Music Write-Ups
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The Charm of 5:30
By David Berman
It’s too nice a day to read a novel set in England.
We’re within inches of the perfect distance from the sun,
the sky is blueberries and cream,
and the wind is as warm as air from a tire.
Even the headstones in the graveyard
seem to stand up and say “Hello! My name is…”
It’s enough to be sitting here on my porch,
thinking about Kermit Roosevelt,
following the course of an ant,
or walking out into the yard with a cordless phone
to find out she is going to be there tonight
On a day like today, what looks like bad news in the distance
turns out to be something on my contact, carports and white
courtesy phones are spontaneously reappreciated
and random “okay”s ring through the backyards
This morning I discovered the red tints in cola
when I held a glass of it up to the light
and found an expensive flashlight in the pocket of a winter coat
I was packing away for summer
It all reminds me of that moment when you take off your sunglasses
after a long drive and realize it’s earlier
and lighter out than you had accounted for.
You know what I’m talking about,
and that’s the kind of fellowship that’s taking place in town, out in
the public places. You won’t overhear anyone using the works
“dramaturgy” or “state inspection” today. We’re too busy getting along.
It occurs to me that the laws are in the region and the regions are
in the laws, and it feels good to say this, something that I’m almost
sure is true, outside under the sun.
Then to say it again, around friends, in the resonant voice of a
nineteenth-century senator, just for a lark.
There’s a shy looking fellow on the courthouse steps, holding up a
placard that says, “But, I kinda liked Reagan.” His head turns slowly
as a beautiful girl walks by, holding a refrigerated bottle up against
her flushed cheek.
She smiles at me and I allow myself to imagine her walking into
town to buy lotion at a brick pharmacy.
When she gets home she’ll apply it with great lingereing care before
moving into her parlor to play 78 record and drink gin-and-tonics
beside her homemade alter to James Madison.
In a town of this size, it’s certainly possible that I’ll be invited over
one night.
In fact I’ll be you something.
Somewhere in the future I am remembering today. I’ll bet you
I’m remembering how I walked into the park at five thirty,
my favorite time of day, and how I found two cold pitchers
of just poured beer, sitting there on the bench.
I am remembering how my friend Chip showed up
with a catcher’s mask hanging from his belt and how I said
Great to see you, sit down, have a beer, how are you,
and how he turned to me with the sun reflecting off his contacts
and said, wonderful, how are you.
This is from David Berman’s book of poetry, Actual Air, which is damn good. David Berman is also the lead singer of the Silver Jews. American Water is a great summer album.
-Casey Mills
It’s really weird how bands develop identities. Like, who the hell is Cracker? What are they? Alt-country? Pop? Adult-oriented rock? Bad? Awesome? Ridiculous? A Serious Band that People Think About?
I always felt that, for whatever reason, Cracker was kind of shit on. No respect. Known by frat guys for ‘Euro-trash Girl,’ known by MTV watchers for Sandra Bernhardt boxing in the ‘Low’ video, known by cool kids for their pretty uncool succession of radio hits in the nineties - ‘I Hate My Generation’ and ‘Nothing to Believe In,’ mostly. They were always kind of…just…lame.
David Lowery didn’t help. A lead singer that is both ugly/dorky and arrogant/a dick doesn’t work with the media. They’ll let you be one or the other, maybe - but not both.
Lowery has a special place in my heart, though, in part because he’s the guy who started Camper Van Beethoven. Lowery, like me, went to UC Santa Cruz, and it was there that he started one of the more interesting and bizarre bands of the 80s. Songs about Lassie flying to the moon and skinheads bowling, styles that ranged from Eastern European folk to Grateful Dead jams to SoCal punk to ska, often in the same song. Great stuff.
When I lived in Santa Cruz, towards the end of my time there, Cracker played a show at the Catalyst – a great, great venue if you ever get the chance. And there was this mini-Camper reunion show as an encore, with some of the guys from the band that still lived there. I ran into Camper’s old bassist, Victor Krummenacher, in a liquor store afterwards. It was my first run-in with a musician I respected since I shook Ian MacKaye’s hand as a freshman in high school. I was similarly dorky with Krummenacher, though at least this time when I shook his hand lamely and said something along the lines of, “You guys rule,” my face wasn’t covered in acne.
