and typecasting as a unifying weapon, the fear about and power of the much-vaunted reunion, the songs on the upcoming record, the new band members, the meaning and complicity of rebellion, the strength in numbers, The Bible, especially Revelations -- and the classic reality-breaker: the conflict between Heaven'n'Hell, which starts at home, is fueled in holy rollin' churches and is fanned by Friday night juke joint fever. He was humble in a way that belied his pompousness, yet he also believed much of what he was peddling -- inhaling the self-aggrandizement for so long, it became a self-sold truth. When the hour had turned well into the second, the guitar player with hair almost to his butt needed to take his leave of me. What had started out as a shut-that-kid-up play had turned into something that challenged his perceptions, opened his world -- and mine. To see how hard someone like this believed spoke volumes about the power of delusion and the will to never be hungry again. For someone who easily teetered on the high wire of loathsome, there was something utterly human and therefore admirable about him. His high-flying singer, the one and only part Cherokee, soul patch glistening as a landing light for the tequila'n'Jim Beam swillin' ORWs - or in more modern Gretchen Wilson speak 'Original Redneck Women' -- was another story. In his room a bit later, white bed linens wadded up around old blue jeans at the base of tired looking bare feet, Danny Joe Brown was a melancholy soul of the road, not quite surrendered, but reflective about all that had led him to that point. He believed in this band. It was why he was back After leaving -- ostensibly because of his chronic and severe diabetes, but the down low back when was a power-struggle with Hlubeck that more than demonstrated the power of their tension, the sizzling current of showmanship, oneupsmanship and just plain resentment -- it was obvious, the flint and spark came from the sum of the parts, the alchemy of raw want against revenge against stereotypes and the will to explode any chance proffered. Danny Joe Brown, the quiet man. Pensive, reflective. Not willing to say his time away was lost, not ready to throw his arms around what would be a compromise. "I believe in what we made," he said thoughtfully. "I believed in these songs. and this band. I want to do this." A simple benediction. A clear explanation. A reason to believe that would hold water in the rain. Exhaling deeply, I considered the scene. Rock warrior. Groupie quarry. Possessed banshee. Caged lion. Quiet storm. He was forthcoming. Considerate of his answers. Not one to overstate. Not one to talk the big talk. Yet, he seemed to understand that while they never had the hoist of Skynyrd, or the cred of the Allman boys, they were in many ways the white hot center for white trash roughnecks and romeos, jacked up and ready to "fuck-or-fight" as the beer joint parlance so tactfully put it. It wasn't necessarily an army he'd've convened by choice, but they saw something in the music -- and he recognized the raised fist in them all. Danny Joe Brown, smoldering mystery and mayhem, had come to play -- in every sense of the word. With a Pentecostal bone and a rage that simmered so deep within, one could hardly sense it beneath the almost zen placidity, this was an exhortational front man preaching a gospel of ne'er-do-well, not-quite-enough,busted-chances, moments-shattered, loves found, faithless women, reckless men, Hell-Yeah's, Hell-Nos, kicking in the stall and every Southern cliché known to man. John Prine once said "Cliches become clichés because they're true." John Prine is a wise man. When the conversation was done, I headed back to my dorm room. Head buzzing with everything that was shared, wondering where the lines were, the common reality separate from the truth. I would return that night, backstage pass waiting. I would stand by the far side of the stage -- watching the steam and combustion rise. For the collected audience, it was kerosene and grain alcohol hurled against a wall of sparks. It was hot. It was heavy in the way only loud chords can be. It was speeding like a freight train downhill, no brakes. It was the rush and gush of an almost rapidfire drumbeat -- and the throbbing bass that kills, echoing a more rural Johnny Thunders. There was hair and beer swinging. There were big speeches and quickened tempos. There were bodies pressing forward, shoving to get closer to the keepers of the renegade flame. They took no prisoners; they rode hard; they mostly believed -- and believed in gutty kids who showed up, looking for something that made them proud to be swamp crackers, short on prospects, long on "oh, yeah." The big bravura ballad was a new song. one that culminated Hlubeck and my conversation, one that included the Pope and Kissinger and Arafat, the Middle East, the end of the world as we know it (long before r.e.m. ever embraced that reality). and it's meaning went over most everyone's heads. Watching the lighters raise, wondering if they might've even missed the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King in their express lane to fallen Southern rockers Duane Allman, Berry Oakley, Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines. Standing there, the dust and the smoke and the moistness of exhalation in a too hot room swirling around me, I scratched my notes into a reviewer's pad -- and I wondered. Not about the power of the performance, though never quite a fan, I understood when a band ran 40,000 volts straight into an audience's soul, but of the way things can mean such different things to so many. When the last note was played, the encores spent, the chants finally died off, the lights started coming up. The Hallandale Agora wasn't much in limited light. Now it was a lot of black paint on two-by-fours, duct tape and chipped edges. It was the kind of place you expect to see someone with a long handled broom pushing the night's detritus into a heap in the middle of an abandoned dance floor. It is what it was. Another hollowed-out past-midnight where the echo of what was had faded to nothing, the beat of one's own heart mocking your faith in what had passed and the notion of not-going-home, but-not-staying-there seemed daunting. Standing with the vertigo that afflicts one who's had their world tossed into the tumble dry, not quite sure what I believed about any of what I'd just seen anymore. I knew Creem or was it Musician was correct when they reviewed the album this tromping of the troops was meant to rally called No Guts, No Glory with the tight little bromide "Wrong. All Guts, No Glory is more like it," a not-so-veiled reference to the paunch bubbling out from many waist-lines, most notably Hlubeck's bare-chested under a leather duster look. To see people turn themselves inside out, to believe in something so bloated and dumb was miraculous. There was no irony, no knowing-eye-rolling, nudging, winking. They were of another cast and caste, proud of where they came from and what they represented. As the night verged on morning, aching and sore, they emerged from the cramped dressing room with the grammatically incorrect grafitti, the holes punched in the dry wall, furniture punctured and hemorrhaging stuffing. It was a hard-scrabble refuge between glory and stale hotel rooms, it was the ollie, ollie, income tax free zone where they weren't quite mortal, even as they weren't the golden gawds that gallivanted around that stage, either. Soft skepticism in my eyes, I said my good nights. Head cocked. Watching their progress out the door. Some walked slowly, arms draped over too-skinny girls who weren't anorexic, but opted to put their money into meth and menthol cigarettes over nourishment. These weren't even fallen angels, just broken refugees of the night -- clinging to the fragments of a venal dream that sustained those for whom it was enough. Danny Joe emerged about last -- with a better quality of woman. No debutante or Mother Theresa to be sure, but the singer always gets the girl. Before disappearing out the back door, he looked at me. Just held my gaze. Didn't shrug or shake his head. Didn't seem to wonder much at all. "You be back tomorrow?" he graveled out, with what little voice wasn't shredded on the altar of those raving breakneck songs. "Yeah," I said real quiet. "Well then, you'll be on the list." That was that. Now he's gone. 53. Diabetes and life beyond-lived. Demons no doubt, and yet a grace to walk the line that gave him dignity when so many would've been cowed by the crappy room, the lousy circumstances and all those people who didn't get the honor of lifting up what one was, regardless of what it was or where it came from. Somewhere across town a friend girds up for battle for a new duo made up of old parts. Called Van Zant, it's the other brothers, one a .38 Special, one a Skynyrd. I figure he's got his work cut-out for him, but those Jacksonville boys take a hit hard, then soldier on. Quickly I send him a note. Because, as I tried to suggest, these folks don't look back. Too damn heroic for histrionics, and yet... There is dignity where they come from, the belief in Sunday dinners and saying "Ma'am," as much as fighting for what you believe in. The note offered a simpler truth than any I can now muster: <<it was a by-god time back then... faded glory, though, don't fade memories that's the news good & bad give them an angel's wing for me soft and white and downy... & pass the essay on, too, if you think they're readers it's in progress right now as if you even wondered much grace a quiet head bowed for another lost soul headed home>> Once upon a time I managed a girl named Mary Cutrufello, a Yale-educated black woman with dreads and androgyny, who could make a Telecaster burn. The line on her was "the future of rock & roll;" Springsteen was a believer, Mellencamp and Gregg Allman hired her, Bonnie Raitt hailed her -- 'cause it rolled through her veins. She wrote a devastated song about a songwriter who was about consumed by consumption that was beyond her reach to help called "Good Night Dark Angel." A celebration of homicide-turned-suicide, it offers perhaps the best epitaph ever --offered to a God who doesn't try to understand, just tries to catch us when we fall "Another soldier coming home." Tonight, he's not flirtin' with disaster, a cloud of dust whipping beneath his feet. May there be peace in Gator Country -- and anywhere a Rebel flag may fly. Tonight, a baby girl rock critic grown into a midwifer of dreams bows her head to another star twinkled, then out. Maybe the world just got a little colder. Or maybe there's another ragged, jagged soul looking to take care of his own from the other side. Somehow I think Danny Joe Brown would prefer it that way. Head high, no tears, guitars blazing. Forever and ever amen.
