« Thinking outside the big box and other re-entry notes | Main | The wisdom of Yosh Nakagawa »

Gretchen Wilson's "Pain Killer"

The day before I first played my advance copy of Gretchen Wilson's third album, the just released One Of The Boys, I went out for a beer with my favorite doctor. (One beer. We both have small children, and my daughter, at least, can smell weakness in her sleep.) He is a good and thoughtful man who reads interesting things and with whom I share little obvious political or philosophical ground, and we both like to talk.

For some reason I got him talking about Oxycodone, and I wish I'd been taking notes. If I need to explain the toll this particular drug, marketed under various brand names (it is, he explained, nothing more than high-test Percoset, and, in his view, serves no useful purpose in the marketplace) takes in its theoretically unsanctioned applications, particularly in rural America, you're lucky. One of his interns ran a small survey at the local hospital to see what was, in the view of its patients, the principal medical challenge it faced was. It wasn't smoking or heart disease or obesity. It was prescription drugs.

In order to explain what this has to do with Ms. Wilson's third album, I need to talk about Bruce Springsteen. Now, I think my Springsteen credentials are in tolerable order. I typeset the headlines for the first issue of Backstreets, the unauthorized Boss quarterly, and worked for Charley Cross, that magazine's founder, for seven years and two weeks, and have written for the magazine a couple times. I even own two or three Springsteen albums, and, because I also have a radio or two, I've heard my fair share of his songs. And Charley once very kindly treated his staff to good seats at the Tacoma Dome, so I've seen the Boss in church, as it were.

But I am not a believer. I think his heart's generally in the right place, but I hear little depth and less subtlety in his words and music, and it simply doesn't speak to me.

And I've never quite gotten over "Born in the U.S.A." I know, because I've been told it and read it dozens of times, that the song's about a disenchanted Vietnam vet, that it's not written or sung as a patriotic anthem. I also know there was a big American flag on the cover of the album and that it caught the mood of the country as it elected Ronald Reagan to office, and that Springsteen -- or his operatives -- allowed it to become a misunderstood anthem, the song which made him a superstar, the enormously successful centerpiece to the album which followed Nebraska, the one album of Springsteen's I almost like, except I saw Martin Sheen play Charles Starkweather on late night TV, too.

Now, that's not fair. He's a singer and a songwriter and can't possibly be expected to control how his audience hears his lyrics, and what they make of them. I know that. Really I do. I got interested in graphic design because I thought it might give me an extra edge making myself understood as a writer, and maybe someday I'll be good enough to find out if that's true.

But at the same time, Springsteen approved that album cover, and, though he turned the Republicans down when they tried to rent his song, he stayed pretty quiet during that election, and we would surely have a different country had Reagan not been elected president. And, no, I'm not saying it's Bruce's fault. I'm just saying it would have been a time to stand up for what one believed.

So I've got my doctor friend's diatribe against Oxy and the memory of an acquaintance whose life has spiraled out of control down that general rathole, and Gretchen Wilson's new album on the stereo while I try to make the coffee last.

And I'm struck, now with a final copy of the album in my hand, that somebody has chosen to give up Wilson's striking, brilliant typographic iconography, the quintessential white trash mailbox letters which spelled out her name on the first two covers. Which would be fine if the new logo were better, but it's not, and which would make sense if she were moving away from her joyously aggressive trailer trash persona, which she's not. If every picture of her in the package didn't flat look like some kinda trouble.

Not the point, but let me digress again: I have enormous respect for Ms. Wilson. She is pure country, she's smart, and she can sing. And she can write. Beyond that, I don't know much, and I can live with that.

But there's this song, the eighth one in, called "Pain Killer." It's about wanting a broken heart to mend and the bottle letting her down, and maybe one night with the wrong man solving the problem. All pretty traditional country fare. But there's this refrain, "I need a pain killer," and the lines "Never been the kind to sleep around/I wish it was a pill and not a lover/It's gonna be so hard to swallow down."

And I had this image, while the refrain rang along, of a bunch of people singing along, meaning it the wrong way, grinding up their Oxy -- or whatever one does with the damn stuff -- and feeling somehow validated by the chorus, even though I know full well that all that means they're completely misunderstanding or misapplying the lyrics. But I had that vision.

Along with the press material accompanying my final copy of the album is a song-by-song commentary written by or with or for Ms. Wilson. Let's assume she wrote it and somebody edited it, because that makes sense and it really doesn't matter. "That song almost didn't make the record. It was between that another one -- same beat, same tempo, and I wrote them both with the same songwriter [Dean Hall], and I was really torn up until the very last minute. I had a dream in the middle of the night and I woke up and said 'Pain Killer's got to be on the record." [punctuation sic] I don't know why. It may just be the sheer fact that I think 'Pain Killer' is a great title. If I was walking through a store and I saw a female artist with the title 'Pain Killer' on there, I'd buy it just to see what the song was."

I wish Ms. Wilson well. I do. But I hope that song's never released as a single, never dropped into the soundtrack of some new rural Drugstore Cowboy because everybody in the audience who knows will know.

If it's just a song, it's just a song. But if it gets marketed, as Oxy was once marketed to rural America as a benign cure for back pain, I am going to think a whole lot less of Ms. Wilson.

Posted by grant on May 17, 2007 9:30 PM | Permalink