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December 13, 2005

Reba

For some of the 1980s I had a typesetting shop in Seattle with the grandiose name Words, Pictures & Images. Shop even seems too grand a description for it. In short I was about to graduate from college, with no job prospects, and had survived the demise of SeaGraphics and Western Photon -- the work I had done to get through college and pay for my vinyl habit -- which meant I had a handful of clients trailing after.

For a time I had a lend-lease arrangement with another small shop which went by the name of Scarlet Letters; they rented space from a job printer in Wallingford, a first-rate shop that's probably long gone now, Time Printing. Scarlet Letters did a lot of dog show programs, long, tedious files which had to be run out on the Compugrahic Editwriter 7500 -- chunka chunka chunka went the sound of the wheel spinning around beaming a photographic image of each character onto film -- and they'd have me come in at nights to catch up the overflow work. I traded my time for access to their machines and tended to the needs of my few customers.

With nothing better to do with an English degree, I ended up buying my own machine. It seemed a reasonable prospect, to work four hours a day and write fiction after, but it never worked that way. I think I finished one short story, a dare to show off to a girlfriend, and a few chapters on an inevitably bad novel, in all those years; instead, I worked very long hours, sometimes months on end without a day off, and paid rent. And built newsletters and magazines for, oh, the life insurance industry, a restaurant chain, giftware wholesalers, an antique mall, and the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern.

Actually, they may not have been Scarlet Letters. That might've been another shop, a later harbor, but it doesn't matter.

This is about Reba, see.

College was full of punk and new wave, obscure '60s psychedelia, British invasion blues, and then, back to Elmore James and Robert Johnson and Sleepy John Estes and all that. But West Coast punk got mean, new wave got dancey, and I ran out of time and money to buy records, at least at the clip I had during college. And the guys I knew at Second Time Around Records drifted off to other things; I ran into one of them, years later in Rochester, tour managing for Live. So I listened to the radio, especially at night while the Editwriter did its thing.

For some reason I listened to KMPS, Seattle's country station. Maybe it's what they left on the stereo, possibly I sought it out. But this was the early 1980s when the new traditionalists were just emerging, and so I came to hear Ricky Skaggs and Randy Travis and the Whites (their one terrific album), and all that. And Sunday nights they played, though I don't know how often, these long, three-hour syndicated shows on the history of country music, in which way I came to know Hank Williams as more than the caricature of the TV commercial for his greatest hits. (My best friend growing up, his mother came from Louisiana, and those commercials always embarrassed him because she liked that music, I guess. Me, I thought the lyrics were, "hey good looking, what ya got cookin', how come you don't love me like you used to do," all one long, sad song.)

One of those artists was a woman named Reba McEntire, though I remember her being interviewed and swearing her brother, Pake, was better. The marketplace never agreed with her. In truth I don't think about Reba much, except when channel surfing past the sitcom she now stars in. And she's done Broadway, hasn't she?

I tend now to divide performers into artists and entertainers. Some are both; some learn to be both. Most are one or neither. There's a bit of a pejorative to being only an entertainer, and I have to fight against that prejudice sometimes. Entertainers are malleable, seeking an audience. Artists...want an audience, but don't conform to its needs. Perhaps they want the audience to conform to their needs. They have different centers, I suppose, and serve different purposes.

Anyhow. Reba. Before she was a country diva, before she was a TV star, before she needed only her first name, Reba McEntire was one hell of a singer. Arrival of a new compilation assembling her 40 #1 hits (with, inevitably, two new tracks for radio), and the perversity of a day's mood, reacquainted me with some of that. Those early hits, the ones I rooted for on KMPS while waiting for the machine to do something and hoping I hadn't broken it, they remain unassailable: "You're The First Time I've Thought About Leaving," "Somebody Should Leave," and the still-gorgeous "How Blue."

I didn't make it to the second disc, to be fair. She has become, for me, the epitome of the over-singing Nashville diva, has put so many curicues into each line as to make us too consious of the effort put forth. All technique, no heart. And there's something about the liner notes, for those of us who still read six-point type: She lists the producer of each track first, and then the songwriters. Which is unusual. And doesn't credit the session musicians, which isn't.

We often say, here at ND, that we try not to hold an artist's commercial success against them, nor their failure. But there are prejudices in play, whether we wish them or not. I wish Reba had one more "How Blue" in her. I wish she were as generous with her gifts as Emmylou Harris has been, and maybe she has been, in ways I do not know. But I sure don't miss that Editwriter.

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