Not counting two trips to Starwood, an outdoor lawn and band shell outside of Nashville, where we went for sport to see a tour that included Ratt and Poison and, I think, Great White (and one more), and where I saw Sonic Youth open for Pearl Jam, the best I can remember is that I went to some suburban Los Angeles shed to see KISS, which would have been ten or eleven years ago. And that was my last arena show.

Long have I held to the belief that there's little point in going to such places to see music, because music cannot happen on such a huge stage, in such a vast room; and because few among the audience go there for the music. They go for the event, for the proximity to fame. They go because it's the only context in which they understand music to be offered, and sorting out the confusing array of clubs and emerging (or submerging) performers is too much trouble for the casual listener. (And, anyway, in Lexington, the Dame has been closed and will shortly be demolished for some enormous block-sized structure that it is not clear the city needs, nor its citizens want.)

Once I expressed this opinion in a piece David Menconi wrote advancing the Down From The Mountain tour, which by then had run a great many miles. That, and my suggestion that O Brother was analogous to the "Dueling Banjos" flurry following Deliverance in the mid-'70s inspired T Bone Burnett to e-mail a couple of angry notes my way.

(I seemed unable to make him understand the Deliverance reference, but Eric Darling's soundtrack album -- or whatever it was -- was hugely inspirational to me as a child. I took up the banjo, through sixth and seventh grade, tender years, which, at least, finally allowed me to practice upstairs where my parents could hear that indeed I had no talent, not for that and not for the piano downstairs I had been banging on for six years, and so I was allowed to quit and take up typing. Deliverance was the album -- I've never seen the movie, nor read the book from which it was adapted -- which cracked open the door to roots music a little further, past creeping down to my dad's office and listening to Tiny Freeman on Saturday nights. So it wasn't meant as an insult, suggesting O Brother would have similar impact, but I suspect Mr. Burnett had hoped to change the world a bit more this time 'round. And, perhaps, he has.)

It is also true that my tastes in music are not so broadly shared that the artists I wish to see are often asked to play in basketball arenas.

And so, having seen the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss tour open its run across the state in Louisville -- a beautiful but inevitably tentative show which I inexpertly reviewed here -- we came to Rupp, gifted unexpectedly with wonderful seats, not so much expecting to see great music as to see what great musicians had done with themselves in the intervening weeks. Last night's show was the penultimate on this swing, which concludes tonight in Nashville, and then they all take a break. Or at least pause to do other things for a while.

Let us not pretend that we were anywhere but a partially-sold arena. The top level, where we occasionally sit to see Coach Gillespie confound fans and critics alike, was curtained off. There were seats available elsewhere. The fellow next to me had a piercing whistle he offered regularly by way of approval, but it happened to be in my good ear -- not the one the .357 went off near some years back (OK, I shot it, but it was supposed to have a .38 load in it, and that's about all I know about guns) -- and I hadn't thought to bring earplugs to an acoustic show, and the middle-aged couple in front of us were as engaged in their own betrothal as they were the show. Same as it ever was.

All that's true.

But this is also true: T Bone Burnett was, much as it pains me to admit...Burnett was right. Music can happen on an arena stage, and this slowly dawned on me as the evening wore on. The trick, which I should have seen coming, is to place six of the best musicians at work on the western half of the planet in one place, let them get to know each other -- but not too well, I suppose -- and, providing the egos stay in check, fun will be had. (I am not sure how often this trick can be repeated, nor if it should be tried by anybody else.)

The show -- Plant called it a revue, which is what it is, and what it can still grow into being -- has much evolved since Louisville. I can't speak to the set list because, again, I don't take notes at concerts, save to suggest that they weren't all the same songs, not even close. More than that, it is now clear that Raising Sand is no longer the purpose for the tour, it's the pretext on which they are allowed to continue having fun in public. (And, of course, get paid handsomely for their efforts. Though I suspect the principals might still do better financially as solo headliners; that's not the point.)

