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June 27, 2008

Quick thanks

I have become desultory about opening the mail. I told my father, who sends me clippings regularly, that this has become my pattern, and he worried that I was becoming depressed. No, but the lure of the CDs within all those packages has diminished, and I look forward to returning to my previous state of fandom; to listening to music for the pleasure of listening to it, and not with the expectation that I will hear something to write about, or to assign somebody else to write about. Though I shall, perhaps, still have occasion to do both those things.

Nevertheless a couple readers have been very kind and sent music by way of thanks. This morning I opened a typewritten package from a man I don't know, name of Thomas R. Smith, which included a two-page note and a burned copy of the first Julie Miller album, the one I've never heard. He says he is not much of an internet consumer, and so he may not stumble upon my thanks, but I am most grateful nevertheless.

And I wanted to quote one part of his note here:

"I bought my first No Depression off the newsstand in November, 1997, which, being pre-Bush, now looks like some halcyon past golden age. I felt at that time that alternative country (or whatever) music was helping to heal some old class wounding in America and bringing North and South a little closer than they'd been for a while. The crowning public moment for that movement was O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I think. The election of 2000 and subsequent events, of course, turned back that momentum, leaving us, as a nation, arguably more divided than we've been since the Civil War era. But it's to No Depression's credit and yours that through the past eight years' nightmare of division and national animosity you managed to keep that middle meeting ground open in your pages, so that the dream of reconciliation could stay alive while "red" and "blue" went for each others' throats. With any luck (and an Obama presidency), we may see the end of that nightmare estrangement. Meanwhile, you can take satisfaction in knowing that No Depression succeeded in doing a hard job in hard times."

I suppose it goes without saying that I have chosen to place Mr. Smith's words above because I agree with them. More than that I am glad to have been understood, though I suspect in hindsight that we did not -- that I did not -- really understand what small role we might play (and a small role it was) as a national meeting ground until we made the apparently radical step of endorsing John Kerry for President in 2004. I had not known, not really known, the kinds of divides we straddled until the fallout from that decision. Which wasn't as severe as it might've been, but which was, still, bracing.

I have always wanted the writing about music to be about more than music. I have sometimes understood that those of you who read such things often wished the words only to be about the music. But none of it happens in a vacuum, not the creative process, and certainly not our lives.

Finally, I should like also to thank Joe Goldmark, who sent along a copy of his enormous project -- 16 CDs, in all -- compiling pre-1975 country music. As he said in his kind note, it's perfect for road trips. At $4 a gallon gas, I'm not sure how many more of those road trips I have in my future. Perhaps I shall have to rig the tractor for sound, but I think that's probably the wrong thing to do to a 50-year-old Ford. (I know, I know, I could get an iPod. I suppose I could. But I don't want to!)

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June 25, 2008

Yesterday's News

It is my morning ritual to settle into the couch with a cup of coffee and a copy of the nearest big city newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader. It's a McClatchy property, now, but Lexington isn't all that big a place and we live about 75 minutes from where the paper is printed. Which means ours is the first edition, and the sports scores are incomplete. Which means a quick glance at CNN or The New York Times online is probably more comprehensive in the morning. But I like tangible things, y'know, and I like sitting reading a newspaper over my coffee.

So I read the whole thing this morning, including two nice obituaries for George Carlin (one of them even front page). Only, later, when I looked to see whether it might rain on our garden, did I notice that it was Tuesday's newspaper. And today is Wednesday.

What with open windows and singing birds and a five-year-old who seems to wish to eschew sleeping at all costs, we wake early here. And it's not uncommon for me to beat the delivery person to the box where the newspaper rests.

So after breakfast I walked back down the driveway, and there was today's newspaper.

I wondered, as I walked, as fuel prices and -- I presume -- coming fuel shortages change how we live, I wondered just how many more years the Herald-Leader will deem our little market at the edge of their readership worth serving.

And whether I will miss it when it's gone.

Our local paper is, of course, dreadful. And the meme is now well circulated that newsprint is dead, the internet can do that job better. And maybe it can. Maybe.

