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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.

Posted by grant on June 1, 2008 11:23 AM | Permalink