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Drinkin’ Doubles, Hearin’ Singles, Gary Stewart

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Ain't nothing negotiable about a bullet to the head. In the quiet lost hours. No one around to save you. Just the silence to hold you, the night to enfold you, the pain to envelope you -- and to the unknown slip into. And so it was for Gary Stewart, the roughestneck voiced honky tonker who could tear the lid off a song like barbed wire through soft flesh.. Just rip it to shreds, leave it quivering on the floor -- no hope for scar tissue, the raggedy carcass or the ability to put it together again. Because when Gary Stewart sang a song, he retired the jersey. Ain't no need to even think about… that song was done gone. Long gone. Over and out. Gary Stewart came back to me during his tenure on Hightone. A big stalwart of the cracks in the jukeboxes of real four-on-the-floor redneck bars -- my initial exposure being west of Military Trail in mid-Palm Beach County ("not west of Military Trail," the upstanding denizens of society and retirement would recoil) -- where people came to "f#%* or fight," and the didn't much care which. They played the hits in those bars, for certain, and Gary Stewart, who was high flying rocket fuel in an already supercharged, overheated environment was aghost of a time threaded with danger, life on the edge and a thrill that came from kicking out the lights with abandon. Gary Stewart was dangerous. Electric. Thrilling. Impossible. Ragged. Raw. Jagged. Beyond control. Beyond belief. Beyond the limit. And those songs, those brutal songs about breaking points and breaking through, high dramas in honky tonks -- "Drinkin' Thing," "Brand New Whiskey," "Out of Hand," "Back Sliders Wine" and the seminal "She's Acting Single, I'm Drinking Doubles." His West was somehow wilder -- and we yearned to hit that horizon hard, certain that the other side would free us from the limitations of real life. But beyond the 9-to-5, the convention of conventional wisdom, the bow-and-genuflect of it all, the glistening eyes, beady and tight searching for some gut-truth that lies beyond articulation, known -- not uttered -- from the inside out. Funny how that works: wild-eyed boys punching and kicking and drinking and loving their way through without much more thought to it than what's on the jukebox. And in that brutal simplicity, Gary Stewart forged his kingdom. And in that brutal reality, Gary Stewart put a gun to his neck -- and pulled the trigger. Probably no one can sing that flat-out open without something driving from the inside out. And Gary Stewart hit it hard -- pushing the pedal through the floor, taking the roof off with one free swing. But in that hardness came a release unlike any other -- an unattainable recoil that left you on the floor, utterly spent, relaxed, satisfied. When Ronnie Dunn -- a seek and destroy singer if ever there was one -- heard the news, awake too early in the City of Angels, it hit him in a place few can reach: the eye of the same fire that consumes him. "Gary was the most authentic 'hard core' honky tonk singer, next to Hank Williams, that I've ever heard.," came the e-mail at an hour no self-respecting barroom refugee should be responding at. "The first time I heard him was on the juke box was in a beer joint in Glenpool, Okla. Singing 'She's Acting Single, I'm Drinkin' Doubles' in the late 70's. He stopped me cold in my tracks -- and I understood right then that a man could tear the heart right out of a song." Dunn, of course, made his name in the juke joints, dance halls and honky tonks around Tulsa, Oklahoma's very vibrant music scene. Steeped in the blood of neon lights and cheap beer, he knew about these sorts of places... and that behind-chicken-wire authenticity helped infuse Brooks & Dunn's muscular brand of honky tonk with the real life drama that made them as one critic wrote "the heart of Saturday night." The heart of Saturday night remains the Holy Grail of working stiffs, trying to stretch the paycheck 7 days and the hours long enough to get it all done. There's no Valhalla or Canyon Ranch for these people, just drowning your sorrows, howling at the moon, finding some lightning bolt or thunder roll of human connection -- because that jolt of right now is about all that can be guaranteed. Gary Stewart not only knew that, he was defined by that. A man who teetered on the brink of reality, rushing from things that haunted and hunted him which most mortals would never understand, it made him wail like a tortured soul in Dante's Inferno or "the Damned Souls" in Michelangelo's Altar of the Sistine Chapel. His was the abyss of want, the vortex of the intersection between lust and hurl oneself dead at it, the charge of right now and the voltage that was combustion contained in flesh. An athletic vocalist whose voice carried emotional current like electricity through water, step back or get fried when he set down on a song. And that was the dang deal, too. Even through some fairly straight-up mid-70s countrypolitan "outlaw" production -- with its lush choruses and neatly margined out charts -- Gary Stewart took the corner on two wheels, hair and shirt tail flying, a cloud of dust swallowing that shrinking dot that was once the man with the voice that was kerosene and a spark. But that's the thing about men who live beyond the outlaw pale… They're consumed by things we cannot see, cannot know, cannot understand. The demons that chase them ignite that shaky emotional overload quiver that makes you stop what you're doing and listen to every quaver in their voice as if it was the tarot to tell all about betrayal, lusts for all things toxic, a need beyond reason. What makes the art compelling is what makes the life a ruggedly rocky road. Gary Stewart, who had his 6-1-5 shot when the outlaws were runnin' the show, Billy Joe Shaver looked like a contender, Guy Clark was a poet with a shot and Steve Earle was a wet-behind-the-ears-kid hanging on the fringe like some dog sniffing scraps and mercy from the older, wiser artists. Those demons, though, were harsh mistresses. The bottle and the shadows of whatever inhabited his mind like a clanking chain-dragging ghost of what shoulda been. The ill-fated, worse-fitting life that is surrender to the game that almost destroyed what little sanity the white knuckled songwriter maintained. In the late 80s, there was an album on Hightone. It was my salad days, but a highwater time for a kind of country that had no place on the assembly line. Straight-up, non-negotiable, undeniable, unwieldy in the way real life can be -- and unburnished the way living and basic metals oxidize as they exist. In a world where Lyle Lovett and Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam and kd lang co-existed with new traditionalists who were polishing up the classic sounds like Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, George Strait, even pre-tv Reba McEntire, there was a congruence for artists like mystic singer/seer Jimmie Dale Gilmore, beat songwriter Butch Hancock, high pressure country/rocker Joe Ely and even crow-on-a-wire, pages-torn-from-a-diary songstress Lucinda Williams. In that arc, Gary Stewart was a phoenix rising from the ashes of his promise on the wings of a reborn appreciation of country-on-the-edge. Though in Stewart's case, country-on-the-ledge might've been closer. Especially in light of the news… News that left me still. Sitting at the keyboard, head bowed, eyes closed, wondering where that sort of turpentined veracity might be found in the future. Because that sort of kicking at the emotional stall now is translated as sloppiness passing as passion. It ain't even close. Back when Brand New Whiskey arrived, it was my first real time exposure -- a lost icon resurfacing or banking after an extended beyond the radar cruise. And out on that porch jutting out from that glorified two room apartment on Duane Street -- the second steepest incline in Los Angeles -- looking over the reservoir known as Silver Lake with even that water stiller than a mirror, nothing moving under the weight of the Santa Ana heat, the raw edge of Stewart's voice rolled out that sliding glass door and down the cracked concrete with a vengeance. To the neighbors, no doubt, this was the abode of some displaced Okie white trash amongst the Bohemians and the last Mexicans who didn't know gentrification was fixing to rid the neighborhood of them soon enough. In that suspended stifling environment, Gary Stewart was a breath of even hotter air, challenging the low pressure cell with an explosive charge. There was a freedom to blasting "Brand New Whiskey" that told the neighbors "have at it" or "pound sand." Someone listening to anything this unbridled was best not messed with… and it was true. Because if you could lock and load on something this unselfconsciously real, how can you be shamed, marginalized, locked down, pack-mentalitied or cornered into submission? Rather than raising a middle digit in what was quickly becoming the epicenter of cool, all you had to do was the set a real hillbilly singer set on emotional consumption on stun and watch the people shudder. Who knew Gary Stewart was just another name for insurrection? If freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose as the seer Kristofferson proclaimed, then suicide is just another name for an angel releasing himself from the mortal coil of torture and anguish. It's been a hard year or so for heroes. Even worse for legends. In country alone, there was June Carter Cash and Waylon Jennings, Bill Monroe and Johnny Cash. Seems like every time I turned around, another voice was gone, another light extinguished, another curtain drawn or chapter closed. Warren Zevon for sure… and and and. And then. And yet. And uhm…. As my little car-radio quality speakers whirl out the gently strolling "Your Place or Mine," Stewart's voice tickles the rafters, drops down and wiggles like too much girl in too little dress and then rolls across a verse that teases the melody with a languishing attenuation of just the right words. And for all the opening up that is his signature, all the catches and rolls, it is the direct need that he sinks into that transforms one more hillbilly song of take-it-on-home connection into a sacrament of flesh and fulfillment. Flesh and fulfillment. Pretty basic stuff, really, but the stuff that -- unlike sanitized for your protection male singers who're clean as a Marines barrack -- makes the world go 'round. And dead or alive, this is music that shall go 'round and 'round and 'round. For Gary Stewart brokered something far more plugged in than two-dimensional Hallmark card realities… When he was sweet, "Cactus and A Rose," "Are We Dreaming The Same Dream," even the cheatin' proposition "I See The Want To In Your Eyes" that was far-flung as anything Elvis ever tackled, Gary Stewart showed that it's the wildest boys who are tenderest. In that release, there's a capitulation that's about wanting to, not being trapped into it. Just like living. Gary Stewart ultimately refused to be trapped… His way may make no sense to the rest of us… We will never know what drove him to do what he did… What existed beneath the surface, what voices might've taken over his head… But what we know about why doesn't matter. That he's gone, but that he left us with so much genuine article is more than plenty. To miss that in the name of what happened, to miss that high wire voice that took the truth and wrung it dry, is to get upside down in how it really is. For Gary Stewart, what could be greater treason?
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Jeff Bates Comes Home To The Depths of His Heart

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Between two people there lies the past. Not the shared memories, but the things that defined them that defy common experience. The past is a rich and scary place, offering up insights into people that exist beyond articulation... both the ghosts of what were and the sweetness that is the true germ of all longing. And when you live in the wind, where you forge the depths quickly, much gets taken on faith. Or it's glossed over because people live on the run and don't want to look back. The bridge that binds the truths is often understood without understanding on the existential plane, let alone the empiric one. So bring me a 40 year old man with a voice that is the essence of the mud at the bottom of the Mississippi River, the deep tones of a 100 year old Magnolia tree creaking at the crease from which the branches grow, the gravelly sound of a dirt road gone mud -- and suggest that the gaps fill in by osmosis. Especially a smart 40 year old man steeped in tradition who is just slightly askew from the star-making processes. Yeah, bring it on -- my colorist needs more reasons to dye me. Somewhere down a blue line, or rather several jagged blue lines zagging into each other like an EKG gone mad, lies the Mississippi of Jeff Bates. It is a place of marked contrasts -- sweeping fields that seem to yearn for something more, perhaps people's dreams to fill the voids that spring up above them, and major trees that reach as broad as they do high, sweeping up everything within reach and promising to take even more in. This Mississippi balances what many would consider abject poverty with the stiff-lipped unmoving stoicism that is survival not even considered, merely a matter of fact. The land of there-are-no-options, so-we-persevere. And like a precariously balanced Thanksgiving dinner plate, wobbling on a knee extended from a stuffing-spewing chair, it somehow exults in the conflicting reality. That would be the easy way to look at it. But not through the eyes of Jeff Bates, an old school country singer who evokes Conway Twitty's direct eroticism, Waylon Jennings' don't-back-down dignity, Johnny Paycheck's dug-in working class rowdiness, Merle Haggard's blue collar poetry and Johnny Cash's elevation of the common man. Looking at Bates' Mississippi, it's every turn that turned into a collision, every house that a pretty girl ever lived in, every place someone he knows once worked. It is a vital place, where every tree, every driveway, every market is joined into a larger truth of life. It is the web of living, of being… and especially of the kind of love that is only forged from getting by when that's the largest commodity one has to live on.For Jeff Bates' people were poor. Honorable in the way people who can't buy their way out of it must be. Decent to the core, and embracing people's entire selves without the cherry-picking that mars many people's worldviews -- denying them the gift of the rich pageant that is humanity. With an ages old magnolia spreading its branches like welcoming arms, the few rooms that housed a Mama and a Daddy and eventually 11 children -- in waves, but still that's a lot of wear and tear in any configuration -- it's obvious this buckled frame building is a dwelling of love. No doubt dysfunction, as well, packed full of kids who're too smart, not quick enough, quiet, boisterous, curious, shy, sly… and parents raised with old school philosophies tempered with kindness and pride and a commitment to giving each other everything they had. Bunker Hill is not a worldly place. It is sprawling fields, some cultivated, some littered with brush and trees and cut up by the occasional wire fence, strung to make sense of the farflung undulations that is the ground that makes up the great state of Mississippi. Popped up there is a three room house -- a big front room and two bedrooms; the big room