In any event, Cracker was quite different than Camper, more cynical, more serious, more refined, more pop, more focused. There were some diehard Camper fans in Santa Cruz, people who would, mostly out of respect for Camper but with a bit of distain for their local music scene, call them the best band to every come out of the town. And they immediately dubbed Cracker sellout crap.
But I’ll be damned if Cracker didn’t write some absolutely gorgeous songs, many off the album ‘Golden Age,’ on which this song is the title track. My favorite is probably ‘Big Dipper,’ which is all about Lowery’s Santa Cruz days. A couple lyrics from that song still make me miss the place, even though I never liked it much. They are ‘cigarettes and carrot juice,’ which perfectly encapsulates the people of that area of California. And ‘from the top you can see San Jose, though I know it’s not that pleasant,’ a dead-on depiction of the view from the top of the roller coaster on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.
The song ‘Golden Age,’ though, is to me the best representation of just how good Cracker was, and how strange it seems to me that when I mention them to other people, they either don’t recognize the name or kind of sneer.
The song always makes me think of summer in my old hometown of Millville, California. ‘The flaxen light off the dying wheat’ perfectly describes the fields of yellowed grass that stretch for miles all around my parents house. The idea of ‘your round whiskey mouth and your dandelion teeth’ sounds like every summer romance I’ve had since I started to drink.
But the sentiment that always gets me is the line “This is the Golden Age, it’s hard to imagine, with the way I feel today.” It had a double meaning for me – the first being that I grew up in the Clinton era. In high school, it seemed every other period in history I learned about, there was famine or death or war or scandal. All we had was Monika Lewinsky. I often felt like the world was a good place and getting better, that we were safe and there were no major problems on the horizon, that perhaps we were reaching a Golden Age, and I should count myself lucky for living in it. Yet there I was, a misanthropic high schooler upset and hating everything.
The second layer of meaning was the way depression can grab you and pull you under during the summer in a way that it can’t during the winter. You’re living in this Golden Age of sun and beauty, flaxen wheat and dandelions, but your insides are so out of step with the outside world, you feel like you’re in an alternate reality. And you feel guilty about it, or at least I did. Another line from ‘Big Dipper touched on this – ‘the terrible green green grass, and violent blooms of flowered dresses.’ Back in high school, these lyrics made me feel a whole hell of a lot better about being bummed out in the beautiful California sun
This particular summer so far is rad. I am truly digging it. I’m playing in bands again, Fourth of July party coming up, I get to see my brother and mom and dad in like 4 days, and we’ll be spending a week together on an island off the coast of Washington. Life is good, etc.
But when it gets bad, and it always does, even if only for a little while, I’ll take comfort in the Golden Age, and David Lowery, and Cracker.
-Casey Mills
Listen #1
Humph. Pretty catchy, I guess. Maybe I’ll check it out some time.
Listen #2
Ok, ok, ridiculously catchy. I’ll download the album. I guess.
Listens #3-10
Wow, great song, and not even the best one on the album. Shee-it, I should tell people about these guys. What the hell is that chorus, though? Send the Moor? What’s a Moor again? Do they live in Russia? Africa? Or maybe he’s saying Say No More? Who cares. Serious toe-tapping, head-bobbing. I think I’ll just believe it’s ‘Send the Moor’ and call it a day.
Listens #11-15
Ok, this is starting to piss me off. What the hell is he saying?
More importantly, what are all those eerie phrases that keep bubbling to the top of the song? The ones that make me feel vaguely uncomfortable? Like, ‘Where’s your mother?’ ‘When he put you in the car?’ ‘Spill his blood between my jaws?’