Until I spill coffee on the keyboard, anyhow.

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June 19, 2008

It's not my tractor, and it's not sexy

The first time, after a long winter and a wet spring, that I got back on my father-in-law's blue Ford tractor, which is roughly as old as I am, I momentarily blanked on what all the levers did, but it came back to me quickly enough. Two gearshifts, a hand throttle, levers to raise and lower the bushhogging attachment, and another to make it spin. A clutch and a choke, and brake pedals that can be separated to gain traction, though that part I've not yet had to figure out.

I've spent small pieces of the last three days bushhogging one section of the farm that we don't use for anything except collecting butterflies and deer droppings. It's a long trip down and back, and bumpy. And every time I get on the tractor, I think of Merle Watson.

Today, I was alone out there, nothing but me and the sun and Survivor #1 cockadoodling back in the farm. I went out because the chickens needed feeding and watering and my in-laws had gone for the day; and I went out because driving back and forth and slowly getting something done is wonderful therapy.

Driving (ah, Pearl Harbour & The Explosions!) is still one of the great calming pleasures. My wife does yoga. I drive things. Her meditation is, of course, better for the planet. Mine works. Yesterday I took my solo voyage on the four-wheeler they keep to run from the house to the barn, and I can guess why people die on those things. Trees don't move, and it goes (or seems to go) fast. Another thumb throttle, which takes getting used to (I never rode a motorcycle; my father long ago decreed that he'd disown his sons if he caught us with tattoos or riding motorcycles...he's mellowed on that, a little, but not much).

Anyhow. The tractor is nimble and goat-like and in the middle of going back and forth I stopped to look at the phone and picked up a message from my father-in-law, reminding me to be careful, not to go where I shouldn't (like into the pond), that what I was doing could be dangerous. And I thought of Merle Watson, again. Every time.

It's an old tractor. There's no dead-man switch, so if I come out of the chair for any reason it keeps going. Quite clearly it is more capable of climbing and descending hills than I am of judging that it can do so safely, and so we work slowly together, and I try to gently figure out where the limits of the thing are so as never to tempt fate. Long ago a chainsaw went into my right leg, and I'd like to use that for an explanation of my basketball career, but when you don't figure out the mechanics of the jumpshot until you're thirtysomething, no more explanation is necessary.

But the sun's not too hot, the beans are coming up, the okra didn't seem to take, and we got our first banana pepper yesterday. And there's a new Solomon Burke album in the little red truck, spinning around as I come and go from the farm. One of these days I'll bring it in and write about it.

Right now, I've got fresh strawberries to eat. And maybe I'll open some of the mail. Nah, I'll just eat the strawberries. If Maggie doesn't get 'em first.

Nothing about this is very exciting, and it's certainly not punk rock. But it does feel good, like honest work, and if the weather holds we'll eat well all winter.

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June 16, 2008

Not the last words from Kentucky

In the ashes of Kentucky's presidential primary, it has been difficult to make sense of this place I now call home. Surely to goodness I cannot and should not feel so comfortable among a population in which, what was it? twenty percent? of the voters felt race was an issue. Voted against Barack Obama because he was black?

Now, I never have spent the time to see how the question was formulated, which makes a difference. Depending on how it was written, for example, some may have voted against Obama because they believe his race makes him a target for violence, and they would prefer not to see that happen in these turbulent, divisive times. But that's probably wishful thinking. Probably Kentucky voters were just a bit more honest and a bit less...evolved is the word which wishes to be typed, despite the presence of a huge museum to the creationism movement up Covington way.

All of which is relevant here, in a place where we talk mostly and peripherally and at least occasionally about music, in this way.

Last week, before we decamped for the beach, downtown Morehead hosted the Clack Mountain Festival. And let me digress just one moment further to note that everything you've heard on album or heard about Chris Stapleton's vocals, Stapleton being the Kentucky-bred lead singer of this particular Nashville bluegrass super group (and I'd forgotten Tammy Rogers played fiddle and sung harmonies, but she was terrific, as always), everything you've heard is true. His is one of the great voices of our generation, and I do not succumb to hyperbole. He's just that good. Rumor has it their next album might not be bluegrass, or that Stapleton himself wants to make a southern rock record, or whatever. Rumor being rumor, I don't care. Whatever he wants to sing, I want to listen to.