cut up some more to create a kitchen and a bathroom and a closet. It is a place that now belongs to one of the older boys… and his family. The front porch, where a young dark-headed boy who looked like the baby Elvis would sit and sing old gospel songs with his Pentecostal preacher's daughter mother while waiting for his father to come in from the fields, has been covered over, closed in like the world getting smaller through the wonders of development. But you can still feel the music and the waiting and the love that three people, who to the rest of the world had fallen through the cracks, shared. See, these are the truths most people miss. And they miss 'em - -even if they somehow manage to turn themselves around enough how many different times to somehow get lost and end up in what was the Bates' front yard. The only trickier negotiation would be the phases of the hearts that beat within this family: strong hearts that believe in the sanctity of life, even in the face of how hard it can be. And these people know hard. A sharecropper with that many mouths to feed. A gorgeous woman aged by the needs of that many children, but made even more beautiful by the love within her soul. It glows behind them, a light that is unseen by the people who don't understand the things in life that really matter -- the things that imbue Jeff Bates with everything that makes him stand out, things that go unspoken like breathing. From the road, it ain't much. The front of the house still up on blocks. Won't betray the magic that exists in the cracks in the floorboards, the windows that have plastic to keep out the viciousness of the wind. It is a husk of something far more wonderful than the bigger houses that also sit out amongst the rolling land that wrinkles the topography and casts the grass like gray/green nets of fertility. If these walls could talk… is a notion that makes me smile. They could describe the smell of chicken frying, cakes cooling, biscuits baking. They could tell tales of thick corrective glasses and Vitalis hair oil and double knit pants, young'uns clean and pressed and ready to go to school looking unlike any of the "in" kids. But also stories of a wisdom that illuminates a dignity that runs through the veins and a compassion that makes lives more potent. When a chubby 14-year old could take no more as a poor-kid-expected-to-take it, and in finally standing up for himself, getting a suspension that more than illustrated the canyon of the class system; it was a knowing father who decreed, "You've probably learned enough anyway" -- and set a manchild on the doorstep of adulthood without the histrionics of popularity contests, trivial school functions and the disposability of values that're rooted in money that most teenagers pass through on their way to maturity. It was a liberation out of humiliation, a stand from necessity and a reaching out that came without explanation. When Jeff Bates got his walking papers, he also got -- at his strong, silent father's behest -- an invitation into the grown-up world. He walked through the door, knowing his Daddy had his back and his Mama would always be there to pick up the pieces. If he was shy, a dreamer, unlike the rest of the family -- He only got his full redneck stripes by the hardwon effort of tearing down an engine in a quest for his father's respect, not some deep burning thrill to get out the wrenches and the screwdrivers -- they loved him as he was. They loved and protected and fussed over and dared and challenged. They gave him roots and wings -- and they prodded him when necessary. If his mother was acutely aware of the gap, and wished to protect her adopted child from the judgment of other people -- a judgment based on arbitrary truths and not the beauty of her son's soul -- she was fierce in her love. She demanded, sitting on that porch on all those nights, "Sing out, boy! Sing like you mean it…" and she meant it. She knew the difference, and she wouldn't settle. A preacher's daughter knows the difference, you see, about heaven and Hell, redemption, salvation and damnation . Mrs. Bates made sure her children knew what God's love was all about. She taught them tolerance and perseverance. She gave them a sense of belonging in a world that could've cared less or bothered to notice. To her, these children -- but especially the one who arrived with double pneumonia, needing to be brought back to health -- were her reason for being. And Barbara Bates intended to be with a white hot reason that would smelt steel, split atoms and turn away naysayers. Still, small towns and rural areas are places of uneasy truces. You must get along, because the space is limited. But there is the implied line of "more than" and "less than;" the silent jockeying for position on the social hierarchy. It can consume one's life, one's soul, one's piece of mind. Or one can just secede from that game of social Pacman -- and turn inward, glorying in the amazement of the lives that've been gathered through grace and circumstance. Besides when your house is something the kids can play under, there ain't much use in airs. Not that having airs would've interested the Bateses, they had far more important things to do: mold young character, give their children a sense that the world was out there to take on. That whatever they found would make them rich, would define who they were -- even if they never stepped back to consider what any of it meant. Lives lived on the margin, you see, do not afford much opportunity for introspection. You merely sign on and start living. You steep in the moments, you build on what's there. Then you celebrate the things that come your way, wait for the setbacks to pass while working like Hell to get through it. On this particular day, there in that white wood frame house -- that had been improved upon considerably -- there was a surprise in the near back bedroom. Peaking in through a window, a fawn -- still spotted, nursing from a bottle -- on wobbly legs, skittered about. Its Momma had been hit by a car, so Jeff's brother'd brought it home to save it from certain death. It was a moment straight out of Marjorie Rawlings. The Yearling in a back Mmississippi bedroom, as naive and sacred as anything one would find in church. Untouched by anything mortal man might consider important, that little deer sucked hard on the bottle, knowing that nourishment would come if it would just hang on… It reminded me of my own Grandmother on my mother's side. A conscientious objector in the realm of organized religion, walking through the woods off Community Drive - where Grandpa was an estate manager for some of the wealthiest families in Cleveland -- "WHY do I HAVE to go to some marble building to see God?" she would bellow, feet crushing twigs and leaves beneath her muddy rubber boots. "Look around, little girl, look… around… If God isn't here, he sure isn't there. If God got to pick, where do you think he'd rather be?" On this afternoon, looking for fried chicken and mashed potatoes to bring with us, Jeff Bates' very best friend behind the wheel, it is no question. God has no interest in fancy or grand or uppity or the latest designer or biggest houses. God doesn't have much interest in small minds, petty spirits or icy hearts… He loves them and he wants them to open up to something warmer, something more, but he makes his home where he feels the most welcome. For God, what could be holier than the fields a young not-quite would fill up with dreams, a stream he would sail his desires down, a Mama who would brush the hair back from his eyes while he sang and a Father who would stand up for him, even as he'd dress him down over dumb mistakes. It is in this kind of reality that character is forged… which isn't an unfaltering diamond hard thing. No, even out of something like this, stumbles are part of the package. But the core remains solid. No matter what happens, there is always this truth to come back to… this love to wrap oneself up in when the night is cold and desolate and the doubts are bigger than the Manhattan skyline. As the roads twist, rise and fall on their way to places that mean nothing to me, but everything to my companion of the day, the world opens up. It is a place of indignity, burning moments of shame and thrills both. It is every person who snubbed or looked down their nose, every girl who ever said yes, every mystery that needed untying, every stigma that required discarding, every truth that held up and every myth that eventually burned off like the morning mist. This Mississippi is all soul, no waiting. A hard place in many ways, but abandoned enough that anything could be possible. You could dream what you wanted, because they were just dreams. If you decided to stay, the life you got was the life you'd been raised on. If you wandered off, seeking something, everyone looked yearningly after you -- wondering what you'd find, hoping you'd share it if you did, and knowing if it didn't work, you'd be back safe amongst'em. It takes a certain hunger to leave a place like that, a place that is fundamentally hungry. But when you have that kind of love, those kinds of images burned inside you, you can go knowing that you're taking it with you wherever you end up. That is comforting in ways that defy words. On Rainbow Man, Jeff Bates' debut, there is a song called "My Mississippi," which celebrates the facts more than the feelings. Perhaps between the words much should be understood. Maybe I'm thick, but as the bleached gray tar falls beneath the tires, it makes me smile -- because there's a truth even deeper than the voice of the bass-singing growler: home is buried deep within us all. If we will see it for what it is, even when it is someone else's, there is comfort to be had. Open your eyes, see what is beneath what is there -- and you can sprout wings and soar in any moment. For every place, every second, every person is the same fundamentally, we just get so lost in the facts and places we miss the far richer, more potent universal truths. This night will be a homecoming concert of sorts. For all the people who had more… at least in terms of possessions… they will have to come to terms that one of the less than found a way to make --and more importantly -- leave a mark. Whether he ever becomes Entertainer of the Year or not, Jeff Bates found a way to make music, to write down the truths of his life, to offer insight, to sow some of the understanding that the people where he came from blew by without thinking. To people who may never leave Laurel, Mississippi, Jeff Bates is a dispatch from the other side. He has seen what they all dreamed of, things they couldn't even imagine -- many of these people who never ever left the county, let alone the state. His blue moon has turned gold, maybe platinum. He is swinging on a brass ring that could set the merry-go-round free, the painted horses running happy and wild and free beyond rules or fears or limitations -- and he, they all know in the deepest places, was one of them In a two-dimensional world, even one that is as achingly lovely in its sparseness as that part of Mississippi, the notion that dreams can come true may well be the most narcotic thing of all. What could make you believe in possibilities of living more than seeing one of your own get their shot? And see them actually bring it home? The songs on the radio, the appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, the acclaim in The New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly ? To have all that, then to turn around and share it so generously with all the people back where he comes from? And when Jeff Bates the hillbilly singer stood onstage, bathed in the warm golden glow of that spotlight, he didn't turn up his nose, say he told them so or extend a middle finger. No, having been raised in a world of love and loving people for what they are, he talked about how his dream was their dream -- their collective dream. So for him, the beauty was letting them share in these moments. In that moment, Cleveland, Ohio and Bunker Hill, Mississippi weren't so very different. Rock & roll and country music were just the same. Prep schools and hard knocks had parity. The rush and the languid pace both had their place, a rhythm that was life fully inhabited. In that shared understood truth, there were no gaps, no distance, no difference. Mississippi is not only the home of great writers and better singers, it is a place where dreams can spread out under strong branches, the sweet smell of grass, the hope for small things and the moments where just enough is more than plenty. If you start there, anything is possible. Look -- or listen -- to what that state gave Jeff Bates. Sure there was a strong family, a deep belief in God and a sense of wanting more. But the soybeans, the untamed animals, the lost nights and everything that is life in the slow sleepy South was a pretty great place to start -- and it creates a deeper truth that anyone worth their heart should be able to get their arms around. Or else if the truth is just too impossibly endless, exhaust themselves trying. #############
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Good-Bye Little Rock’n'Roller

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There were always golf pros. Bored. Jaded. Thrill-seeking to kill summers spent in the service of the overstuffed, self-important and often boorish. They were charmed by the scrawny kid in the pink and green or yellow or turquoise with the swinging ponytail secured with a great big Pappagallo ribbon bow. The kid who didn't understand the meaning of "no," who knew deep truths about life, who chased the night and emotions and most of all rock & roll with a parched thirstiness that was almost unquenchable. All the bands. All the records. Reading Rolling Stone under one of those hand-carved, heavy dark wood Eastern European beds in the attic. Staring down Patti Smith on the cover of Horses, not sure if she was a he or whatever; waiting for the lightning bolt to strike after repeatedly needle-dropping on the disengaged confessional opening salvo of Horses: "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine…" Strangely limp when nothing happened. Disoriented. Vertiginous, even. Not sure about anything in the world anymore -- except that the truth could be found somewhere in the grooves. If not on Horses, then when Bonnie Raitt melted down John Prine's song of emptiness and alienation in a home where love once lived and only memories seem to exhale "Angel From Montgomery." There was Jackson Browne. Led Zeppelin. Heart. The Sanford Townsend Band. Aerosmith. Merle Haggard. Little Feat. Gary Wright. Fleetwood Mac. The Allman Brothers. Carole King. Earth, Wind & Fire. Carly Simon. Waylon Jennings. Warren Zevon. Linda Ronstadt. Jefferson Airplane/Starship. Thin Lizzy. Emmylou Harris. Ear glued to the radio -- listening for the seismic shifts. To know the music. What was next. What was lame. What mattered, what sucked. What could -- properly applied -- lift me up. One day, there was the most haunted sound of a lost wind blowing -- pouring out of the speakers of some golf pro's car, parked outside the Shaker Deli where no doubt the driver was inside buying a couple of ice cold six packs. The announcer's voice, male, a little distant, flat but with an echo, appeared from out of nowhere. There was a serpentine guitar part, buzzing with the promise of kerosene and a match -- that taut tension doing nothing, but its presence letting you know… "It's the sound of faded calico dresses… and leaving town on the midnight train." I was riveted, right there, fanny