And, this night, anyhow, the dynamic has changed, the focus has sharpened. Burnett took only one song at center stage ("Let The Good Times Roll," only he introduced it by its Cajun French name, which I am unable to render accurately), which works better for the flow of things. Plant and Krauss are clearly much more comfortable with each other, more certain where the other will come in and step back, able now to joke because the quality of their work together is comfortably assured. And Plant, to his credit, has shed the arena rock moves which were still his instinctive response to songs -- especially those from the Zeppelin catalogue -- in Louisville.

That focus also means they lean less heavily on the sidemen, which is probably a good thing, though, inevitably, I'd like always to see more of Stuart Duncan and Buddy Miller. Other times, in other contexts. In the meantime, they keep learning new songs, new ways to play with each other, and the audience -- wherever and whoever it may be -- is virtually irrelevant. Fun is being had on stage. Music is being made, music of the highest possible quality.

Even in a basketball arena.

Which was fine. The point seemed made that Buddy was (in the Young Fresh Fellows line) a man who loved music.

Despite the inevitable ups and downs of the recording process, I'm confident that Buddy thoroughly enjoyed making Nashville with Solomon Burke. Thoroughly enjoyed. And had plans to make another.

"I think we're going to do...I mean, he told Rolling Stone that we were doing a record together, a gospel record," Buddy said back in March. "I mean, we were all talking about it. Julie said, 'Yeah, we'll set up a tent outside and set up chairs in our room, and we'll do a live gospel record here, you just come in and preach and we'll play and back you up for a few days, and we'll have a record. I'll write the songs.'

"It was like we were getting a plan together, and I said, 'Yeah, I'll put up a banner out front: REVIVAL TONIGHT WITH SOLOMON BURKE.' And we may still do that.

"We cut 'Dirty Water,' that song of ours which can be looked at any number of ways, I think politically is how he was kind of [looking at it], and that's the kind of gospel record he wants to make, things that tie in that aren't, well, I shouldn't speak for him."

Not long after that last issue of the magazine showed up on my doorstep, I opened a package from Shout! Factory containing Solomon's new Like A Fire. Produced by Steve Jordan, and not by Buddy Miller. I felt an immediate sadness, though it would be presumptuous (no, silly) to suggest that Buddy and I are more than slightly acquainted with each other.

Maybe Buddy knew it was coming, maybe he didn't. Certainly Buddy has a hectic schedule, and Burke is hardly obliged to do anything, much less wait for Buddy to have time to make another album with him. And, regardless, the existence of Like A Fire in no way closes the door to Buddy producing a gospel record on Solomon Burke. They still might, and I still hope they do.

But, as I played the album over and over again driving out to the farm this spring, I couldn't get past my prejudice that it wasn't the album I wanted to hear from Solomon Burke. And, in the main, I think David Cantwell's review (elsewhere on this site) says most of what I would have said on that subject, had I gotten 'round to writing one myself.

Nashville was full of life, as Solomon Burke clearly is. Like A Fire is, in the main, not. The title track seems, no matter how often I listen, like a mistake, for Burke's voice sounds thick and old and uncertain, and it's not a great song, much less so strong it begs to be the opening number, the theme for the whole work. It is followed by the most country number of the album, a Keb' Mo/Alan Dennis Rich co-write called "We Don't Need It" that will pair nicely with Charlie Rich's "Life's Little Ups And Downs" (yeah, I know Rich's wife wrote it) if I ever get on the radio. (Which I probably won't.) Except that there is redemption in Burke's song, and resignation in Rich's.

For the rest, there's a fine gospel song with Ben Harper, "A Minute To Rest And A Second To Pray", and the album closes with an awkward kind of Ray Price shuffle, "If I Give My Heart To You". And after all those trips to the farm the six other songs just blur together.

Cantwell is right. Time is running out, don't waste it on mediocre projects.