Listen #16
Man, this hangnail on my finger is really disgusting. Why do I pick at it so much? It’s all bloody. I can’t stop picking, though. Maybe I’ll suck on it. Man, it’s true what they say, blood really does taste like iron. Fun facts. Oh, great, boss just walked by and saw me sucking my thumb. Perfect. That movie ‘Thumbsucker’ was pretty good. That was surprising. I was thoroughly prepared to hate it – I mean, the guy from R.E.M doing that thing? C’mon. But then it was good.
Oh yeah, I’m listening to music right now. This is a good song, too. Ach, shit, song’s over.
Listen #17
Ok, I’m looking up the lyrics. This has gotten ridiculous. Hmmm, Cynda Moore? That’s what he was saying the whole time? How would I have ever guessed that? I mean, I know I’m bad a figuring out song lyrics, but Cynda Moore? Come to think of it, I really do have a bad track record with lyrics. The worst was probably thinking Salt n’ Pepa’s ‘Push It’ was ‘Pussy’. ‘oooh, ah pussy…pussy real good! Dunh, da-dunh dunh dunh……dah-dun dun dun dun.’
What about the rest of these lyrics? Jesus, there’s a lot here. Seems like he’s talking about a woman he loved, at least had the hots for, or maybe it’s his sister or friend, but in any event, some dude completely fucked up her life, and he hates him for it. Ok.
Listen #18
So what happens at the beginning of this song? What happens April 12th? It sounds like bad guy steals away the girl when she was young, takes her somewhere private, and does something awful to her, probably sexual. And it closes her off the world, fucks her up, shuts her down. And I think it may have been her father.
Listen #19
All she really wants to do is forget it, forget it ever happened, forget the guy who did it, move on, start over. And the dude, the protagonist, he can’t help it – he wants revenge. He wants to murder the guy. He wants to rip out his throat, feel his blood between his jaws. He wants to find her dad, wherever he started anew, and tell everyone what a shitbag he is. He wants to either destroy his life or erase it completely, even though he knows both are impossible. And he wants to do it because he loves this girl.
Listen #19.5
This song is a supreme bummer and I am totally skipping it, because up till now my iPod shuffle has been delivering me nothing but glorious happy tunes, and because it is sunny out and I am feeling, like, hella good n’ shit. I am skipping this song. But now I feel somehow guilty. What the fuck is that?
OMG, ‘Remix to Ignition’ – perfect!!!
Listen #20
The protagonist feels completely helpless. ‘I know that I’m not useful anyhow.’ He wants to help her, but what can he do? He wants revenge, but it’s impossible. He’s full of anger, but there’s no outlet. And he wants to be close to her, but he can’t seem to get there.
Listen #21
So he tries to convince her that she should seek revenge. That at the very least, she should say his name the way that he said hers, which is with contempt, as if she was beneath the baseline of respect every human being deserves. But he can’t convince her. She’s done with her dad, it’s over, it’s past. Let it go. And her saying this just blows the protagonist away. How can she not want revenge? And wouldn’t getting that revenge make her more open to other people, namely the protagonist?
Listen #22-27
I always wonder, when he ends with ‘let me through that door,’ if he means ‘let me convince you that you need to seek revenge on that fucker,’ or if it means ‘let me into your heart despite all the horrid shit that has happened to you.’ The former is far more selfish than the latter, but the song is so brutally honest, I kinda have to believe that it’s the more selfish motive that he’s referring to.
Listen #29
I just read Chris’ posts about the redwoods and ‘Dishwasher,’ and both were truly great. I’m inspired to write another song ‘o the day. I should totally write about this song.
-Casey Mills
When I was a kid, my mom used to make me and my brothers clean the house on the weekends. We’d each get a list of chores - usually about two or three hours worth of work, depending on how fast we felt like working that day - and get to it. The tasks ranged from cleaning the toilet to dusting the baseboards, and all of them completely and totally sucked.
Sounds horrible, right? However, my mom had this great trick for keeping us happy while we worked. She’d throw on a record, blast the shit out of it till it reverberated throughout the entire house, and then tell us to get started.