planted in the naugahyde. That's when it hit. A voice that was cracked prairie, broken open, a witness to all the earth had seen -- exhaling about a long and lonely highway just east of Omaha. It was as if my blood had turned to electricity and every cell was set on stun. "Marshall Chapman… Jaded Virgin… on Epic Records & Tapes." That was all the more there was. Utterly abortive. Entirely, frustratingly not enough. Yet, it was crumbs in the forest, a trail to somewhere -- perhaps scary, probably dark -- that I must journey. That I would know. Jaded Virgin was of course purchased. Spoils from another bout of parental marital croquet. During this particular separation, it was an attempt on my father's part to curry favor that incited angina over a title that to him signified moral turpitude at best, my moral erosion at worst. But to hear a thick Southern accent flailing, wailing, raving "Why can't I be like other girls…" was a liberation over utterly collected-and-rising guitars… a lazy female diction with the tension tightening up like a horse coming up on a jump, gathering, shortening its stride, extending, reaching and clearing. That was Marshall Chapman's ability to free-for-all into the abyss with a focus that was as intense as the explosive reality she conjured. For control and abandon marked her, and the records, tautening the loose-jointed rolling grooves. And the way her throat opened when she tossed her head back, spewed out the line. If admitting, "I could read, I could write/ But learning to be white was something I didn't need to know…" about grade school education drew the reality-checking line for the South Carolina textile heiress in this lament about role and convention and one's inability to access the hand as dealt. Jaded Virgin offered a rough sweetness that was low-slung leather pants soaked with the salt of a good night's sweat. There was this woman's woman's sense on the record, too. The frustration-tempered-with-reggae that was "The Island Song" and the corner-lipped "Thank You Hank" that settled a debt with the Senior Williams that nodded to the spiritual father of this daughter of the South's musical journey. Miss Chapman understood that Hank Sr. seared the blueprint for the rock & roll lifestyle that stands today: live hard, leave nothing in your wake and when it comes to the music, use the songs like kerosene and passion like a Molotov cocktail. But it was on Bob Seger's "Turn The Page" -- mostly recently yanked out of moth balls by Metallica -- that Chapman's clear-eyed vision of the price paid for the rock & roll dream came to a slow boil that was as cautionary as it was confessional. In that deep, drawn-out voice of her's, she confessed, "You feel the eyes open you as you're shaking off the cold/ Sometimes you can't hear'em talk, other times you can/ And it's the same old clichés… Is that a woman or a man?" Dignity is not always for those who live without surrender when confronted with convention. The normal fears those who live beyond the rules jettison define the status quo. Those people are terrified by a freedom they won't seize, confused by a thwarted willingness to be who they're wanting to, not who they're expected to. And it all plays out in the truck stop dining rooms and backwater cafes, where the dream is quartered if not drawn. If it plays out in the places where basic human needs must be met, it pays out onstage in a million sinkhole bars. Because on that stage every night, the ones who've not yet ascended swing for their soul in increments of 45, 60, 75, 90 or six sets. And it's not just the souls of those plugging in and turning on, but the souls of the faithful who show up looking for witness, looking for comfort, looking to be enlivened by gypsies who will pay the price for the moment of communion with a backbeat, a guitar chord, a shriek that is meant to be release from what is -- commitment to something beyond the pale. And so it was that a young girl in a pink buttondown Oxford cloth shirt, side-parted hair secured on either side by a tortoise shell barrette made small talk with some golf pro -- head tilted to signal interest, heart pounding wanting to see the 6' tall Glamazon who kicked in the stall, incinerated the yoke of "supposed to be," chose to toss herself off the wall of security with a ferocity that screamed "There Is More." The record had become like blood to me. There in the attic, the air too warm and thick to breathe. Over and over and over and over and over again. It wasn't as relentless as the Rolling Stones, who truly did tear this place apart. But there was something to it. Something that rearranged my DNA and made me know I didn't have to accept what was handed… It was liberation as the electrics screamed, the bass churned and this woman who'd -- unknown to me -- railed about being "rode hard and put up wet" turned herself inside out in the name of burning down the house, the mind, the moment. Inside this bar, entered by virtue of a much older companion and a bored security guard who just didn't care and probably figured that it didn't really matter as the door was kinda light, my heart pounded between my ears, between my legs, beneath my solar plexus. There was barely air getting into my lungs. My palms were wet with the warm sweat of anticipation. Somewhere "back there," where they kept the disciples of dreams, the cattledrivers of song, I knew she was waiting. Gathering her energy. Striking her matches. Not sure what Marshall Chapman would do, but knowing it would come down fast and hard, furious and over. It went down just like that. An opera scarf draped around her neck in the most jaunty, thrown-on style, so careless it seemed to negate everything the item signified. And also so much tossed off that it said, everything about what you know can be re-thought in a way that serves you. Charging hard with that band of sinewy, raw-boned thieves, it was all about how hard could you push it. Genuflect before the altar of backbeat, bob hard and swerve around a guitar solo that performed surgery on melody designed to throw her at the moon, jerk back and pull her to the center of the vocal. It was like something theretofore unseen -- a woman who wasn't afraid to sweat, to grind, to push her band, to drag them around if necessary, to be pulled by a gravitational field of undulation that was sex implied, refusal stated, yearning understood. Marshall Chapman -- billed by many as "the female Mick Jagger," referred to by others as "the no shame dame" -- cashed those checks without looking back or considering. She ate moments with abandon. She surged with electricity and rage and lust for whatever was laid before her. If she could respond with a woman's tenderness against the roughness that was a Southern-steeped rock music, she was never soft. Nor was she traditional. Marshall Chapman was a confoundment. Hell bent on getting what she wanted. Intent on being her own girl, "should" and convention be damned. As her shoulder dropped, that blond Telecaster slung low on the tallest woman I'd ever seen, it was an exorcism of sorts taking place on that stage… a woman intent on shirking off the constraints of what was supposed to, all in the name of strangling the will out of something that had plugged into her essence, had taken her prisoner and driven her to places most mortals would never believe existed. As sweat flung off her in every direction, spraying the band, the crowd, the stage like a pressure hose on particularly heated moments, Marshall Chapman was a feral animal intent on release. She knew no fear, no thoughts, no will to accept anything beyond the moment -- indeed, the moment wasn't even considered, it was swallowed whole and digested like the snake that devours a mouse intact. That was the beauty of Mah-shull, telling stories in a speaking voice that moved at about the same molasses-pace as life was lived outside Spartanburg, South Carolina. She took her time when she shared those insights, intent on making people wait for her truth; believing -- no doubt -- the anticipation would heighten the pay-off. Or at least torture us through the contrast with the frenzied free-for-all of surrender that was the most incendiary moments. And there were slower moments. Moments that rolled and rocked gently, measured and straining against desire or lust or recognition of want and denial. Somehow when she slowed it down to low boil, the intensity came up in other ways -- letting you know that a woman's heart, even a heart railing against roles, has the depth of emotions that will always make it true, immeasurable, utterly awe-inducing. In my topsiders, breath held, then released in paroxysms of euphoria, something inside me changed that night. With a heart that's racing, with a pulse faster and harder than the Ramones on diet pills, a veil dropped and a recognition emerged: you could be what you wanted to be. For a young girl plagued by the notion that adulthood was a prison, that the notion of a life of marriage and children and a home and solidity was the way, that your joy and your freedom were traded for what you were supposed to be, this evening was a revelation. Yes, Marshall Chapman was a child of rebellion, of refusal to buy into the roles, of an almost pathological charging straight at the side of the barn. But Marshall Chapman was free. Free to wail, to beat that guitar like a rug on a line, to charge the footlights and take no prisoners. If life was hard -- and it was far harder than the blinding, harsh glow of the moment and the spots burning -- it would not be known until years later when Chapman published her memoirs, Good-Bye Little Rock & Roller on St. Martins' Press. No, in that moment it was all void, for she was the brightest lightest candle on the altar. With a light patina of sweat covering my too young body and an aching in my too old soul, it occurred to me that the rules are what you make (or break) them. If there was something I wanted, I could seize it in the name of some higher glory, or wait out back til it emerged, tired and willing to give in to desire. Either way was good, no, more: either way afforded me an example that said you didn't just have to be what they thought --especially when they arrived at their decisions without ever really looking at you. For in a world where children weren't really seen… where sparkling precociousness and a fire for the songs produced a strange upside down loyalty from the people those wide chocolate brown eyes consumed with awe, wonder and release… where it was all proscribed… this was a revolution beyond recognition. For in a skanky bar that smelled of old beer and vomit, a woman who walked with a sway to her step, who didn't think about anything but the gut of the song and who eviscerated roles, gender definitions and any polite reason with her performance let out a laugh that was tattered, worldweary thunder spreading across the valley of a very worried, equally thirsty soul. Marshall Chapman kicked out the jams that night at the Akron (she swears Youngstown) Agora. She took no prisoners. She never looked down. She never saw the beaming face lifted in emancipation. Not sure quite how it translated for a girl who would never debut, never Junior League, never even begin to be like other girls, a pilot light of a different stripe got struck that night. For the first time in my life, a woman who lived beyond the law combusted before me. That she was more vital than anything I'd ever seen, more consumed by the electrical current of the hottest moments than anyone I'd ever regarded, it occurred to me: you can grow up, you can walk the line between what you're supposed to be and what you want. Perhaps the architect has to make it up as you go along, there's bruising in the name of a fate beyond plodding acceptance and a fair amount of threatened from others as you journey… But you go in the name of a spirit that is something only you can hear, and it is a spirit that can deliver you in ways most people will never know. In the parking lot, where the temperature had dropped, and the snap of the Midwestern night should've sobered up the exhilaration of rock music white hot and burning, the glow just got greater. Laughing to myself, everything had changed. Too young to know how, it was a moment of seeing oneself for the first time and wondering what the path would hold. That it would be four years of being the West Coast call for Rolling Stone wasn't even within the realm. Nor was the notion of knowing the artists I loved. On that night, the idea that I could chase the flame and if my wings got singed, at least my heart would stay warm was enough. For the ferocity of the will is bigger than the weight of the supposed to -- and that alone was enough to make a drive home feel like the ramp up to the rest of whatever. A free-for-all frenzied band scrappy in ways that seemed just like any other hardcore stampede to the casual observer, but ultimately, the moment when it all changes, the shackles and expectations drop and the girl's soul began to emerge towards freedom most people would never touch, breathe or fathom. In that moment, it all shifted -- and I could never be the same again. That ride home was a limp benediction for something that would evermore kick inside, set me ablaze and light the way when all else was dark and too silent to suggest.
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Delia’s Gone, Johnny Cash