That said, I am once again reminded that we have lived through an extraordinary patch of muscular, knowing albums made by older artists. Ray Price has given us one, Johnny Cash gave us a good handful -- make what you will of American V, but remember what the singer knew about himself as he made it, that he knew well what he sounded like, and that he consciously, carefully worked with that. I'd toss Bettye LaVette into that mix, but she's not really of that generation. Porter Wagoner's last, to which we owe Marty Stuart a considerable debt, for I have been in receipt of a number of other late Wagoner offerings which existed simply to be sold off the merch table. Same, I fear, with Ralph Stanley, but, again, ponder the power of "Oh, Death." The knowing behind his rendition.

That, anyhow, is what I hope for from the next Solomon Burke album. That knowing and caring, and commitment.

We three here at home were in the midst of an impromptu cleaning frenzy. We had just installed a new CD player which holds five discs (a duplicate of the one we bought for the bookstore, days earlier), and Susan had turned it on so as to make the work go more pleasantly.

It was the sound of Greg Brown's voice which reminded me. It reminded me of my friend and our contributor, Mike Perry, whose path off the grid is much further along than mine will ever be -- but he has the advantage of having been raised on a dairy farm, not in the suburbs -- and whose last major piece for ND was a fine interview and character study of Mr. Brown.

And that reminded me, for reasons I shan't trouble the synapses to explain, that there sat in my fax machine a contract for Susan and me to sign. And so we did, and faxed it back.

With those signatures I ended my ownership interest in No Depression. I have troubled in the following days whether to mention this, and, if so, how best to do so. Because this has always been a deeply personal matter -- the writing and designing and publishing of our little magazine; the sense I have ever carried with me that I spoke to and with and among a community of friends, known and unknown -- I find that I cannot leave it unsaid.

So the first thing to be said is that I leave No Depression in good hands, in the care of people sworn to do right by our legacy. My leaving has to do with choices I wish to make in my life, and under no circumstances is it meant to suggest anything else. I asked to leave. It is time, and maybe I shall explain that at some later point, and perhaps you reading today have read enough of my musings these last few months, these last few years, so as to know already why that might be so.

The second thing is that I will not be entirely gone. With the forbearance of my remaining partners, I will continue to blog on this site. Sometimes I will even write about music, for it remains a fundamental part of who I am, if less a part of how I work toward the end of each day. And I will continue to design and co-edit (mostly design, this first issue) the bookazine we have engaged to publish through the University of Texas Press.

In this it should be clear that, for good and ill, I am a print person. And I am stepping aside because what No Depression needs right now is a web person. Persons, probably. They are on schedule -- as much as such things adhere to a schedule -- to relaunch this website come fall. But as I have watched this process unfold, it has become painfully clear to me that I haven't the stomach for it. It's not what I do, not who I am, not who I'm going to be.

And so I will step out of the way.

Here at home, when the cleaning was done, we opened a couple bottles of Hennepin, which claims now to be a saison though it's really a pretty good North American knockoff of the Belgian Duvel (so good a knockoff that Duvel now owns the brewery), and I never thought of Duvel as a farmhouse ale. No matter. We had a glass, and saluted.

For the rest, I am tanned, rested, and ready for what may come. And patient enough not to hasten its coming.

Y'all be good. I'll be watching. Listening.

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The last year, just mom and me, it took a day and a half. In the same car, a 1964 Chevelle, I believe, and not the faster 1967 Dodge. That's how much the roads got better.

Over the years I've driven a good bit of this country, the main roads and the back roads. Back in the mid-1980s, emboldened in part by William Least Heat Moon's book, I sold my first business and fixed up a 1967 Dodge van with the engine next to the driver's seat and a stereo that cost more than the van itself, and went out to try to find the America which had voted for Ronald Reagan.

I didn't.

I do remember leaving Austin with Timbuk 3 playing on the college radio station, though I'm not entirely certain the timeline makes this memory possible, and thinking that would be a cool town to move to, and moving somewhere out of Seattle was on my agenda, though it would take another decade before I would finally leave. A good decade. Grunge. The Rocket. The bare beginnings of No Depression.

