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(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- You probably won't believe this, but the above lyrical snippet is actually the very first line of a song written in the 1970s by Mark McKinnon. Yes, that Mark McKinnon, the one who last week announced he was stepping down as chief advertising strategist to John McCain because, to use his words, "I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy."

The song is called "The Fever" and, despite its uncannily prophetic opening line, it's not by any means a political number. It's your basic yearning-for-love tune -- later in that first verse, he laments, "I guess what I really need is to fall in love again" -- but it's a pretty good one, especially as sung in 1977 by Julie Griffin (who would later become Julie Miller) on the one and only record by an Austin band of that time called Partners In Crime (which I wrote about last year in this blog entry).

"The Fever" is, far as I can tell, one of very few surviving relics from McKinnon's modest musical heyday. The only documentation I've found of McKinnon singing and playing his material is on a ten-disc Kerrville Folk Festival compilation covering the festival's first ten years, 1972-1981 (released in the late '90s on Silverwolf Records). McKinnon's song is called "Back On The Street" and is the third track on Disc 5, featuring performances from the 1976 festival. (McKinnon's name also appears in a mostly-complete online listing of finalists in Kerrville's New Folk songwriting competition; apparently he competed in 1975, along with the likes of Lucinda Williams and Tom Russell. Nobody seems to know who won that year.)

I believe I have that ten-disc Kerrville collection somewhere in a box in the closet (which I failed to locate in three or four hours of searching last night, but at least I finally got the bulk of the other CDs sorted and shelved in the process). There are, however, 30-second snippets (different ones) of the song on both Amazon and allmusic. The chorus goes, "When you've lost that old desire, and your life's just not complete / It's time to set your soul on fire again, and get back on the street."

McKinnon's modest musical aspirations ultimately met a dead-end as the '70s waned. He explained to Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, in an interview which aired on Austin PBS station KLRU in 2003, that "the one time in my life where I really exercised some wisdom was to recognize the limits of my musical ability. I figured on the trajectory that I was on, I'd end up at a Round Rock Holiday Inn when I was 45. And I shifted gears into politics and journalism."

The first stop was The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas; McKinnon was its editor in the 1980-81 school year. I missed him by three or four years -- I did some work at the Texan during my college days at UT in the mid-'80s -- but I do remember, as a high school journalism upstart in Austin, hearing about how McKinnon had (if I remember this correctly) spent a night or two in jail for refusing to reveal a source. (I've searched the web in vain for details of that incident; if anyone reading this may recall the particulars, feel free to add a comment toward that end.)

Over the following two decades, McKinnon made a gradual transition from Democratic media-and-politics expert -- including stints as press secretary for Lloyd Doggett's 1984 U.S. senate campaign (lost to Phil Gramm) and for mid-'80s Texas governor Mark White -- to independent consultant with the company Public Strategies and his own firm Maverick Media, and finally to George W. Bush's inner circle, first as media/advertising director for Bush's Texas governor re-election campaign in 1998, then in the same role for Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.

Given that he's crossed the Democrat/Republican divide before, his actions last week were perhaps not entirely surprising. While he's made a point to insist that he still plans to vote for McCain and to act as a sort of informal adviser, he apparently decided quite awhile back that if the election came down to McCain vs. Obama -- a rather unlikely scenario many months ago -- he'd step aside. McKinnon said in a June 2007 interview with Cox Newspapers' Washington bureau, "I don't think Barack Obama needs the mirror of politics to reflect who he is. I think he has a deep character and good judgment. I also think he's wrong on some fundamental issues. But I believe he is honest and independent and if he were elected, I think it would send a great message to the country and the world."

This seems, in a way, to echo something McKinnon said in a lengthy 2005 interview with PBS. It strikes me as a sort of mission statement about McKinnon's political beliefs:

"...one of the things that occurred to me, in my development as a political consultant, is how important character is to a candidate. ... Character I saw as really an important characteristic for officeholders, because I had seen Democrats who sort of met an ideological litmus test but failed miserably in the character department. So when the important decisions came, they weren't necessarily making those decisions based on the right reasons. And so I saw over time, working with people like former [Houston] Mayor Bob Lanier, former [Texas] Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, people who ... were the sorts of people you'd look at and you'd say: 'I may not agree with everything you say, but I know what you're saying; I know what you believe; I know where you're going, and I admire and respect you for that. You're predictable. You have a backbone. You believe in something.'"

The irony, of course, is that McKinnon applied that very litmus-test to the up-and-coming Texas governor George W. Bush, and decided that he wanted in. We've all seen how that has turned out. On the one hand, I'd expect that McKinnon would still staunchly defend Bush as someone who believes in what he's doing; on the other hand, it's almost impossible to dispute, at this point -- from either side of the aisle -- the ill effects of what Bush has done during his eight years in office.