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The phone rang at 5:50. AM. Recovering from a vicious stomach flu that strafed me until my cells all pounded from the screaming pain, unconsciousness would be putting it mildly,. But the Associated Press needed reaction to the news we'd all been dreading, knew was inevitable, yet wishfully denied by virtue of the power of the man, the myth, the music. Johnny Cash had passed away. My world -- a foggy beyond exhaustion dizziness -- needed to be cut through NOW. In the name of deadlines whirring, moments passing and the celebration of the life and songs of one of the greatest icons our country ever produced. Johnny Cash. The man in black. The man who stood for the poor, the overlooked, the cast-off, different, uneducated and any other characteristic that would or could make a human being "less than." Johnny Cash -- as close to the Voice of God as any mortal man can hope to be. Deep. Thunderous. Rich. Solid. Strong. Craggy from a life lived without apology -- complete with immersion in humanity, a witness to pain in its many forms, sowing dignity and care wherever he went. And then there was the music. And not just the obvious hits -- "Big River," "Ring of Fire," "I Walk The Line," "Boy Named Sue," "Folsom Prison Blues" - but the riveting "John Henry," the thumpety thump of racing hearts "Ballad of a Teenage Queen," the hilarious latter day "One Piece At A Time," the carnal meltdown of threatened adultery on top of a marriage born of utter lust sung with June Carter "Jackson" and his haunted recent work with Rick Rubin, from the deep Gothic "Delia's Gone" to his inside out meditation on pain and addiction that is a far more ravaged read of Trent Reznor's "Hurt." One could get lost in the songs, the common poetry and empathy. Except there are calls to make, ducks to put in a row and have dial their respective phones. Hierarchies, even, of who they want and who they don't -- but who are, damnit, absolutely valid. So, at 6:10 in Las Vegas, a cell phone rings and goes to voice mail. Jeff Bates has had a long night and no doubt, as the newest client, has no idea what could be so impossibly important. Figuring Terri Clark is in Switzerland, but there's no way to get her numbers yet; that Kenny Chesney is somewhere in international waters; that Ronnie Dunn and Kix Brooks have just shifted time zones again and are locked down on their buses, out of safe reach of their cell phones; and John Michael Montgomery is lost somewhere on the back of a farm that barely gets cell service on the best day, there's only one thing to do: leave urgent messages and wait. Pray they'll call back. Oh, and wake up the baby act's manager… Also, to get on the phone to critical print outlets. See how tight those deadlines really are -- and buy time. Buy time and remind them as they're passing on Jeff Bates, the Mississippian man who's a more fitting legacy of Cash's meaning than all the bright shiny bold faced names in the galaxy of hillbilly stars. Born poor. Barely educated, but filling the gaps on his own. The child of a Native American mother who can't even pinpoint a father -- making the mongrel Alabaman a dodgy risk who was ultimately adopted by a sharecropper and his Pentecostal preacher's daughter wife -- he understands every intricacy of being an outsider. "I never really fit in any place/ Because there's always a part of me to hate…" he confesses on the title track to Rainbow Man, a debut album released at the tender age of 39. 39 years old, following a serious crystal meth addiction, a stint in jail for grand theft over $25,000 and drug charges, and four marriages. If he's come to acceptance -- mostly of himself as he is, but also of others -- the hard way, he embraces it with the very same grace that marked Johnny Cash's life. The phone rings back a few minutes later. The deep voice that's equal parts Barry White bottom, Conway Twitty eroticism and Mississippi River gravel asks, "What's wrong?" Then proceeds to talk about his father's love affair with Cash's music -- "the harshest reality I ever heard in songs -- and just like where we were from" -- and the recognition of similar demons. Like a good soldier, he starts making his calls. Ironically the journalists who had to be coerced to deal with this plain dirt person in a world of glitterati and marquis caliber celebrity call back to acknowledge the validity of the slow talking songwriter's witness. Amid the whirl, Ronnie Dunn calls in. Visibly shaken, the man with the most emotive, flexible, strength-in-the-moment voice in modern country music is faltering. His statement is the classicism of modern country royalty… but it's in the head-shakingly confessed outpouring of moments that the power of the passing descends. Janine Dunn, his longtime bride, was a widow when they met. Johnny Cash and June Carter had been in the bridal party of her first wedding, making their relationship with the icons more familial than musical. Their moments were marked with a deeper kind of intimacy -- less the rock & roll totem than the patriarch and matriarch of a very, very grounded family. For Ronnie Dunn, taciturn at best, this was daggers dipped in acid. And then there was his own wife's pain, that need to be strong for someone sustaining an even graver loss. So it went all morning, Air traffic controlling the big interviews. Getting the official statements out. Finding the people where and how you could. Being the bearer of bad news, listening to the jumble of emotions -- the shock, pain, confusion, fear, sadness, terror even -- that made up their response and recognizing Johnny Cash was a man who these artists desperately wanted to pay their respects to. Kenny Chesney, actually sitting in a Waffle House -- back from the islands for 48 hours to attend another funeral, one for one of his bus drivers found dead from congestive heart failure in a hotel room the day he was to close on a house, no next of kin only next of employer -- and trying to make sense of the death. Terri Clark on the side of the stage in Gstaad, Switzerland, pulled from a soundcheck to hear the news and respond -- dazed by both the raggedness of the loss and the time zone cha cha whiplash of international travel. Kix Brooks, back from an early run to the golf course and already aware, able in his lucidity to address the facets of a man who meant much to many in many, many ways. Johnny Cash was like that. In his humility, he inspired all of us to be more, to be better, to have integrity. To hear Johnny Cash, to gaze upon a countenance that was essentially a portrait of the human condition, it was the know peace and pain, torment and release, love and sorrow, but above all, faith. No matter what… No matter how lost or wild… There was always faith to bring him home. It may've faltered. Been battered, tattered, torn and bruised along the way -- but it was a constant undertow to pull his soul back to the shore where it belonged. When I think of Johnny Cash -- beyond torturing my Latina college suitemates with those bumping backbeat heavy early records that were all rockabilly and adrenalin and raising him as the ultimate punk rock symbol back when the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were raging -- I think of a pillar of strength, a mountain of humanity that could weather any storm, survive the pain -- which he most certainly felt -- and maintain his dignity as a man and his artistry in the truest sense. Not that anyone necessarily cares what I think -- a midwifer of dreams, believer in the poetry of the lives lived, survivor of lost nights, broken heels and brokener hearts, I am one more handmaiden to the celestial beings. Taxi dancers who give their souls to the songs must choose wisely for it's an all-consuming high-stakes kind of musical poker… and if you cast your soul capriciously, you come to know the hard way that Johnny Cash is about the only surest bet in town. His memory should be celebrated. His legacy cast in the words of those who survived, whose music thrived because of the songs of Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash and the Carter/Cash Families. There had been no time to breath, to think, to pause this sad day. Churn the phones -- cell and hotel room. Burn the e-mail. Cut and paste and resend. Bob and weave. Create and recreate and try not to remember… until now… on a plane home, still sick from the flu that makes your ribs ache, heading home to my own little bed. When my own father died of a protracted illness that wasted him slowly, stealing his power and his shine, it was those calls from unexpected places that pulled me through. Just the notion that somebody knew, cared, felt it. And so I dialed, only my friend was at the funeral parlor when she answered -- clearly an inopportune time. But the voice of the sad lost little girl that overwhelmed the wet lushness of the woman who testified about "Seven Year Aches," anguished about living ghosts in "A Lover Is Forever" and "Why Don't You Quit Leavin' Me Alone," stood naked and vulnerable in "The Real Me," embraced a gentle tempest in "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" and got all over the musical joy of her father's tale of musical arrival "Tennessee Flat Top Box" was the embodiment of stillness engulfed in sorrow. She had lost her Daddy. It's a pain like no other, never lessened or tempered by the knowledge it was coming. On her Rules of Travel, Rosanne Cash sang a song with her father called "September When It Comes." It was generational. It was inevitable. It captured the horrible recognition of the ravages of times with a bittersweet beauty that transfixes you with its fragility. Both vocalists know what is to come, but they bravely stiffen their lips, resolute in the understanding there is something beyond the known. Perhaps that's the greatest truth of Johnny Cash's resolve. His faith was such that we can almost know by his passing that there must be more beyond the mortal coil. Will The Circle be Unbroken, Volume 2 opens with Johnny Cash singing the Carter Family staple "Life's Railway To Heaven." He is joined by his great love June Carter Cash and her sisters Helen and Anita for as simple a profession of faith as one could hope for. On the wings of blood harmonies, it brings the hereafter here and now -- and sets the listener free with its unnuanced courage of conviction. Whether you believe or not is irrelevant. Listening to "Life's Railway," it is impossible to doubt. It's fitting then that the first guest on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's third installment of their musical, generational and philosophical merger was Johnny Cash. For this outing, Cash asked if he could bring in a song he'd never got around to recording -- "Tears In the Holston River," a song about Mother Maybelle and Sara Carter's passing and funerals. That performance, along with American IV: The Man Comes Around, the single and video for "Hurt," are all nominated for awards at this November's CMA Awards. Even now, his force may flicker, but always shines. Helen Keller once wrote, "It's better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness." Johnny Cash lived his life like a blaze of glory -- throwing light into the deepest crevices and recesses of this world, so we could see or be seen, know or be understood. The Dirt Band's boyish guitarist/vocalist Jeff Hanna, a dear friend, has voice that deserves to be heard in the wash of response even if the band couldn't justify keeping a publicist on retainer. Stammering and talking through tears, he spoke of the fellowship Cash brought through moments and music, the shock waves of recognition that rolled through you being in close proximity of a legend who'd been an indelible part of his childhood tempered by the easy way Cash had. But it was Ronnie Dunn whose benediction offered solace amongst the sorrow. In a voice that bore no recognition to the muscular power-tenor that attacks America's concert stages with a fire and ferocity each night, he spun out the truth as he believed it: A man in black stepped through three pearly white gates today Into the waiting arms of his angel June Carter Cash. Mortal man may be saddened, but heaven's singing… The Louvin Brothers have their own anthem of redemption with "The Angels Rejoiced." Though "The Ballad of John R." was never quite so hard-won or stark, the joy of the deliverance was no less great. Recognizing freedom from devastating illness and a reunion with the true love of his life, we should all find joy in the passing of one who truly made a difference. He wasn't afraid to burn, to love, to seek, to live with complete abandon. But also with a strength that made him regal in the hushed way of kings. Tonight, 37,000 feet above America, I can finally inhale. Take it all in. Consider something more than facts, feelings. Reach for a meaning more powerful than stats or Grammys or grand reviews. Up here with eyes on fire from the searing tears that just keep rolling down my face from loss and exhaustion, there is much to remember about living a life of integrity. For honor only comes from honesty. Sacrifice for something greater, something more is the only way. And the joy truly does come from the journey. Stones in the road, absolutely. But laughter and passion burn far more intensely when you give yourself to it. So tonight that is the lesson of passage -- and it is one to be kept close through the mourning. -- Holly Gleason Flight 1970 to Nashville
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This… Is… Radio… Clash

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College radio may be the most subversive place in the world. Alone in the studio, with a couple of turntables, a cart machine, a phone line and an open mic, the moments and the music are exactly what you choose to make them. It is filled with both possibility and community. Send your cry out and see what comes back… For a Midwestern girl, even one with a record collection as vast as mine, the idea that total strangers were going to be influenced by what I played -- well, that was something that made my pulse race. And having driven by Record Revolution in Cleveland Heights all through high school, sneaking in there whenever I could to see what was below the radar of even Kid Leo's breaking afternoon drive show on legendary rocker WMMS, I knew there were records that existed beyond the pale. The first time I heard the Clash, a guy named Tony Christy -- who college dee jayed as Antonachem on WPRK, the teeny Rollins College station -- spun them from a vinyl 45 during the schizophrenic thorazine-needed late night punk programming that was the antidote to the afternoon and early evening's classical offerings. Tony Christy with the 9 p.m. shadow, the olive skin, the eyes that never stopped moving and the intense sense of what mattered, leaning into the mic, barely breathing, uttering after a long rambling free associative ramp up, "This… is… The CLASH!" And what ensued was the jabbing herky jerky profession that "…this IS radio Clash." Over and over. Around that 45 went. I was transfixed. Electrical current ran through me. WHAT was it? How did it get like that? And how did I miss this utterly vital thing… this life force that made me think of how scary Keith Richards seemed, how out of control Keith Moon was? The Sex Pistols were rage to rage. The Clash was a focus to their anger… enragement based on something beyond selfish desire. It was Jackson Browne with a hard-wired, hardcore reflex response. It was vicious. It was white hot -- and there I was in that cobbled together studio, with the lights low, the candles and incense burning, jumping up and down in a little white girl pogo. It wasn't violent. It didn't seem to be the byproduct of electroshock therapy. It was the energy that needed somewhere to go and the balls and heels that knew what to do. If the Clash were pissed off… If they were the Ramones with a political agenda… Then this was what the revolution would sound like, and if Gil Scot Heron was right --and the revolution would not be televised, at least it would chew up the airwaves like silverware in a blender grinding and whirling and shattering the silence with the jarring sounds of metallic fury. But the Clash - like Elvis Costello's "Good Year For The Roses" (country music? Yech) and Prince's "Controversy" (hormonally-adled funk) -- were Tony's, not mine. I could watch him spin breathless, but I could never own that kind of focused rage and intensity. After all, I was "Muffy" in th first degree: a pink button down shirt and a pair of espadrilles, a pony tail secured with a great big bow. Girls like me, even if we slummed in the right record stores, didn't get to buy in, didn't get to belong to that world. We weren't welcome… we were the problem. Until I transferred. And I decided to jettison any sense of what was appropriate. When I hit WVUM -- the Voice of the University of Miami -- I reinvented myself as Angel Dust and I was as downlow and worldly as any female voice that ever worked that mic. Angel knew things -- and to that girl, the Clash was anything but lost! They were Angel's birthright, and she reached for them directly. Sandinista. London Calling. The Clash. They all came with white stickers that threatened in big black Sharpie scratched letters: "Remove from Studio, Prepare To Die" and "Failure To Replace Means Instant Termination." Of course, it did… Otherwise, how would the copies stay in the station. Insurrection at 33 1/3. It was right there at one's finger tips. In a world of Fun Boy 3, Banarama, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, the Smiths, Souixsie Souix & the Banshees, the English Beat and the Pretenders, not to mention Generation X, the Stray Cats, Romeo Void, the Ramones, Charlie Picket + the Eggs, the Replacements and these new