But this trip, driving my wife to her yoga retreat in Woodstock, IL, northwest of Chicago, I have been struck by how bad our main roads have become, by how we've lost faith even with the fundamentals of our society.

I wrote this originally for daily kos from an indifferent hotel in the suburbs of Chicago. (I hadn't the passwords to my own site, which explains a lot.) No CNN, no ESPN, a Mexican restaurant next door that thought I might be la migra and was cold at best. We passed beautiful old barns that are about to be turned into housing developments, the cattle already sold, one last corn crop in the ground. We passed new and old -- but unoccupied at a rate that speaks to the deterioration of our economy -- retail and manufacturing strip malls.

And we did it on roads that should have been repaired long ago. Now, I know the weather up here is rough and that road maintenance is expensive. But even Grandma, assistant to the county clerk except during the war, and then she gave his job back, even Grandma said you get what you pay for.

Some day we're going to run out of gas, and it may well be during my lifetime. Certainly its rising price will change my travel habits, making these trips far more of a luxury than they have been. It will become more of a struggle for my daughter to know her relatives on the West Coast.

But the roads are a symptom.

And they're plumb awful. Broken. Fragmented. Dangerous. Crowded, yes, but the pavement is in terrible shape.

If I were a touring band, I would worry afresh about the increasing possibility of severe accident, about the damage done to tires and suspension systems, about the wear and tear and the economy of rock 'n' roll at $4 or $5 or $10 a gallon.

Travel is now, for us, a luxury item, for which we budget.

But the point, here and now, is this: We have suffered a fundamental breakdown of our social contract. We have changed our relationship to taxes and to civic duty. The sainted Ronald Reagan (though I don't remember him having been so beloved during his terms in office) and his followers have recast taxation as theft. Rather than believing government can and should work to better the lives of citizens, they infused political discourse with the notion that government could not work.

This is not a new observation. See: Katrina. See: health care. See: public education.

When we stop believing in this country, when we stop believing things can and should be improved, when we stop being willing to pay for the society we say we wish to live in, and when we start believing that we are all nothing more than specific and discrete interest groups, we have failed. We have failed ourselves, our children, and the patriots who founded this land. (Which is not to say their aim was pure, but that's not the point; their words were.)

We face a lot of choices. This next election, it could be about race, or the economy, or the war(s), or, with any luck, it could be about energy and ecology. But the bottom line is that it's about the roads we travel together.

Generations of ancestors who tried desperately to free themselves from the toil of the soil would probably be saddened by how I've been spending these last few weeks, but the sunburn and the work boots and all my talk of chickens and worry about the weather. For most of my 49 years I have changed channels when the weather came on, and ignored its presence in the newspaper. In part this is because I spent 30-odd years in Seattle, and there's really no point in having a weather forecast most days there. It's gray, and dripping, and I miss that soothing sky. I look at the weather every morning, now, trying to guess when it's going to be dry enough to plant beans.

Still, I have been thinking some about that pejorative, "redneck," and not so much about the Randy Newman song (although some of the silliness being spit at Barack Obama does remind me how desperately we could use Newman's wit just now; his old wit, that is, not the elder statesman making soundtracks). My neck got red because I was out in the field, really only for a couple hours for a series of afternoons, trying to get the ground ready and the plants in the ground so that we could eat local food grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Maybe there's something effete in all that, but it's harder, and it's work, and it tastes good when it's done.

Point being that the neck only gets red when you're outside working, because if you're playing you probably have suntan lotion on, and if you're dozing it's probably in the shade. And there's been a lot of talk during this inning of the presidential election about the white, working-class voter in Appalachia. I can't pretend to be one, but a lot of that talk was still hurtful and shamefully ignorant.