Not what I came here to type, though.

The Clack Mountain festival had booked the Carolina Chocolate Drops in the slot before Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys, and, especially after the primary, some of us had some concerns that they would be too warmly received by some of our less evolved neighbors.

First song, the cloggers came out. Not just at stage left, where they had been keeping themselves, but stage center. First song, all the older men and (and few women) who seem mostly to be the only people keeping this tradition alive, who dance mostly by themselves and in some veiled competition with each other (if only, now, to see who can keep going longest), all the folks who one might caricature all kinds of ways in a racially charged environment, they came right out to dance and had a big time the whole set.

Now, surely somebody will note that African-American performers have always been enjoyed by a racist society, and maybe that's part of it. But I prefer to think the music did the talking, and the music won out.

At one point Rhiannon Giddens introduced a song with the notation that it was one she'd known for a long time, but recent events had made it reasonable to sing. And I thought, ah, she's going to obliquely comment on Obama, and sat back expecting, I don't know, "A Change Is Gonna Come" or some such. Instead, she cut loose with a version of "Single Girl, Married Girl" that I hadn't heard before.

A good time was had by all, and I took that for a good sign.

A postscript. At the end of the day I happened to notice Mike Farris's Salvation In Lights sitting on my desk, because I'd been talking about him with a friend and had played a song or two. So I tossed it into the CD player, that being easier than, y'know, filing the thing. There it was: "Change Is Gonna Come." Now, the Chocolate Drops surely don't need me making repertoire suggestions, but, that said, it would have been the right song to hear that night, at least for me. And I think Mrs. Giddens could nail it. Of course she could.

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June 5, 2008

The end of the road song

We are a rootless, restless people, we who have settled across the continent of these United States; even, best I can tell in my ignorance, even those who were native to the place. The safety net we have all had is that we could leave where we were and go somewhere else, abandoning caste and castle, arriving re-made ("beware," my mentor Thoreau wrote, "of ventures which require new clothes, and not a new wearer of clothes"), readymade, and refreshed.

How else to explain the dominance of train songs in early country music, the continuing lure of Kerouac's On The Road (still to be read only in ones early 20s), the perplexing success of Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again" and every song Bruce Springsteen and Woody Guthrie and every other touring musician ever wrote about the simple joys of driving from one place to another place, known or unknown. Dashiell Hammett's "Flitcraft Parable," recently illustrated in the Tacoma, Washington magazine City Arts by longtime ND contributing artist Stan Shaw. Jon Dee Graham's blank, bleak, joyous "Swept Away." The popularity of Robert Service's poetry at the turn of the twentieth century:

"There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
and roam the world at will...."

A benediction, and a curse, that.

This morning I spent a few minutes trying to find a photograph of my 1967 Dodge van, the one I fixed up with a bed and a stereo and a writing table and two hidden compartments the customs inspectors never found, where I stashed dirty laundry and my two 35mm cameras and lenses. I took its picture at the top of a dirt road that had taken me over a mountain in Colorado, though I do not know the summit's name. But it won't be found this morning, at least not quickly, and so it goes.

That was my first time communing with the road. I went to find America, perplexed by its adoration of Ronald Reagan; and I went to find a home. As it worked out, as I have told before, I ended up back in Seattle and took another decade leaving. I am too private a person to have found America, but all that time alone, I did find myself. Quicksilver, of course, that finding, but it helped.

The first night I still remember. It took longer getting the van ready than I'd hoped, and so it was early fall and not early in the day when finally the road took me away across the North Cascades. My head took to hurting almost as soon as I got into traffic, a reminder that the pressure of Northwest clouds often lead to sinus headaches. By the time I was far enough away to stop without shame, my first night in a crowded campground, I was almost physically sick. And very alone. Very alone. Turning back seemed prudent, but once left, going home was not really an option. And so I stayed, stayed the course. It took three or four days to find the rhythm of the road, switching cassettes as moods passed, always playing old blues at high volume when the road took me through rich neighborhoods. Not that anybody noticed.