guys from Athens R.E.M. (and later fellow Georgians Love Tractor), the Clash stood out. They were integrity that was gritty. They were rancorous with a strong melodic sense. They were backbeats to beat you with, to drive the point home -- and they understood that rock & roll was about abandon, freewheeling and full-tilt. It was a time of much personal and musical stratification -- coming of age in South Florida, where nights were spent straddling the gay dance clubs and a column about dance records for The Weekly News, the first Swatch Watch Fresh Fest Tour with Whodini and Grandmaster Flash, plus Schlitz Malt Liquor tours and profiles for Black Miami Weekly and the country freelancing for a Top 10 daily newspaper you mighta heard of called The Miami Herald. Each world was impossibly singula, rich with stories, ripe with moments that opened whole vistas up. But they were bound together by the glory of music's ability to deliver one's soul to the other side. There was plenty to recommend each flavor… There was even a great deal of overlapping from one to another… Which is the greatest beauty of the beat. Still for the majesty and the spectacle, the moments where the rhythms carry you along, nothing burned as bright or as insistently as the Clash when they were on. Making you think. Making you jump. Making you scream. Making you transcend moments to where there's nothing left. My youth was scattered like so many fragments of broken glass. Bluffing my way backstage for an Elvis Costello and the Attractions show. Waiting and waiting in in the always dark and dank lobby of Cleveland's famed rock and roll hotel Swingos for the U2 interview that kept slipping until it had slipped away. Spending Thanksgiving at the Waldorf Astoria, watching the rockabilly punks surrounding the Stray Cats cast against the opulence -- and marveling at the contrast to the pasty Long Island white boys in the standard Holiday Inn hotel room I'd interviewed them in my field hockey shorts because it'd taken so long to confirm they'd do it, there was no time to change. It was the blazing red burn on Modern English -- who hadn't discovered sunscreen as they hit the beach for Spring Break shows in the name of "I Melt With You," the exhaustion around Annabella Lwin's young eyes, sprawled in a torn up dressing room before bounding onstage to exhort "I Want Candy" with her multi-culti punkish new wavers Bow Wow Wow one more time. It was seeing the Black Flag hand bills on the telephone poles for a 27 Birds show, and the same kick-stepping socio-politcal fire igniting the Dead Kennedys mosh frenzy in a castaway bar on Miami Beach. You could say those were the days. Innocence and kerosene looking for a match. Sid Vicious hadn't died. The rest of the Sex Pistols hadn't sold out. Debbie Harry was still a vinyl clad siren walking the Phil Specter edge of punk -- even as Patti Smith tore poetry by the roots from her desperation and moved ever closer to rock. It was all so RIGHT THERE. But it all started with the Clash. And a timid girl. And a man who smelled of musk and patchouli with a voice that was gravel and uncombed wool and knowing something that "you, little one… will never figure out." I didn't have to, because deep inside, I knew… Today, came the e-mail from London. "Sad mourning…" wrote the friend from the BBC. The one who explained that his pompadour wasn't an Elvis affectation and that his life was littered with all the important Clash shows. He believed from up-close, from the rush and the fury. From across an ocean, how do you tell someone like that, you feel a part of you has been snuffed out as well. An artist you never met, ever saw, only genuflected before those burning records… And yet, those records threw me off a balcony, left me grabbing for a meaning that -- imagine this -- had been deep inside me all along. And that's probably the biggest bitch of it: that part of me's flown up to pink and black heaven, studded and leathered and agitating even as it flies. These are the things we don't even think about missing 'til they're gone… so vital how does something like this even happen? 50? Unimaginable, and yet… but once they are gone, the numbness sets in, and you can only hope the tears will bring a thaw. Til then, it's not a matter of should I stay or should I go -- I'll stake my claim and fight that much harder because of what I was felt in the lost hours. Something lost that shouldn't have been -- and shouldn't ever again. 23 December 2002 Nashville, TN
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The French Inhaler Hastens Down The Wind, Warren Zevon Learns To Let Go

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There's that thing called friend-of-a-friend, where you're "in" even before you know about the other person. And so it was with Warren Zevon, produced by my whole reason for living as a 14-year-old-pink-button-down-sporting-naif in Cleveland, Ohio. Whatever there was about him, I was going to love it. Which shouldn't have been such a leap of faith, as his "Hasten Down The Wind" had been the title track to a Linda Ronstadt album I'd quite liked. Nothing about the complexity and confusion of women had ever revealed itself to me quite so compellingly or completely… and against a mournful melodic current, the images poured out clean and simple. It was almost a haiku without form, grounded by the man who'd withstand the tide in the name of what was slipping through his fingers. Devotion and delicacy. Fragility as something other than frightening. Capriciousness as something understood, accepted. It was Zevon at his best, a man reconciling difficult things with a few lines, a modulation that signals the shift in the blood from ecstasy to quiet agony. Warren Zevon, a filigreed painter of human emotion and nuance. A man unafraid of what wasn't going to happen. A writer with a deft touch at the small details that wrought his lyrics an incisive heaviness that made him the Hemingway of the Southern California singer/songwriter jungle. What wasn't expected was the turgid irony, the bulked-up soldier of fortune flex that came with the more muscular offerings. When Warren Zevon went deep into musk and testosterone, he wasn't kidding around. "Excitable Boy" whimsied through the tale of what would pass as today's average Ritalin-deprived ADD-addled little angel who goes psychotic and no one knows why, while "Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner" went wherever men fought wars of conscience merely for the money and the adventure, heartless as much as headless but looking for the thrill. These songs rolled and kicked and burped and swaggered. These were men's songs sung with bravado and glee and zeal. They were delivered with the stench of body odor, rank clothing, wet and tattered, clinging to beat-up forms of men who've done heroic things, perhaps for bad or selfish reasons. And there was always the humor. Don't lose sight of the gag. "Werewolves of London" have the Lon Chaney franchise a walking talking scenario to work out of… and the howling, yowling chorus had every frat boy, beer guzzler and weekend warrior lifting their lungs in the name of their basest core/corps presence. Nowhere, though, did it quite register with the brilliance of the genius quite like "Lawyers, Guns + Money," a hard-boiled ne'er-do-well adventurer's world-weary end-of-the-line call for help that never quite buckled at the pride. And in its head tall urging, there was something about the not-giving-quarter-in-the-face-of-fate dignity that made men proud -- and mostly likely validated everything women hate about them. My empiric evidence came in a '74 fire engine red Mustang on a blue highway somewhere in West Virginia. My father was taking me for some spring training at Pinehurst, one of America's high temples of golf, and I was balancing my interest in the game, with my will to be conversant in what the golf pros liked to talk about. White sneakers propped up on the dash, Rolling Stone splayed across my uplifted thighs, I was reading to my father in a transgenerational bonding ritual that probably spoke far more about my dad's will to connect with this puberty-addled creature who made no sense to him. Until. Until that one page feature on Warren Zevon, the one that included snatches of lyrics from his upcoming Excitable Boy. In an effort to shock -- this wasn't Creem, how bad could it be? -- there was no fear of something scandalous popping up. So there was no pre-reading going on, to sanitize the copy for Daddy's protection. Besides, Jackson Browne wouldn't be associated with anything too racy. That rising and falling cadence of good writing falling from my lips, a smile on my face for a story well told. And then there it was… the lyrics with the no-no word "I'm hiding in Honduras/ I'm a desparate man/ Send laywers, guns and money/ The shit has hit the fan…" There was that pause you could drive a truck through. Not looking up -- even sideways -- to see if the knuckles are so white they're going to pop the steering wheel from its casing. Just the big quiet of the night falling, the wind being driven into and the tires on the tar. It was a gestation pause -- the ones where you know something's being formed, perhaps nothing will be the same again. What's going to happen is a jump ball. But something is… And then it did. My father doubled over in laughter. Big rolling gales of laughter. The kind of deep chested belly laughs that women almost never get to experience. Not impolite, but just so totally utterly consuming -- and then, he snorted. "Who is that guy?" he asked, whipping tears from his cheeks a few minutes later. Dreadful songs from that era played beneath me -- the squirrely "Undercover Angel," the histrionic "Lonely Boy" -- as the lecture ensued. About Jackson Browne, the importance of songwriting, the ability to filet a moment. It was so serious. My father drove on, brows knitted like two wooly bears copulating, chewing his cigar. "Well, he's funny…" was about all my Midwestern Dad could muster. Not for him the emotional depth charges or gentle nudgings of revelation, nor the silliness of "Werewolves." Though the insurance salesman and golf historian eventually made his peace with Zevon's other side. Between "Tenderness On The Block," a song about a young girl finding her way with boys sung from a father's perspective, and "Back Turned Looking Down The Path," about the passage of time, life and learning for those you love, John Gleason came to love the down bed that Zevon made for the sweetest feelings. And me, I remained a sucker for the gentler side that slowly peeled away the layers of what obscured the things that mattered. To me, "Accidentally Like Martyr" or "Abandoned Love" urged us to see people from their insidest places rather than the mask that was shown to the world. There was a recognition like fire, even though it was done in the softest of ways. You could feel the careful acceptance being doled out, the notion that even in the wreckage, there was much grace here -- grace that should outshine whatever was painful. And that may be Warren Zevon's greatest gift: grace over pain, light rather than baseness. Nobody rolled'em like Warren, no doubt. He could smoke and drink and shoot out the lights, find adventure anywhere -- and make you believe that you were as sinister and dangerous as the darkest bounty hunter. Even when you were a mere white collar waging rules-flaunting insurrections merely at the water cooler. That's a gift -- to give adventure back to the domesticated. Jimmy Buffett serves carefree "Ferris Bueller"-esque tropicality to the not as desparate, not as dark with startling aplomb and consistency. He is a franchise of escape. Warren Zevon became something more veiled in danger, longer on subterfuge, yet utterly overt in its attack. Warren Zevon was for Volvo drivers who longed for the unspoken… believed in the unrelenting… wanted the stories to tell of Calcutta and Zimbabwe and anywhere bad things were taking place. The difference is, though, Zevon attracted those who lived those lives -- an aural high 5 to a lifestyle frought with mystery, terror and endorphins. And he'd seen his share of stolen moments on the other side of propriety, the law and/or reason. He wasn't yearning for it… he was steeped in it. And that brutal knowledge probably heightened his sensitivity to the moments of quiet contemplation. It took him to where he could respect these complicated fluttery beings and emotions. He could assess what he was feeling towards his children. And he could find the words within the understanding… words, visions, realizations most of us won't ever even see as the world flies by our windshields. ' Warren Zevon let nothing blur by his passenger seat window -- or blink and miss that final rearview mirror reprise. He took it all in. He digested it. He gave it over. Then he came back with these songs, these varied and various songs. I know where I was when John Lennon was gunned down, when I heard about about Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane, when I got the news that Nicolette Larson had left this world. Heck, I know where I was when Tupac was jumped in a Manhattan recording studio lobby, busted for sexual battery and finally murdered in Vegas. And now I know where I was when I got the e-mail about Warren Zevon. Sitting at my comptuer, writing yet another press release about an accomplishment of one of the clients, people who set standards and seek new levels of excellence every day. It stopped me cold. Right there in my tracks. Made me think about a long ride to North Carolina, about using "Back Turned Looking Down The Path" for tempo -- "I was caught between the years/ Cost me nearly all my tears" is about perfect to swing a golf club to, about seeing the extremes in one unified whole. There was a time when the woman in "Hasten Down The Wind" was all I wanted to be: a confoundment, an object of desire, a kettle of emotions that were fine and elevated and fired by strength and longing. That woman, that creature was so beguiling, so bathed in the light of a fire, eyes glittering with knowledge unspoken… it was something that defied my 13-year old mind, made it hurt wondering who hid the road map. In that moment -- seeing that Warren Zevon had advanced lung cancer, the very thing that killed my dad slowly, definitively and with much suffering, and had opted not to seek further treatment -- something very powerful came to me. All these years later, Warren Zevon knew something about me, about all women really, that we couldn't see. We're all that woman in "Hasten Down The Wind." If we don't worry or second guess and just be… we're all a mystery and a marvel. Somewhere John Gleason takes another bite off a cheap King Edward and smiles. Daddy may've thought he was funny, but he also recognized the ability to see our finest truths in songs like "Tenderness On the Block." As the troubadour terrorist asked in that song's open: "Daddy, where's your pretty little girl tonight? / Trying to run before she can walk, that's right…," it a question that's plagued grown men with little girls for ages. Now, though, I realize that until the girl knows she's that woman, anything can happen. And as a parent who sees what could go wrong, what would be more fearful? At the same time, once the child has locked into that uberknowledge -- what could be more thrilling than to see one's daughter soar? Somewhere John Gleason laughs a bit. It's a long way from a car ride through West Virginia, but for two men who never met, it's the moment where what is is what's known… and what could be more powerful than that?