Doubtless all my chat about chickens and crops seems odd, particularly on a music site, particularly coming from a middle-aged child of the suburbs. Fine, it's odd. But when I listen to Larry Sparks sing "John Deere Tractor" (as I have been; Rebel sent out a compilation disc that's been spinning in the little red pickup, once I brought Duffy's debut back inside to write about it), I have a little more context than I did the first few times I heard the song. Sparks has a lot of nostalgia in his songs, a lot of looking backward. I'm not immune to that temptation, but it's far more useful to look forward.

I spent most of today out in the barn, waiting for a chicken to die. It didn't, at least not yet. I got there early this morning, caught up with Dan while he was walking from the little pen where the motley assemblage of month-old roosters live, cradling an almost unmoving bundle of feathers. He set it down in one of the compartments in our unfinished chicken condominium, and shrugged. The night before he'd turned the heat lights off on the little ones, and, in their scrum to stay warm, this one had been hurt. He didn't figure it had long, but on the chance that it was sick (and not hurt), he wanted it segregated.

So we sawed and built and stapled chickenwire over the second set of condos, and the little rooster kept breathing. We moved the half-grown hens into their new quarters, and I spent a few minutes chasing the one that got away with a fishing net, which works better than bare hands. And then we moved the month-old roosters into their remodeled quarters. Which meant I held a bunch of chickens today, on purpose. And then we fed them, and, since it hadn't died yet, Dan fed and watered the bedraggled rooster. My guess is it got pecked on its back something fierce, or stepped on hard, because it couldn't raise its head. But, to our surprise, it drank, and then ate. So maybe it'll make it.

Dan looked at it eating, and shrugged again. "If you live, I'll kill you," he said.

I live -- we mostly live -- pretty isolated from death. Death happens in hospitals and hospices, and I've been very lucky that it hasn't been a presence in my family for a good long time. I am far from the first to note that there's something about knowing what you're eating, where it came from, and how it lived. What it ate. How it died.

I find it easier not to be a vegetarian now that I'm involved in some of the meat we eat. It's a little more honest, anyhow.

And ferrying the little birds, it made me smile. Scared, timid little things, with sharp feet and beating hearts. If they live, we will kill them. That's a hard truth for a life-long pacifist to embrace, but I'm getting there. It comes with obligations, that food. Our food.

Folio serves a broad spectrum of magazine publishers, many of them business-to-business titles for whom the magazines they publish are really long-form adverts for the tradeshows they produce, which are their real profit centers. Folio has also just spun off a new title devoted to the proposition that magazines will find new and exciting profits and possibilities online.

Which, y'know, is either a sore subject or an opportunity, depending on what part of what day you talk to me.

At the same time I have just this morning been reading a diary entry on the daily kos website talking about West Virginia politics and sociology, the extent to which cable TV and high-speed internet access does and does not penetrate that and other largely poor places.

Under any circumstances I think it's kind of idiotic for Folio to be giving away and embracing a piece of technology which has as its avowed aim the end of print as we know it (with apologies to one-time RayGun magazine art director David Carson).

But far more to the point I am endlessly frustrated by the herd mentality within the American business community. We have constantly downgraded magazines (and publications in general) ever since MTV and Spy and USA Today introduced short-attention-span journalism. With pretty pictures.

Fine.

That doesn't mean everybody has to be like that. It doesn't mean you have to design publications only for the lowest possible common denominator. It surely doesn't mean people should be encouraged to read -- and think -- less.

And, one more time: the digital music revolution has done nothing more than transfer the profits made from the production of music from record labels and into the hands of the manufacturers of the playback machinery, who have in their favor planned obsolescence and the unplanned certainty that new technology will quickly make outmoded whatever gadget they presently sell, forcing consumers to buy yet another fancier gadget.

Anything else we pretend the digital music revolution has accomplished is either temporary or propaganda.

I'm not saying the web is irrelevant. I'm just saying it's different, that it performs a separate and distinct function which -- if publishers tend to their knitting -- can mesh with the printed word, but should not be permitted by the unthinking bean counters with corner offices to gut the publishing industry.