There were three records she would always play - Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A, Paul Simon’s Graceland and Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits. They’re all incredible records. When I rediscovered Bruce as an adult and slowly made my way through his catalog, it was bizarre to revisit Born in the U.S.A. and view it through adult eyes. As a kid, I used to love the title track. I remember lip-synching it in the mirror, getting way into it, totally pulling the macho vibe and making the veins in my neck stick out while I ’sang’ the lyrics. To kid-me, “Dancing in the Dark” was this happy song with an awesome synth part that provided a good soundtrack for washing the floor. I now consider both songs two of my favorites by the Boss, obviously for very different reasons than I did during my singing-into-a-broom days.
Even now, I consider Graceland one of the best albums of all time. I can put it on at any moment, and it subtly augments whatever mood I’m in, making everything seem a little sweeter or a bit sadder. Back when I was younger, though, I simply loved singing along to Ladysmith Black Mambazo - the ‘oh weem oh weh’ of “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”, the ridiculous and incredible backing to the lyrics, ‘I know what I know, I said what I said,’ and the haunting beauty of “Homeless”. I loved hearing strings of words like ‘the Mississippi Delta shining like a national guitar,’ ‘lasers in the jungle somewhere,’ ‘a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.’ I didn’t know what it meant at the time - maybe I still don’t - but the words were mysterious and a little magic back then.
For just unadulterated fun though, and probably the best soundtrack for cleaning, Billy Joel was it. “Only the Good Die Young,” “Movin’ Out,” “Still Rock n’ Roll to Me,” “Tell Her About It,” - I knew every word. But the best one of all, the one that would often lead us to reconvene in the living room from all our chores to take a quick break and sing along, was “Uptown Girl.”
Who in their right mind doesn’t love to try to mimic his crazy vocal inflections on ‘And when she’s walkin’ she’s lookin’, so fi-i-ine,’ then yell out in unison, ‘Whoa oh oh oh oh woah oh oh oh whoa oh oh oh oh!”? Not the Mills family.
Anyway, thanks Mom, for putting on those records, for loving good music, for sharing it with us, and for turning the dreary chore of pushing dust around on a Saturday morning into a ramshackle celebration.
-Casey Mills
Isn’t this a catchy song? Mega catchy. The little stutter step in the voice. Very pleasant to listen to. Not a ton going on, but extremely pleasant nonetheless.
Strange then that this song totally freaked me out. I found it randomly on some website, and thought, huh, that name sounds vaguely familiar, listened to a few times, finally pulled the trigger on my decision – yeah, this is good. But then I thought, shit, what if this is super dorky? I found it on a pretty dorky website. What if this is like the female version of John Mayer? What if cool people consider this as lame as, like, Norah Jones? Actually, Norah Jones does that great duet with Ryan Adams, ‘Oh John’, so bad example…SHIT!!! I don’t even know if I hate Norah Jones anymore?!!So then I tried to think back where I heard of Regina Spektor, and I couldn’t remember. Pitchfork? Then she’d be cool. But wait, can’t remember if that was the place …what if it was from my mom? Good lord, what if my mom told me to listen to Regina Spektor?
Then I felt very old. Like, why they hell don’t I know if Regina Spektor is cool or not? Shouldn’t some of my cool friends have told me about her if she was? Or at least told me she was dorky? Maybe me and my friends don’t talk as much about music anymore. Apparently my ear is no longer to the street, and I’ve lost the ability to tell what’s hip and what’s not.
Then I watched the video. First, I thought, ok, ok, pretty cool – Bjork-like dress – Bjork is cool, right? Listened to the lyrics closely – pretty typical, I guess. Could go either way. ‘I don’t let myself fall in love,’ etc.. No real hints there… Then, blammo, the video ends with a boy and a girl spreading colored chalk all over a black and white room to symbolize the joy their love has brought to a formally dreary world. Shit, buddy, we’re in trouble! We’re treading on Gloria Estefan, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston type shit here! Anyway, then I went back to work and stopped trying to figure it out. End of story.I still don’t know if Regina Spektor is cool or not. Maybe someone can tell me. Whether she is or not, it was a great lesson in how arbitrary the decision as to what is cool is. I mean, if she’s not cool, that’s lame, because it’s a damn good song. But if she is cool, how can they justify the colored chalk? Here I am, reasonably aware dude, and I couldn’t for the life of me decide. Maybe I’m too old to tell the difference anymore.