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Red Ragtops + Memory Stains

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Tim McGraw Gets A Little Real With Country Radio There was a time when country music pulled no punches. When it said what was on its mind, blunt as a sledgehammer -- and swung hard as Paul Bunyan with that axe. We're talking Loretta Lynn gettin' reproductive control in "The Pill" and declaring her secession from marital duty on "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' On Your Mind)," Conway Twitty just flat-out calling his carnality with "I'd Love To Lay You Down," Johnny Paycheck getting all overt on the big boss man with "Take This Job and Shove it" and Johnny Cash confessing the bottomless senselessness of murder with the admission "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…" With the exception of Toby Keith's almost burlesque ugly American bravado of "The Red, White + Blue," nobody in country music seems to want to speak up or speak out. Getting real nowadays is about like getting pulled over -- something to be avoided at all costs. Matraca Berg, who won the CMA Song of the Year Award, says that when she said in an interview "Strawberry Wine" was about trading one's hymen for experience, bliss and the transition to womanhood, some stations quit playing the record. She even got mail from people saying they wanted to return the record. Anyone who heard "Strawberry Wine" recognized it as a bittersweet reminiscence of something all young people go through. The experience of losing one's virginity should be something viewed with tenderness -- and in the case of the young girl in Berg's song, a certain hunger for knowledge that exists beyond the classroom: knowledge of emotions, of bodies, of communion of the flesh and the spirit. It was a song that served as a bridge from unknowing child to youth on the path to adulthood. Bittersweet is the color of Tim McGraw's latest single as well. "Red Ragtop," with its loping tempo and backwards view, captures both the heat of young lust and the weight of the consequences. And while it may be hard to believe that the man who gave you "Indian Outlaw" and "a barbecue stain on my white t-shirt" would be the potential ground zero for the return of unflinching content in country music stand poised to bring country music directly into the 21st century. "Red Ragtop" is reportage -- on what happened once and where the singer is now. It is the not-quite-faltering confession of choices made, decisions lived with and the (un) expected denouement of consequences beyond the pale. "Red Ragtop" is a song about the heat of passion leading to the depths of reality -- a 20-year old boy and an 18-year old girl, unmarried, out of work and faced with the dilemma of a child that neither are equipped to handle. "We were young and wild," the singer confesses, "and we decided not to have the child." It is not said with justification -- or any other emotional underpinning. The teller isn't about to dodge responsibility, nor is he going to wallow in pity-me-for-what's-happened bathos. No this is straight-up life, no chaser, the kind of tale that defines us in its just how it is. Whomever this young man is he offers no excuses, no explanations. He just blinks into the light, tells what happened -- copes with whatever might haunt him. And in country music, where losing one's virginity is a scandal, where we don't really drink or fight or much of anything else -- except ache and fall in love for forever, the notion of a song dealing with abortion is unfathomable. Until Tim McGraw went north. With his own band. And made a single that was all about the music and the message. The singer who plays to Middle America's common streak isn't making taking a stand more than likely. His own mother gave birth unwed to the dark-haired renegade artist -- and kept his father's identity from him as much to shield the young boy from abandonment as to protect him from pining for a man who would not be there. If ever there was a candidate for a young woman in a back room termination, it would've been Tim's mom. But she didn't believe that way. That was her option, her belief, her values. And so it is that her son can sing a song about the other option, a song that will make you twinge just a little and dig a little deeper when the topic comes up again. As a Catholic for Choice, I wish I could say I had answers. I'm not sure I'm comfortable dictating how others should live their lives, especially when I can't know their circumstances. Who am I to say? No doubt there must be a cost -- and the ghosts of what might've been certainly die harder than lovers gone or childhood pets that left this world prematurely. I don't want to determine how someone else lives or decide what they can cope with. I'm not even sure we can imagine how it feels until we're standing in their shoes. Even "Red Ragtop" avoids drawing broad spectrum conclusions. With the admission, "Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins/ and there's no such thing as what might've been/ that's a waste of time, drive you out of your mind…," Tim McGraw looks back the wiser on an object in the rearview mirror that was far larger than it appeared. Not one to point fingers, there is very much a sense of what was slipping through theirs. If this was a fate two youngsters couldn't handle, they made the decision they did. Though the girl implored the boy, "please don't stop…loving me," there are some shocks to the system that can't be sustained. Whether it was merely young hormones burning off or the inability to deal with the weight of the situation, eventually the passion broke into pieces and fall apart. It may've been nature's course, but there will always be the stain of shame and guilt and what happened on the memory of that first love. Time heals all. Softens regrets. Offers the solace of the immovability of the things we do in the moment that may not make as much sense in the long run. In the moment, you believe, "No, we did what we did and we tried to forget/ and we swore up and down there would be no regrets" because you must cope, survive, get through it. Everything can be weathered. The question comes down to the damage. Because the options are pretty slim: deal or die. For the two brave hearts of "Red Ragtop," they're not ready to fold… they do the thing they believe they need to and they get on with their lives. Ultimately, they come to realize that the great love may not be definitive. Eventually he realizes, "It was all make believe in the end." It is the truth that paves over what was. The roads diverge, draw up and pull away, head towards other horizons. All that is left is the echo of a decision, an action and the reaction. Looking over his shoulder at a younger boy, the singer confesses the truth only time can allow: "And I can't say where she is today/ I can't remember who I was back then…" It is the admission of someone who's traveled many miles, learned many things, seen even more. It's all pale in the past, so much gone from the recollection. If there's no recognition for the boy parked out in a grove, locked in a fevered embrace, there's still some twinge of want and wonder. With a gracefulness a bit alien to these sorts of truth-telling songs -- something that sidesteps judgement, flat-out avoids grandstanding and haranguing, heavy handed moralizing -- there is that moment when it all comes back in blazes. Sitting at a traffic light, the past is present in spades. Seems a young girl in a Cabriolet pulls up next to him. Her eyes are green and her future is limitless. In that moment, he returns to the true moment of definition -- not in the backseat or the living room where a decision was made or a clinic where a termination took place. That would be the easiest mark of innocence lost. No, no, no… Tim McGraw's narrator survives all that with the resolve of what had to be done. Sitting at that traffic light, there's a moment of pregnant exhale -- and then the boy once again becomes a man, singing, "And I was in an old scene/ I was back in that red ragtop/ on the day she stopped loving me…" It wasn't what happened or what they did. It was the moment when the bond was broken that struck the hardest. In the cold dawn of what wasn't, this is a song about coming of age the hard way. "Red Ragtop" never judges, it merely offers a portrait of something harrowing… something middle America… something that could happen to anyone. In the shudder that is drawn from the admission that try-though-they-might, they couldn't outrun what happened is as cautionary a tale as anything out there. It's about deeper emotional costs than what shows on paper -- and it reminds us all that consequences are often more pervasive than they ever seem. For Tim McGraw to record a song like this is brave. To put it out as a single is either foolhardy or brilliant. For the man who's the proud father of three, it's a song that challenges people to face their own biases, attitudes and truths. With "Red Ragtop," there will no doubt be much conversation stirred. Will there be clarity on the subject? Hardly a consensus perhaps. But any time a life or belief can be examined closely, we're all probably the better for it. The "why" being as important as the "how" if we are to learn to respect each other's differences. At this point, who knows how country radio will respond. They may not even realize yet what the song is about -- and that's okay. Let it find its way and its audience, before the controversy kicks in. Ultimately, it's not for us to judge -- merely to sow compassion on those struggling with the choices they've made. For country radio, the choice is one of the most powerful in ages. Is it censorship to not play this song? Is it suicide to embrace something that in reality is the embodiment of the whole First Amendment truth? And what about a genre of music that never flinched when it came to how it was? Because how it most likely was was this: two kids consumed by the will to feel as much of the other and the throbbing release they found within another(more than not for the first time) didn't understand and got into trouble. Terrified by the responsibility of a child, they took another way out because "I was out of a job and she was in school/ Life was fast and the world was cruel…" They were responding -- with their limited knowledge -- to how the world looked and felt. One never gets the sense that the singer, lost on the scent of what was so strong amongst the carnage of what was, ever felt particularly good about this event. It's more stoic pragmaticism. And that's what -- besides a killer hook and a melody that sweeps you up like a dust bunny -- makes "Red Ragtop" so compelling. In a world where it's about cumulative audience, tune-out is the enemy. Whether "Red Ragtop" holds or repels remains to be seen. But if it can punch through the Hallmark, offer some modicum of measured truth, it's impact is huge. But it needed to be written about before the die were cast: hit or stiff. For then this becomes an essay of praise or damnation, a reaction to what happened -- rather than what was done, created, offered up. For Tim McGraw, who appeared two CMA Awards ago singing a provocative if challenging song about the genre called "Things Change," this may be his biggest gamble yet. If it works, he returns country music to being the unburnished truth genre -- a place where we look at how it is even if it doesn't fit the Norman Rockwell, "Leave It To Beaver" specifications that have defined American family life as we know it. "Red Ragtop" isn't a beachhead, by the way, or a grand gesture. It's a well-written song about something difficult that people face up to everyday. If it doesn't get people pushing the buttons on their car radios, one can only imagine the healing and resolution that lies ahead.
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only daddy that’ll walk the line… waymore’s waygone blues

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Waymore's Now Waygone Blues When the news that Waylon Jennings was gone broke, I was on my back -- pretending like every muscle in my trunk wasn't throbbing from a particularly virulent strain of the flu that'd knocked the life right out of me. Waylon Jennings -- a real true bona fide rebel, a musical gunslinger, a hard-ridin' beater of odds who lived just outside the law. Waylon Jennings, one of the first people to make me think of country music as something dangerous, something hard, something that truly packed the intensity of rock and roll. Someone sent me an e-mail noting that "it seems the candle that burns brightest burns out twice as fast." Maybe. But Waylon Jennings most likely packed just as much, no way more, living in his time on earth than many who attain grand old ages. Fearlessly chasing the night, the songs, the loves, the passions, the wild times, whatever else made sense, Waylon Jennings emerged from the wings of Buddy Holly to become first an edgy mainstream country star -- and then a cornerstone of the "outlaw" movement. But that's history… and while honoring the facts and the wherefroms is important, it sells Waylon Jennings out pretty short. For Waylon Jennings was about the blaze. Whether it was the way they came down hard on the beat as the bass bounced up and down on Rodney Crowell's "Ain't Living Long Like This" or leaned into the thumpety-thump of the back lounge on bad road in his own piano-plunking, rubbery-bass query about the Silver Eagle bus side of life "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way," it was always about the intensity of the truth, the moment, the build-up. Growing up a rock & roll girl in Cleveland, country music was about as appealing as a cold shower. Braying, hick-ish, doubleknit leisure suits and white pleather boots -- oh, yeah, baby! I don't think so. Though there were these golf pros, and they were, well, Southern and they did like country music. And so in the name of trolling bars as a young looking 13- and 14-year old, I feigned interest. And then Waylon Jennings set me free. See, there was a phonky cool bar called Peabody's, which set their bands up in this cavernous basement with an upstairs that let patrons as interested in music as they were the opposite sex play both ends against the middle. One of the regulars was a scrappy local band that went by Deadly Earnest and the Honky Tonk Heros, whose fearless leader understood it wasn't even a hair that separated Waylon from the Stones -- and he would swing from a ripe'n'juicy "It's All Over Now" right into the aforementioned "Ain't Living Long." It was a couple months before I made the connection. Then there, at Record Theatre all the way out Mayfield Road, I saw him finally. Waylon Jennings, soaked in sweat, black leather vest, hand-tooled guitar, peril and perspiration flying from every pore. I knew this was the kinda guy girls like me weren't supposed to bring home. And I liked what I saw in that same fearful-yet-moth-pulled-to-a-flame-way kids do. Waylon Jennings. Even the name was perfect. A randy, rowdy howler committed to bearing witness to his side of the tracks. Wild-eyed, wilder-living, there weren't nothing he was afraid of -- and that fearlessness let him swing full-tilt and hard into shuffles and ballads. When Waylon launched into Neil Young's "Are You Ready For The Country," it was almost a challenge, a line drawn, a gauntlet thrown down. Most importantly, it came off as a query about being man enough to walk the line. And as everyone knows from Waylon's earliest days, he was "The Only Daddy That'll Walk The Line." "Only Daddy," another Deadly Earnest chestnut I cut my teeth on. It's a killer song of fiesty fidelity from a man whose woman ain't quite getting her man his props -- and while many have suited up to lean into this bad boy, ole Waylon had long ago retired the jersey. In his salt-soaked leather lungs, it's a warning and a pledge and a caution and the kind of aggression that makes making up the best part of getting sideways in the first place. Waylon Jennings. Lady killer. Not that I got that. At least not back then. But he was a handsome devil, dripping desperation, black eyes flashing, guitar low slung on his hips -- drawing the gaze right to the heart of the matter. Heck, Waylon remains the only hillbilly singer with his own passage in Pamela Des Barres' golden age groupie memoir I'm With the Band. If you figure Miss Pamela (as she was known during the rein of the GTOs [Frank Zappa's loosely organized band of pretties Girls Together Outrageously]) was a source of solace to Gram Parsons, a consort of Jimmy Page, and a companion to just about every other rock name that mattered, you realize what a long shadow Jennings cast in that world. Not that it was about sex. Coupling was a by-product. Living fast and feeling the depths of the moment were the raison d'etre… and telling those stuck-on-themselves-city-people how it was was a pretty strong back-up. Not much impressed Waylon Jennings, which is probably why when he was on, it was a complete immersion -- and consequently he "never did toe the mark and I never did walk the line" as he sung on the refrain of the aptly-titled "Never Could Toe The Mark." And he wasn't shy about dipping in the barrel of other influences. He'd work Jimmie Rodgers "T. For Texas" into a lather that rivaled Lynyrd Skynyrd's -- and took Albert Collins/(Little) Richard Penniman's "Lucille (You Won't Do Your Daddy's Will)" all the way as both a lament and a frantic frenetic caution. And then there's Okie bluesrat J J Cale who gets the full-on Waylon treatment on his "Clyde" Indeed, the swarthy, solidly built country singer could bring a ballad to a boil, and make his wistful moments the bittersweet wine people steeped in on the lost nights in lonely bars with beer signs as offertory candles and stale cigarettes as their incense lit to the god of broken hearts, unfinished dreams and memories that on their best nights serve to build bridges to whatever future might be carved out. Waylon Jennings, patron saint of the kickers and the losers and the biker angels, looking for something more at the end of the jukebox's rainbow - and most times coming up a little short, but ultimately with dignity in tact. To hear Waylon surrender to the brooders' waltz "Dreaming My Dreams With You," a prayer to what might have been evolves into a strength and a conviction that life will do more than just go on. It's not merely about the pain rolling by, but learning to love the moments for what they were -- even if part of the is is "gone." There's a dignity to his admission "I'd rather believe in love/ I've given away as much as I can/ The things that I'm fondest of…" which elevates the ache into something that can deliver and refit a barren soul looking for hydration. That was one of Waylon's greatest gifts. As bad ass as he was -- take thatKid Rock -- there was a tenderness at the bone. For it's always the toughest guys who're capable of the greatest vulnerability. Let no man mess with the original hardcore hillbilly, not just because they'd be leveled, but because they'd be forced to confront their own emotional stillbornness. And that's a pretty chilling place to be. In songs like Jennings' "Shine" and Jessie Colter - the woman credited with saving Jennings' life -'s "Storms Never Last," it is the deliverance and redemption that leads. Waylon Jennings had seen, done, snorted and drunk it all -- at least six times over. He chased the night, fought the morning, lived in the present and left the past in the dust. When the dust settled, Waylon Jennings realized it wasn't the high-timing that mattered, the painted ladies and snuff queens who would be there. Songs were constant companions, Miss Jessie was a woman who would stand by her man, the road would truly go on forever -- and there was much to be savored. Waylon learned to like vegetables and made friends with an exercycle. He never bought into the Music Row follies -- declining to attend his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame -- and he always found a way to carve out his very own special niche. Today there was another e-mail, remembering a lunch that had been shared at his home outside Nashville -- talking about an insurgent trying to make peace with a quieter, more balanced place in the world. It was a warm, gentle e-mail… one that fit the man he was becoming. Which may be the ultimate act of sedition: finding a way to escape the stereotype and live a life that might seem the antithesis. Of course once you've lived the dream, how many times can one repeat? And what happens whenone realizes that the rock and roll fantasy is an empty shell of not too much of anything but cheap thrills and worn-off lipstick? Twenty some years ago, an underage kid in a pink buttondown sat under a staircase watching a band. She didn't quite understand what she was hearing, just that she liked it -- and she wanted to know more. When Deadly Earnest and his merry men swung into "Bob Wills Is Still The King," it wasn't celebrating a style of music so much as a man who found his own beat... Though I couldn't have understood the lengths Waylon Jennings charged from the gate, he rocked hard -- and that was more than enough. When the clerk finally explained the sweaty man I sought was a country singer, my brow knit. But I didn't care. I'd heard the way it hit the wall, and I wanted to do that, too. Who knew all these years later, I'd be in Nashville, Tennessee, sorting through too many memories, feeling too many different emotions all at once? Crying and smiling at the notion that a man who would supply the narrative for the dreadful "Dukes of Hazard," would also be the one to break down everything I ever thought about country music… things that just seemed sorta backwater and embarrassing. I can't be sure Hank did it that way, but I know for sure Waylon Jennings kept it real, kept it rocking, kept it right where it oughta be. Upstairs, you know he's probably raising hell over the whole chiffon-gown-tilted-halo-and-a-golden-harp thing. Down here, amongst us mere mortals, it's a much simpler deal. We finally, unequivocally have an answer to the song's title. "Don't You Think This Outlaw Bit's Done Got Out Of Hand?" Absolutely, positively no. Not even close. As long as people suck longnecks, dance shuffles, shoot out the neon and seek comfort in the dim light of a local tavern, there will always be outlaws. Maybe not as full-tilt and full-throttle, but then again, who knows just how ole Waylon's coming back?