Discuss at your leisure.

If I remember some numbers Chris Morris ran off a few years back, the total number of releases in distribution (which is a subset of all releases, in that a number of local bands and home-bound artists sent their music out for review in our pages, though it was not nationally available) had trebled in the last decade, from 20-odd thousand to 60-odd thousand.

My sense is that number has slowed to a trickle. But it's also likely that a number of publicists have quickly removed me from their mailing lists, and that I've neglected to count all the links to downloadable albums which I still ignore because I continue to view such things as the spawn of a particularly evil demon. (See: previous posts at this site. Too many of 'em, in fact, I'm sure.)

So I'm tossing this out to my more active colleagues: Have release schedules slowed down as much as I think they have?

It would make sense. The economy is in tatters, and no matter what election fix goes in, it's going to be a mess for a while because the whole structure is no better than the structure of the music industry. And while bands of a certain profile (or with trust funds) can continue to release albums, with $4-a-gallon gas and a bad economy and no record retail and little, if any, label structure (not to mention radio, which is mostly unmentionable), it seems like a lot of musicians from whom we once heard regularly are sitting on their hands. Staying out of the studio. Touring Europe.

Some winnowing would be good, based on all the CDs I have yet to listen to from acts I've never heard of (and I am, slowly, doing that, just for the sport of it; if I find something good, happily, I have this nice little website on which to trumpet the discovery) from musicians who ought to be able to hear that they're not ready for the national stage.

But I fear we're in for more than winnowing.

The last cash cow left (aside from TV) has been touring. And I'll be real curious to see how the summer festivals do. Local bands in big cities will probably do bang-up business. But those of our friends who can tour one or two major regions of the country and play to 60-200 fans each night...I bet they have a tough time this summer. Next fall.

Not wishing any of that. Just tossing it out to see if that's what the world looks like to the rest of y'all.

"I don't differentiate all that much between movies, music, TV -- it's like all these companion pieces that go along with your life," says Steven Tannen.

Not my life.

We weren't raised with television in my house, not until dad and I took to watching football at the home of an economics professor who also owned a vineyard, which I imagine led to mother's relenting and finally acquiring a 12-inch black and white and hooking up the cable. To this day I cannot walk into a room with a TV on and ignore it, and this may explain -- this and a timely chainsaw accident -- how I came to watch the entire Watergate hearings.

My co-editor had a more normal raising, which doubtless reveals why he found it necessary to thank "Gilligan's Island" in the staffbox of our first issue.

Apparently, if you are a musician, television is the new lottery ticket that buys your way out of the day job you just lost. Apparently, if you are a fan of unknown artists, it is necessary to watch "Grey's Anatomy" or "Scrubs" to hear needle drops of new songs that radio is too ossified to play. It is one of the few ways musicians are well-paid in the new economy, but I refuse to watch either show because they bore me to tears. As does the music they play, which is chosen for its ability to serve as supporting wallpaper to a scene, not for its lasting creative merits as a song.

Same with movies. Or film. None of which is to minimize the virtues of good music placement (I still remember a short-lived '50s detective series that Joe Jackson did music for, and the fun I had realizing he'd placed Link Wray's "Rumble" atop a barfight), nor of being paid for same.

But the narrative structures of film and television are different, one from the other (so is the screen dimension, though that appears to be changing somewhat), and music is too important to me to allow to become nothing more than the supporting tear jerk of an already over-calculated screen moment.

Blame it on radio. They quit caring about artists, quit back-announcing songs, and were so busy buying and selling each other that they owe the bank so much money that music is only fit in among commercials and satellite-fed banter from absent DJs.

Blame it on MTV. Do I have to write more than that sentence? I didn't think so.

Blame it on the decline in record retail.