I know there’s massive brawls in the hip-hop world. West Coast versus East Coast, old school versus new school, Jay-Z versus Nas, etc. But in “Fist City”, Loretta Lynn serves up one of the best dis songs of all time.
Before I get all wacky and meta, I have to point out real quick how funny this song is to me. First, just the concept of Fist City. There’s a place you can go, and all that’s there is fists. Just fists, everywhere you look. Fist freakin’ City, man, what a horrible place!! Who would want to go there?
Fist City isn’t just a place- it’s also something you can eat. An entire meal, in fact. Imagine that - eating nothing but a bunch of fists. Bad idea!
If I was threatened with Fist City, I would do absolutely everything in my power to avoid going there or eating it. I think anyone who says they wouldn’t is a total liar - thus the power of Loretta’s threat. So on to the meta part…
It’s really weird how this song presents a point of view that is simultaneously more and less progressive than the present day.
More progressive: What woman would sing about beating the shit out of another woman today? Threaten to grab her ‘by the hair of the head’ and lift them off the ground? Loretta is so tough in this song, openly confrontational, willing to prove what a ‘real woman is’. I don’t see any modern female artists saying anything this brazenly aggressive, as they’d be labeled too masculine, violent, and kind of insane.
Less progressive: Loretta totally accepts the fact that her man is uber promiscuous, and puts no blame on him, as that’s just the way men are. They cat around with kitties - ’nuff said. Loretta accepts it as her lot that to stop her husband from cheating, she can’t force him to. Instead, she just needs to introduce all potential kitties to Fist City. This doesn’t seem like a great deal for any of the ladies involved.
In closing, “Fist City” is hilarious and provides a profound insight into modern gender dynamics. Actually, not really. But it does contain the line - ‘the man I love, when he picks up trash, he puts it in a garbage can.’ Dis patrol!! No way Jay-Z could top that.
-Casey Mills
Remember being a kid, and all those points in time lying out there in the future, that once you reached them you would finally, definitively be ‘grown-up’? Let’s see here - there was getting your own place, graduating college, your first real job, turning 30 (or whatever your pre-pubescent brain had cooked up as being ‘adult’), getting married, having kids, and a whole bunch of other benchmarks that seemed perfectly legitimate at the time.
Looking back on it now, it often seems kinda funny and ridiculous. ‘Ha ha, when I was 12 I thought I’d be totally grown up at age 25. But I’m 25 now, threw up at the company Christmas party last night, then hit on my boss, and have no friggin’ clue what I’m doing with my life. Crazy!’
But however ridiculous they sometimes seem, I think those milestones we set for ourselves as children stay with us our entire lives, serving as constant measuring sticks for whether or not we consider ourselves ’successful’. You can look at it as both a good and a bad thing - if you’re thirty and still rocking your parents basement playing Zelda all day, its probably time to listen to your childhood self and get it together. But more often that not, it just makes us feel guilty, as in, ‘Dude, it’s Sunday morning, I don’t absolutely love my job, I have no kids, and I’m wicked hungover. I gotta make some changes.’
I think one of the biggest ones for me was marriage, a journey I’m about to embark on. As a kid, I believed that would be the pinnacle of me having my shit together. I would be stable, great job, part of the ‘normal’ world, never do anything bad, etc. etc. But - you guessed it - that is totally not the case. Maybe it’s more the case than 10 years ago, but I’m certainly not the idealized ‘adult’ I imagined I’d be.