But there is still no better place to hear an album in all its glory and with all its shortcomings than in a car, alone, in the quiet of a cool, clear night, driving. (Ah, Pearl Harbour & The Explosions...)

I have driven a lot, and though it has never been my aspiration to drive competitively, for I have not the eyesight, nor, at this point, the reflexes for that work (nor do I have a clue how to do more than change a tire), I would say with an American man's pride that I drive well. At least that I do not hit things when I drive, and that I am able to be comfortable driving whatever's at hand, though my father-in-law's tractor is not yet my friend.

But I feel that road coming to an end. Not because I have become middle aged, nor unemployed, but because gas is now $4 a gallon, and will get no cheaper for any length of time in my lifetime. Our daughter is five, and we plan carefully the trips we want to take her on, the roads and places we want her to know, keenly aware that at some point those roads will close to us.

Once it was nothing to hop in Susan's jeep and drive past New Orleans on our way to Houston, and then, on the way back, decide to stop in New Orleans for dinner and two days of exploration in the old book stores and galleries. Now...now I treat my travels as a rare treat, each one potentially a final indulgence.

And I feel caged. Not by the place I have chosen to live, but by the closing off of so many choices. I am an American, and the calculation that it's not worth driving somewhere because...that's tough math, even for me. It has been part of our DNA for centuries that we could pull up stakes and go. We still can, of course, and in part I am writing this for a friend who is amid just that journey. And we should ("Sing!" again, please: "Fear is a man's best friend!").

Part of our safety net has been that we could operate without a net. That we could leave. That the grass might be greener, or, at least, they might pay us to mow it when we got there. Those days aren't over, not yet. But I can see them coming to an end, as the airlines cut flights, as friends cut down to a single car, as we measure each trip against the possibility that there might not be another.

This will make no sense in Europe, where the spaces are different and there is no real escaping one's past (unless one emigrates, of course).

I can half hear Steve Earle's early song about working at a gas station near the interstate, saving enough money to get gone down that road one day and never look back.

Inevitably one looks back.

But what will it mean for us -- for all of us -- if going down that road ceases to be an option, save for the very rich or the very desperate.

Perhaps it has always been that way, and we have lived in a fortunate bubble that is near to bursting.

Perhaps.

But we as a people are not ready to be caged in the places we have settled. And it will not go easily.

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June 1, 2008

Pass the Mike

Before I became a music critic, it was possible to luxuriate in albums, to play them over and over again simply because doing so felt good, because you heard new and invigorating things each time, because you came to know an artist and his or her or their work intimately through that repetition. Over the years I became adept at making quicker judgments, but in my new semi-retirement it is a real joy to go back to simply playing the things I wish to hear for as long as they entertain me.

Because my friend Hayseed -- and I have become friends, over the years, with only two musicians, believing such a relationship to be inappropriate to my role as critic -- will be coming down from Ohio this coming Saturday (June 7) to judge a band contest as part of the Clack Mountain Festival (featuring, for all of $5, Ralph Stanley, the Caroline Chocolate Drops, the Steeldrivers, and the Clack Mountain String Band), and because my five-year-old daughter has not yet met Hayseed, I've been playing his music these last few days.

Because the band contest is, so far, undersubscribed (it's the first year, we may not have publicized it as much as needed), it is possible we will fill out the afternoon with an old-fashioned guitar pull. This, at least, was a plan Clack Mountain fiddler Jesse Wells (whose day job is at the Center for Traditional Music here in Morehead; his boss is mandolinist and esteemed bluegrass singer Don Rigsby) and I hatched at the coffeeshop a few days ago. Now, Hayseed doesn't play an instrument, but I'm scheming to get him onstage anyhow. I burned his two albums, Melic (the final offering from the Watermelon/Sire marriage), and an all-covers disc he made (and for which I assembled cover artwork) a few years later. And then I burned a disc Hayseed sent down from his exile in upstate New York, songs he'd cut with Jimmy Ryan. And added a song from his Florida year, a duet with Callie Chappell called "Leaning Into Jesus." And left them on Jesse's desk (actually, I handed them to Don), with the hope that Jesse would skip through them and find a few songs he wouldn't mind playing on if we needed to ask Hayseed to join the fun onstage. Which I hope they do.