But it does little good to assign blame, for it changes nothing, fixes nothing.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a way to re-establish communities now linked only by their ability to type at each other from great distances. There has to be a way to sustain the work of musicians without whoring out their songs to film and TV and commercial spots because that's the only paying work, and the only way to be heard against the din of this over-plugged society.

I know all this writing about chickens seems obscure and remote to a great number of readers. "Green Acres" and all. But it's real. It's a beautiful day today, filled with bird calls and green everywhere and the smell of things growing which one day we will eat, except for the chicken shit. I am not nurtured by text messages and knowing where the moment's most important blog is to be found, what everybody else is listening to or thinking about. What fabulous new widget might be used to spend even more time playing on the computer.

Television is this stupid box in the livingroom that I sink into when incapable of anything else, or when there's a football or basketball game on. It's not my life. It's not real life. And real life is where art comes from.

And yet Dan has gone fishing and so it falls to your newly unemployed scribe to go feed the chickens. And make sure they're warm enough, since we have 24 that are less than a month old, all roosters, most of whom are doomed to the pot; it's worth noting that roosters are much cheaper to buy (less than half price, in fact), though I haven't enough feminist theory to go further with that thought. Another dozen juvenile hens (we like eggs), and a half-dozen adults (one rooster, Survivor #1, and five steady but indifferent layers), round out the flock each population housed in separate chicken condominiums. When Dan gets back, we will have to build a new condo for the growing roosters, who are now housed in a wooden box smaller than most televisions.

Midafternoon, having finally opened a batch of mail, I loaded a somewhat randomly chosen CD into the little red truck and headed out. It's a long enough drive that I can get most of an album heard coming and going (at least the old 34-minute album, or enough of a new one to know), though it's not a place, once one arrives, that calls for music. I had plucked up the debut CD by a Tupelo, Mississippi blues trio called the Homemade Jamz Blues Band whose oldest member is 16. They play guitars made out of gas tanks, at least some of the time (the YouTube videos I scanned involved more traditional guitars), which sounds more rural than the pictures within the package suggests. They replaced a Jimmy Reed reissue (the curious 1961 Jimmy Reed At Carnegie Hall, influential in England but not recorded at Carnegie Hall) that had been spinning a few days, and the Homemade Jamz sound nothing like him. A nine year old girl, Miss Taya Perry, plays drums. The 16 year-old singing and playing lead, Mr. Ryan Perry, sounds like a man, but it's hard to imagine that he has lived enough to mean the words his father, Renaud, who apparently goes just by Perry, has written. Songs like "Right Thang Wrong Woman." Mr. Kyle Perry, at 13, handles the bass. A classic power trio. (Oddly, Steve Winwood's newest album was in the day's mail haul, but, as much as I loved the Spencer Davis Group and half of the Blind Faith album, I hadn't the heart for it.)

I was listening to the Jamz' album, titled Pay Me No Mind and to be released June 10 on NorthernBlues, because it came in today's mail, and because a fellow named Roger Stolle wrote some liners to it. Roger was a marketing executive in St. Louis who became friends with Art Chantry, the designer, which meant we met up in Nashville once. Stolle and his wife quit the straight life to open Cat Head Gallery in Clarksdale (my folk art weakness once again) and, I gather booking Ground Zero Blues Club down there. Or maybe he's started another business, I dunno. Maybe they're the same thing.

Anyhow, Roger has put out a couple Big George Brock albums on his own Cat Head imprint that I've listened to but never found any words to write about. But his name was enough to get me to listen to these kids play the blues.

Even if it's a little cold right now to get into the rhythm of that Mississippi thing. It's been unseasonably cold here (this morning, as I rewrite a tiny bit, it's about to get unseasonably hot), and so we were worried yesterday when both lightbulbs heating the roosters were out. We scurried to Southern States and bought more lights and they were fine, but hungry. And, being incredibly stupid animals, thirsty, as they'd knocked their remaining water container over. Incredibly stupid animals, let me underline that.