What I love about this song is how completely unapologetic the singer is about still being a far cry from perfect. ‘What else would you have me be?, he asks his lover, since being a ‘drunkard running wild in the streets’ is as essential to his being as having brown hair or green eyes. Rather than offering up a promise of redemption, pleading that he’ll change his ways and grow up if only she’ll take him back, he simply asks her to remember that he will always be the person she fell in love with- and that it’s a pretty damn flawed one. The messiness of it all is as much a part of their relationship as the attraction that draws them together, and to change would be to change something intrinsic to what they have.
I can’t say I take the whole song literally. I definitely couldn’t handle accepting that both people knock mad boots all over the place, then simply ask that she ‘don’t mention any girls names to me.’ But the song does a great job of answering that 12 year old voice inside of me that tells me that as I hit all these arbitrary milestones, I’ve got to be more and more perfect, more and more adult. It reminds me that I’ll always be a little rough around the edges, that I’ll never completely trade in the me that wandered the streets of San Francisco drunk and kicking over trash cans at 3 in the morning, that the 6th grader that created all those benchmarks is still with me, still thinking there’s going to be a magic point in time where everything changes, and slowly understanding that it’s probably never going to come - and that that’s a good thing.
One last thought: I love the line ‘make good use out of these drunken feet.’ For whatever reason, it just makes me so goddamned happy.
-Casey Mills
Good lord, I’m ready for summer. I think I’ve already whined about the nasty winter up here in Seattle on this very website, but for a more detailed rundown of my bitching, check this. A quick synopsis – I move here, storm of the year comes, then it snows, then storm of the century comes, then it snows again, then it’s frigid, and that brings us to, um…about now.
Some little hints of future bliss: it’s finally light outside both when I get to work and when I leave - this far north stuff makes for short winter days; as Mr. Earley so eloquently pointed out earlier, spring training recently began, though yes, the Mariners are going to suck; today I didn’t need to wear a scarf and beanie on my way to the bus stop; and there’s little tiny green leaves making their way out a lot of the trees. Sure, it’s great that spring is beginning, but for me, these are all just signs that summer’s not that far away.
I was spoiled in Redding. Yeah, it got up to 115 degrees sometimes, but when nightfall came, it dropped to about 85, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced since the kind of freedom I felt on those nights. Swimming, driving around, playing music, drinking, smoking, hanging out in empty parks, wandering around empty streets – every night felt like if you wanted to, it could go on forever, and there were a lot of them good enough to make you wish they would.
San Francisco is cold in the summer. It’s foggy. It’s damp. It never really actually comes out and acts like summer. Which, during the five years I lived there, always bummed me out a little. So I got excited when I heard from locals that Seattle summers are usually epic. They say the summers easily make up for the crappy winters – the days last forever, everyone gets out at night and parties, there’s a million great places to camp nearby, it actually gets pretty hot, and so on.
Gillian Welch’s ‘Look at Miss Ohio’ is a summer song through and through for me, and I’ve been listening to it constantly to get a little taste of what I hope is in store. There’s a couple reasons it reminds me of summer – the first is just the way it sounds. Laid back, dusty, like the soundtrack for a world colored like your parents photos from the 70s. It sounds like whiskey in mason jars, maybe some lukewarm Bud in the can, and breezing through life in a way winter won’t allow - the edges are worn off of everything.
The second is that little refrain – ‘I wanna do right, but not right now.’ Summer is when I have a few extra beers, stay out a few more hours late, eat a few more burgers, make a few friends at bar-b-ques, go on trips for no reason other than to go somewhere and see something, sit around and hang out and just enjoy things. It’s letting go a little, feeling a little more human, like you belong here, ‘runnin’ around with your rag top down’.
And I can’t freakin’ wait.
-Casey Mills
I don’t know when you all went through the transition from, ‘Man, Fleetwood Mac blows!’ to ‘Holy Christ, I can’t stop listening to Rumors, ‘Dreams’ makes me lose my mind!’ Maybe you haven’t even gone through that transition, and don’t really want to. But for me, it was 6 years ago, while living with a bunch of hipster wannabes right after I moved to San Francisco.