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seeing with your heart rather than conventional wisdom, kenny chesney, back where he comes from

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Ten minutes before two as New Year's Eve surrenders to 2002, and the Waffle House is jumping. There's a place at the counter, because they take care of the regulars, especially regulars flying solo on this, their most hectic of nights. And sitting at the formica in my party clothes with a Coke and a waffle, there isn't a better place to close out a year of tumult and revelation. It was a year of realizing you should never be too fast to count anything out. We shouldn't be so quick to know we know… Because sometimes it can all turn upside down before you even know what the hell happened. Which is how I came to spend my birthday, New Year's Eve, with one Kenny Chesney, a country act I'd've never believed I'd be aligned with under any circumstance. The irony, though, is sometimes our biases can rob us of something really wonderful without our ever realizing it. Filing under the "pass my muff, hell just froze over…" tab is my most recent client -- the aforementioned emergent country force Kenny Chesney, of the back-to-back two-million sellers, the 11,000 in attendence at Nashville's Gaylord Center for New Year's Eve, the frightening "Sexy Tractors" and "Having You From Hellos." Kenny Chesney, a mainstream country artist I couldn't have been more certain was a major part of the problem. Kenny Chesney, the kind of broadband hillbilly star who was the cancer that would sell what little was left of Nashville's soul to the superchain radio stations and laugh all the way to the bank. Kenny Chesney, from Luttrell, Tennessee, who didn't long to be a country singer 'til college -- and who's taken the long road with little respect in the name of a dream and something he probably didn't even dare embrace because he was a little too small, a little too average, a little too much like every other guy from where he comes from. While the Nashville industry is out looking for brand new mysteries, deeper truths and old standards, Kenny Chesney was holding up a mirror to his audience: real kids and regular people -- folks the 6-1-5 doesn't really even know anymore with their research and their focus groups, but would never take the time to break bread or toss back a couple cold ones with. Kenny Chesney knows those people. He is them. He knows the fear of asking the popular girl out, the quickening of the pulse when you take the plunge or kiss or fall in love for the first time, the rush of suiting up for Friday night football even when you're the world's slowest starting receiver. The young man in the cowboy hat knows how it feels, how it thrills, how it can hurt -- and he has no pretensions about who he is. In fact, he likes who he is just fine -- and so do all the other people who look and live just like him. He was able to weave that truth with some frothy hooks and give people a soundtrack to ordinary lives. And for that, the fans have rewarded him in ways that defy the conventional wisdom down on Music Row. He can now headline. He runs three buses. He has a home behind a gate where the-tour-of-the-stars- homes buses pull up on a regular. But mostly, when he flashes that smile that is pure good and good ole boy, they see themselves celebrated by one of their own. Standing at the jukebox, figuring to drop the quarter in my pocket into the machine and play "You Had Me From Hello," the song that provided my first Chesney humiliation, a young kid 19 or 20 walked up. "You go to the show?" he asked "Show…" "The Kenny Chesney show down at the arena…" "Oh, yeah," I say, shifting my weight. Looking into this face that's so wide-open, so filled with hope and happiness, aglow in the beam that is New Year's Eve, a bunch of unruly dark hair pushed under a ball cap, shirt tail hanging out and just a bit too much girth to probably get any of the really pretty girls, there was a connection he was trying to make. "How was it?" "Real good. You go?" "No, but my friends did." There were six kids squeezed into a booth meant for four, with a chair on the end for my new friend. They were all American-looking kids, shining faces, freshly scrubbed, pupils just the tiniest bit dilated from celebrating the end of the year. "Uhm, did you go backstage?" What an odd question, I couldn't help thinking. "Yes, why would you ask?" "Well, I saw your pass said ALL ACCESS…" In my exhaustion, I'd forgotten to take my laminate off. And there it was big as Dallas, hanging off my coat. Smiling the wan smile of the busted, I nodded. "How come you got to go backstage?" You'd've thought it was Valhalla. But for the people who don't understand that backstage is mostly a drab concrete warren for the functionaries, there is a sense that it's the return of Sodom and Gomorrah. Partypartyparty at a level mere mortals could not comprehend -- a bacchanal of every excess known to man. A veritable flesh buffet of willing groupies, a bevy of babes and famous people wiggling about in demi-clad states ingesting champagne, cocaine and whatever else suits them. I hate being the pin in the bubble. "I work with Kenny…" "You… work with him? You KNOW him?! What do you do…" It's a question you get, though not normally with quite this degree of enthusiasm. I explain my function. He yells to his friends, "She KNOWS him." And then he invites me to come talk to his friends." "He rocked, man. He just rules…" So it went for a bit, the big throwdown. A bunch of sparkling-eyed merry young adults who can still throw it all to the wind with complete abandon. They were so classically all the things this country wants to believe it's young people are, it was hard to believe. And they were so excited about their big new year's eve. "Where were you sitting?" I ask, knowing proximity can be a factor. "Third tier, man, and there were these old people who were telling us to be quiet." With that, they all started laughing. They'd come to have a good time, to party, to ring in the new year with their main man -- and no one, gray haired or otherwise, was going to stop them. And rocking the cheap seats isn't an easy thing to do. It was one of those moments where you don't even think about what to do. "You guys wanna talk to him?" I ask, reaching for my cell phone. "Really…" uttered in sextuple tones of wonder." "Well, let's see if we can find him. He may not have his cell on -- and he may not be home yet, either. He was actually pretty sick yesterday, so he may just have decided to sleep on his bus." "Hell, yeah, we wanna talk to him." "Okay then, let's see how we do." It was New Year's morning. Of course there was no answer anywhere. But that didn't mean we didn't leave a message. I passed my phone over to the one who seemed the most eager, another young guy in ball cap and let him ramble. His friends all muttered their approval -- and he rapped for a good 60 seconds. My first call of New Year's Day was my mother seeing how my night was. My second call was Kenny Chesney, laughing, saying he heard the message, wondered what was going on, heard the phrase "we're at the Waffle House" -- and knew. "Only you," he laughed, "only you would put some fans on the phone in the middle of the night… and let'em leave me a message." "Because only you, Kenny Chesney, would appreciate something like that." There was a pause. Then the man Country Weekly called "country's hottest bachelor" laughed. "Yeah, I guess you're right," he conceded. Kenny Chesney understands how it feels to be looking into the lights. Ten years ago, he had a big New Year's gig -- thrilled to be working on such a major night in Nashville, the city of dreams. He played the Turf, a rough bar on the worst block of what was Music City's seediest strip of low-rent, low-class honky tonks or losers lounges. He played for four hours that night to a crowd that at it's greatest number was 10. You'd have to add a few zeros for this year's attendance. Because Kenny Chesney, who came to Nashville as everyboy and knew there was no way he could compete with Alan Jackson's looks or Garth Brooks' charisma or Vince Gill's voice, writing and guitar-slinging. So Kenny Chesney decided to tell the truth about what he'd lived and what he'd learned. Most of us don't get to lead profound lives -- and many people would rather have a frothy ditty to make them forget the day. Kenny Chesney wasn't above making those people, his people feel good -- which has been the secret of his success. And if people don't "get" it, well, they don't get that audience, either. As someone who tries to get out there and watch the world going by, staying in touch is hard… but you do the best you can. Even still someone who sings songs about tractors, who makes videos with dancing merbabes, who has never cared about courting the industry can amount to something. That's where you have to remember to not know. Because there are plenty of artists who will let you down and break your heart, who will be selfish and self-centered and vain and petty, who you come to realize abuse those around them because of their gift -- and that's heartbreaking in its own way. Then there are the people you write off from the distance, who might actually have something to offer. Yes, many of them are petulant and uncultured. But there are several who'd shock you with their commitment, their dignity, the willingness to lay it down for their people. And the largest truth may just be this: the people who love Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams (people like me) would find another place to go for their emotional recalibrating because we are seekers and introspectives and dreamers. For the people who love Kenny Chesney, they may not have someone else to voice their triumphs, their glories, their tragedies. Kenny Chesney's world is blue collar basic. It's Firebirds or pick-ups, a couple of six-packs, college football, believing in Saturday night and picking up that certain girl -- or finding that just right boy. For those folks a song like "Fall In Love" is everything they could hope for -- and "Back Where I Come From" is a rallying cry that defines the very core of what has shaped each and everyone of them. "Back Where I Come From" was never a single -- and it looks all the negative clichés about being backwater right in the face. It embraces them gently, smiles and sets them aside in the name of all the things that come from those places that make each of these kids not give a damn about that other level of cool so many seek. These people -- like Kenny Chesney -- are living their lives, not worrying about the rest of it. And for me, a girl who was certain she was going to pass on this client, that's a pretty good lesson learned. Indeed, signing Kenny Chesney came down to two truths: he wasn't afraid to do the work and he wasn't concerned about what people thought as long as he was connecting with his fans. When you look into the faces of those fans, indeed if you'd seen that table of kids at the Waffle House, you'd understand what touching people really means. And once you've seen that, how can it be about anything but getting out there and making it happen in a way that lifts people up. Indeed.
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