Oh, and being called chicken? It's way more of an insult than you thought in the schoolyard. In junior high there was a wandering substitute language teacher who promulgated the notion that "unanisumbua" was the worst word you could say in Swahili. It means, he said, "you bug me." Which seems tame, until you consider the size and disposition of insects in Africa. (I have no idea if that was true, nor if I've remembered it exactly right. Nor does it matter.) So trust me when I tell you that chicken are chicken.

Dumb and stupid.

This morning there was a woman in front of me at the gas station, waiting to use the pump. Smoking, with her door open and the car running. Finally she got up, went in, paid for her gas and came back with a Mountain Dew. Turned off the car, at last, and put $4 worth of gas in it.

Anyhow. Out at the farm one of the lights over the juveniles was out, and I tried to replace it. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Halfway in their end of the big chicken coop, when one of the little hens jumped over my leg and fluttered to the ground. Flailed, actually.

This is a problem.

I know how to catch a cat. In fact, if these were cats, we'd be friends by now and it wouldn't have happened. I have a fair idea how to catch a dog. But I've never picked up a chicken, much less caught one on the fly. Er...scurry, for it made straight for the dirt beneath the henhouse.

Noises are being made above it, clucking disapproval, I imagine. Hope. Lessons being learned, perhaps. (No, Grant, these are chickens. They learn nothing.)

This is all a problem, and I am darn lucky that the farm dog is more interested in the city garbage I dumped on the compost heap than in fresh meat on unsure feet. She's a c-minus dog anyhow, and sweet, and hasn't yet connected live chicken with feathers to the bones she gnaws. (And we know you're not supposed to feed dogs chicken; she's a farm dog, get over it.) But I have to keep one eye open for Annie the dog, just in case.

I call my wife to ask how to catch a chicken, but fortunately her phone's not working.

And then it flutters to the air and I make a grab that almost works, but it is immeasurably smaller than I imagine it to be it is when I get my hands on it, and so I let go quickly, afraid to crush the poor bird, which is nothing more than feathers yet, not one of the ten-pound monsters still languishing in our freezer.

So we chase each other around the barn for another couple minutes until it gets tired and even more stupid and traps itself in a corner and I pick it up. If it were a smarter animal, I'd assume it took pity on me. But it's not smart, or I'd not have caught it. Sort of. It's a tiny thing, under all those feathers, and clearly scared. Thankfully not scared shitless.

Back into the coop, and none too politely.

These are the things I now do to feed my family!

By which point, in any event, the hens are in fine feather. They have left us four eggs, which is nice, except they won't lay in the box where they're supposed to, they lay in the far corner of the coop, which means I have to crawl mostly inside the thing if I want breakfast. This is not a clean business. Chickens are not clean, and the bottom of their coop hasn't been cleaned since Dan left. (Happily I have not been trained in this chore yet.) Leaving my behind exposed, but, fortunately, they're chicken and don't take to pecking.

Probably I should have fussed with the lightbulb more, but I'm not going back without backup.

None of which explains the bird I saw on the way home, down the road where goats used to graze. It was songbird-sized, and the color of a newly minted Mary Kay Cadillac. I do not make these things up, nor have I an explanation, though mamaw posited the possibility of an albino cardinal, and then we both laughed.

The Jamz' record outlasted the trip there and back again, but they ain't no damn chickens, that's for sure. They can play. They can sing. And they might grow into something; they might not. It's hard to tell with kids. But they seem to have an instinct for the thing, and to take a joy in playing it. And it's nice to hear somebody living (and scheduled to be living through the next decade) playing the blues.

All of which reminds me that one of the bands Jimmy Reed may or may not have influenced in England was called Chicken Shack, and that once upon a long time ago my friend Cheeseman played their version of Tim Hardin's "If I Were A Carpenter" for me, and it will help to remember that Christine Perfect McVie was singing. Never have found that record. Nor have I figured out why the Legendary Christine Perfect Album (McVie's solo outing between Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac) wasn't offered in the glorious reissue frenzy of the last decade.