Our place was on 8th and Howard, and could only be described as a filthy, awful place. We had a druggie die while leaning up our front door one night. It used to be an office building, but they converted it into flats, complete with 64 frayed phone and fax lines running everywhere, crappy carpet (even in the kitchen!), and a couple rooms with zero ventilation or natural light, including my bedroom. Someone had painted the tub with paint that wasn’t waterproof, so we’d often pull big chunks of it off while showering in the morning.
Drastic times call for drastic measures, and we used to constantly drink and dance away the doldrums of the place. While this tactic eventually spelled disaster (see: ‘roommate cooking endless hamburgers in a frying pan coated with fat from the previous burger while drinking vodka morning, noon and night straight out of the bottle, several days in a row’ as a reference point), for a while it was damn fun, and Lindsey, Christine, Mick, and Stevie helped make it so.
We would invite people over for parties, get everyone pretty sauced, then put on dance mix tapes people had made and crowd into our living room for a dance session. When I first moved to the city, I went to some club in Chinatown where a seemingly cool DJ played ‘Say You Love Me.’ I couldn’t believe the audacity of it, as I considered them a cheesy 70s band on par with the Eagles. But I loved dancing to it, and pretty soon all kinds of Fleetwood Mac started making its way onto my dance mix tapes.
Good lord, so good. Breezy coked-out bliss with an undercurrent of severe dysfunction, a perfect encapsulation of my wasted SOMA flophouse. Nothing made me so completely forget my less than ideal surroundings than a great Fleetwood Mac song. I think there was something about the filth and desperation of our home that made us lose ourselves more completely in the music. We danced furiously and often and without worry.
My life changed immeasurably after moving out of that place, and almost entirely for the good. But I will always have some truly epic memories of living in my nasty ass San Francisco flat, drunk as fuck on two buck Chuck, and shaking it to ‘You Make Loving Fun’ (that’s all I wanna dooooo!) with a bunch of people I probably knew I’d never see again. Makes me think, I need to throw a dance party sometime soon…
-Casey Mills
Everyone told me I’d love Hank Williams. Countless books, websites, artist’s testimonials, etc. went on endlessly about his genius, his revolutionizing of popular music, his being the Godfather of Country. So I dutifully went out and bought his 40 Greatest Hits a few years ago, and listened to it now and then.
It sounded good enough, I supposed. It had a warm feel to it, as if I’d just come in after a long day’s work in the field, turning the knobs on my big wooden radio to get a better sound.
The songs were catchy enough, and as an historical document, I could see how he brought folk songs into the modern era by codifying the song structure – verse chorus, verse chorus for about three tightly structured minutes, the same basic parameters pop music still functions within.
And lyrically, he did seem at least partially responsible for making rebellion one of pop music’s foundations. His themes of drinking too much, staying out too late, sleeping around, and being heartbroken by beautiful women - usually as payment for his sinful ways - all showed up later in every iconic rebel rocker’s music I can think of.
But I honestly couldn’t get too worked up about it. Interesting, informative, mildly entertaining - something that belonged more in a library than on my turntable.
About a week ago, though, something clicked when I put it on. ‘Ramblin’ Man’ started playing, and it sounded like one of the most sincere, heartfelt, and painful songs I’d ever heard. The creepy, shaky guitar chords; the warbly voice, sounding like it came from the bottom of a river; and the words, that struck me as brutally honest and heartfelt. He recognizes who he is, accepts it, and warns his lover. But the sorrow and regret in his voice betrays whatever tough exterior he tries to create.
How did this guy get up in front of thousands of people and bear his heart like this? How did he display such honesty about himself in an era when his behavior was considered so reprehensible? And how was he able to turn a part of his life that he could have easily hidden away with shame into something like this?
If Hank Williams did nothing else for modern music, he made it possible for anyone with a weird voice, mediocre guitar skills, and something to say bear their soul to anyone who would listen, and have it be accepted – even loved. Which, to me, is an impossibly huge feat.
So I’d like to join countless books, websites, artist’s testimonials, etc. in recommending a little Hank Williams in your life.
-Casey Mills