That McKinnon subsequently ended up in the camp of McCain -- whom he'd helped attack and defeat in the 2000 battle for the Republican nomination -- is a telling and colorful side-story in its own right, as McKinnon related to Evan Smith in a March 2008 Texas Monthly interview:

"I only got to know him in 2004, when he was traveling with the president. We had our bonding moment at one of the general election debates. Because it was in Arizona, McCain hosted us. We were in the greenroom waiting for the debate to begin. I noticed a television in the corner. There was a news story on about Pat Tillman -- about how Jake Plummer, Tillman's former teammate [at Arizona State and with the Arizona Cardinals], had put a sticker printed with Tillman's number on his helmet and had gotten in a fight with the commissioner of the NFL, who said it was a violation of the uniform policy. And then it cut to video of McCain blasting the commissioner, saying that it was absurd that he hadn't allowed Plummer to honor his friend. So I went over to McCain, and I said, 'Senator, I just saw this story about Tillman, and I'm not surprised, as he was a constituent of yours, that you would be defending him like that.' And I said, 'By the way, I have very profound feelings myself about Pat Tillman. I thought it was an example of sacrifice and humility when he joined [the Army] and a tragedy when he was killed. It had such an impact on me that I wanted to remember him every day, so I got a tattoo of his [jersey] number, which was 40, on my arm.' So McCain said, 'Bullshit, let me see it.' I took off my coat and rolled up my sleeve to show it to him, and he grabbed me by the shoulders and kind of teared up and hugged me and said, 'I knew there was a reason I liked you.'"

And so, McKinnon's battle within himself rages on: Having initially played the aggressor against McCain because he believed in Bush, only to bond later with McCain and take up the Arizona senator's cause, he now removes himself from the fight because he believes Obama to be too much a man of character to attack.

Let's return, for a final word, to the previously-referenced 2003 Texas Monthly/KLRU interview. The original topic of conversation which led to McKinnon's self-critical assessment of his musical shortcomings was that, as a youth growing up in Colorado, McKinnon had been befriended and mentored by a fellow named Kris Kristofferson.

"I was a wild teenager and I loved music and wrote music, and Judy Collins was my baby-sitter growing up," McKinnon related. "And he [Kristofferson] heard our band and liked us, and tried to get us a record deal -- he came up to Colorado, and we spent a week or two in the studio. The record deal never worked out, but I got the bug badly, and I ran away from home, and went to Nashville and lived with Kristofferson, and ended up staying there for three or four years, and wrote music and hung out, and he put up with me. It was a great chapter in my life."

Kristofferson's left-leaning world-views are no secret; thus it's natural to wonder what the songwriter has made of McKinnon's long and complicated journey through the American political landscape. There was some back-and-forth about this two years ago in the letters section of The Austin Chronicle, in response to a feature that the alternative-weekly had run on Kristofferson in February 2006. First, a letter-writer asked why the interviewer (Andy Langer) hadn't asked Kristofferson about McKinnon, to which Chronicle editor Louis Black responded: "I spent several days traveling with Kris Kristofferson last year, and he made it very clear that this was a topic about which he had nothing to say."

And yet perhaps more revealing was another letter that followed two weeks later, shortly after Kristofferson and McKinnon had apparently encountered each other at the Austin Film Festival Awards show. Letter-writer Kelly Jackson observed that "Kristofferson and McKinnon were seen at the Austin Film Festival Awards hamming it up on the red carpet, including a moment when Kristofferson grabbed McKinnon, put his arm around him, and turned to the cameras laughing, 'Red state and blue state!'"

Just as McKinnon wrote, many decades ago, that "black on white was the news today," so did Kristofferson write, many decades ago, a lyric that nails Mark McKinnon to the core:

"He's a walking contradiction."

It's from "The Pilgrim (Chapter 33)", which Kristofferson once introduced as being "a song I started out writing about Dennis Hopper, and ended up writing about Johnny Cash...and Chris Gantry...and Ramblin' Jack Elliott...Bobby Neuwirth...Freddy Neil...David Blue...Eric Andersen...Paul Siebel." Or perhaps various other names, depending on who came to mind at any given time he may have sung it from a stage.

Dunno if he's ever mentioned Mark McKinnon in that recitation. But it sure seems like it fits. Especially this verse:

"And he keeps right on a-changin'
For the better or the worse
Searching for a shrine he's never found
Never knowing if believing is a blessing or a curse
Or if the going up was worth the coming down."

Posted by peter on May 27, 2008 11:01 AM | Permalink