Little Maggie is all excited to meet Hayseed. She came in this morning, while her mom was getting ready for church and her dad was checking the latest political news, and asked me to put Hayseed back on the stereo. So that's a good sign. It's also a good sign that playing his music felt like I was again in the presence of an old friend, and it made me look forward even more to his arrival. Sometimes you get to liking people and go blind to the faults of their art, but I came here in the calm of this morning to revisit a time of greater hope and innocence.

See, for our fifth anniversary issue, back in January-February 2000, we did what music magazines often used to do in the stagnant first quarter: We picked five new artists and made that the cover story. It was the only time we did this, for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being the disappointment I felt (and I suspect other contributors felt) at being proven so wrong in so public a way. Or, at least, wrong in a commercial sense.

We polled our senior and contributing editors, and ended up picking Tift Merritt (who got a Grammy nomination and a major label deal, so that worked out tolerably well), Mike Ireland (who made one more damn fine record, wrote a couple reviews for ND, and retired to Kansas City where, I suppose, he's still teaching freshman comp at a community college), Marah (who remain one of the great rock bands around, when they're not too busy shooting themselves in the foot; and they, too, got big label shots), Trailer Bride (a North Carolina band on Bloodshot who I've never seen but never again heard the great promise of their...second? album), and Hayseed.

The cover photo was one of the few times I've tried actively to art direct a shoot, and it didn't quite come off the way I'd wanted or planned. Which is not Jim Herrington's fault, I should add. We borrowed a bunch of vintage gear, some of it from David Rawlings (who has and had a bunch of very cool vintage gear), rented a spotlight, and set ourselves up in the Belcourt Theatre, where the Grand Ole Opry played for a couple years before World War II. I can't remember all the things that didn't go right, but we ended up with the photo which adorns the cover, and not the one I had in my mind. And that, too, is fine. Even more so in hindsight.

(Grammatical digression: In print, we always shortened microphone to "mike," one of several idiosyncrasies we clutched like treasures. I believe the written word is meant to be read aloud, and mic sounds too much like the evil device to the right of my keyboard which has conspired to make my wrist feel twice its age, and like the evil creatures in the attic which occasionally gnaw on boxes of back issues. So it's been "mike" because that's how you pronounce it, with apologies to every Michael reading. I have adapted no better to the new absence of hyphens. It is not clear to me when long-standing became longstanding, and month-long became monthlong, but in both cases -- and many others -- I do not think our language has become clearer for the change. Anyhow.)

Doubtless I started out to make a point here, this morning, but I've mostly lost it.

Here are some of the points I started out to make:

I wish Mike Ireland still made music. I wish the marketplace had not so cruelly treated his gifts and his dreams. I hope he is still making music, still writing songs, still recording them for later, and I hope later some day comes.

I can't wait to hear Hayseed's new songs, and I'm glad that he's still making them, regardless the commercial prospects. I have always been drawn to artists who are compelled to create, not to artists who are drawn to the spotlight. Hayseed is a deep character, reminds me of somebody who might inhabit Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, which I am reading in slow gulps like cleansing spring water at the end of a well-hoed row.

The rest of those once-anointed five I know less well. Tift will do fine, of course. She's smart and gifted and adaptable, and maybe not quite as feisty as once I thought, but that hardly matters. Marah...I saw them last at the soon-to-close (or relocate, or both) Dame in Lexington, and they were a fabulous rock band. Not Mudhoney, but who is? And I hope that is enough, regardless whatever demons betray their gifts. Trailer Bride I have simply lost track of.

So we weren't right, at least not as right as we'd have wished. But the music we heard, in that moment? It was right. And that's enough. Still. Thank you.

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