The Soundcheck & the Fury

Stomp that thing (More songs about this and that)

2012-01-27T07:21:00.000-06:00

Bring around the bottle stopper
let's bottle some beer
The town done got
too dry around here
for me to stomp that thing

-- "Stomp That Thing," Frank Stokes

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Rip This Joint," Rolling Stones
2. "Stomp That Thing," Frank Stokes
3. "Damn This Town," John Hiatt
4. "Tappin' That Thing," Jas. Mathus
5. "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)," Talking Heads
6. "You Can't Get That Stuff No More," Tampa Red
7. "This Wheel's on Fire," The Band
8. "Ain't That a Shame," Fats Domino
9. "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?" Chuck Prophet
10. "He's Funny That Way," Billie Holiday
11. "This Fucking Job," Drive-By Truckers
12. "That's How I Got to Memphis," Sid Selvidge
13. "Grab This Thing," Mar-Keys

Royal City last night

2012-01-25T08:23:00.000-06:00

I became a thin blue flame
Polished on a mountain range
And over hills and fields I flew
Wrapped up in a royal blue

I flew over Royal City last night
A bullfighter on the horns of a new moon’s light
Caesar’s ghost, I saw the war-time tides
The prince of Denmark’s father still and quiet

And the whole world was looking to get drowned
Trees were a fist shaking themselves at the clouds
I looked over curtains and it was then that I knew
Only a full house gonna make it through

-- "Thin Blue Flame," Josh Ritter

The ghost of ’lectricity

2012-01-24T08:48:00.000-06:00

The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face

-- "Visions Of Johanna," Bob Dylan

Dead man's guitar (Murder ballads and dark turns: More songs about Stack A Lee and Delia)

2012-01-20T07:30:00.000-06:00

The Memphis newspaper for that day of ’53 said an itinerant musician returned home from the road to catch and shoot and kill his wife and her lover, himself an itinerant musician named Malcolm Gaunt, aged thirty-eight, hometown unknown.
It was reported that Frankie Walls shot them dead and then walked out on the porch to await the law. He played the dead man’s guitar while he waited. He played some country weepers and then he played a bluegrass tune so fast his fingers took to flying. He was playing a mean Memphis blues called “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” when the police arrived. His playing was full now of mad flourishes and thudding depths and rippling asides. The lead officer, who played a little, once upon another lifetime, let Frankie finish the song, and then took custody of the guitar.

“A Cassandra Special Rider,” the officer said, nodding approval.

“Yeah,” said Frankie in his smoky, low voice. “With a woman like that I don’t know what he needed with mine.”

-- from "The Long Gone Daddies"

Hawlin Alley on a dark and drizzly night,
Billy Lyons and Stack-A-Lee had one terrible fight.
All about that John B. Stetson hat

-- Bob Dylan's version of "Stack A Lee"

... the song says that a man's hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it's a matter of taste. they say "let's sleep on it" but theyre already living in the sanitarium. No Rights Without Duty is the name of the game & fame is a trick. playing for time is only horsing around. Stack's in a cell, no wall phone. he is not some egotistical degraded existentialist dionysian idiot, neither does he represent any alternative lifestyle scam (give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist & you'll see the Authentic alternative lifestyle, the Agrarian one) Billy didn't have an insurance plan, didn't get airsick yet his ghost is more real & genuine than all the dead souls on the boob tube -- a monumental epic of blunder & misunderstanding. a romance tale without the cupidity.

-- Bob Dylan on "Stack A Lee," from the liner notes to "World Gone Wrong"

They buried little Delia in the churchyard deep
Louis Collins at her head, Stackalee at her feet
The angels laid them away

-- Josh Ritter, "Folk Bloodbath"

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "Love Henry" and "Stack A Lee," Bob Dylan
3. "Frankie and Johnnie," Jimmie Rodgers
4. "Folk Bloodbath," Josh Ritter
5. "Louis Collins," Mississippi John Hurt
6. "Delia's Gone," Johnny Cash
7. "God Rode Through Clarksdale," Rob Jungklas
8. "A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun," Tom Waits
9. "Stack Shot Billy," Black Keys
10. "Devil Got My Woman," Skip James
11. "I Want Love and Affection (Not the House of Corrections)," Nathan Mayer
12-13. "Dark Turn of Mind" and "The Way the Whole Thing Ends," Gillian Welch

The good book

2012-01-17T08:10:00.001-06:00

Ira and I went to play the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, with a couple of hours off between the first and second show, so we were fixing to walk across the street to this little old restaurant they had across from the Shreveport Memorial Auditorium. We stepped off the curb, and I saw a man lying by the sidewalk, dead drunk, puke running about five feet from his head down to the gutter.

"Who in the shit is that?" I asked Ira.

"That's Hank Williams," Ira said, scorn in his voice.

And it was. He had just got so drunk he couldn't make it from the Hayride over to the restaurant. It was tragic to see. A man with ability, talent, and future like the one he had, to see him waste it on the bottle.

I believe writers are born writers of music. I don't believe anyone can teach you how to write a song. If you weren't born to write, you'll never write anything worth passing along. And if you ask me, Hank was one of the two greatest songwriters of our time. And the other, Ira, he became a real drinker, too.

-- from "Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers"

I can watch old silent-movie clips of my latest fave Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill Jr.," or of the great Bessie Smith singing a barroom version of "St. Louis Blues," on my iPhone. I have 11,355 songs on my iPod, including 322 just by Bob Dylan. My wife, who devours books like no one I've ever known, hasn't stuck her head inside one since she got the Kindle.

And yet ... if we could go back to the way it was -- to the days when print was king, when the physical product was the thing -- I'd drive the time machine and spring for the gas. But there's no going back, I suppose. Some day soon, my mind will tell a screen the size of our living room wall that we want to watch "Repo Man" or "Local Hero," or something with Bogie, and the movie will start playing with us still sitting on our rumps. Maybe technology will be such that some robot thing will go get us fresh beers, pop the tops and everything. Goodness knows the greyhounds are not so inclined. So that would be sweet, sure -- the beer-fetching technology, I mean -- but otherwise, well, I do so very much miss the olden days. It seems like it was just -- well, it was, in a sense -- a few minutes ago...

But small victories, boys. Small victories. Yesterday in the book store (yes, we still have one or two in Memphis) I bought "Satan is Real," in which pretty much the greatest album cover ever (God, I miss album covers) has become pretty much the greatest book cover ever. It's a beautiful thing to have and to hold, to save and savor, this book -- and that's even before I start reading it. I can't wait. Print is real.

Kissing in the valley, thieving in the alley (More songs about love, rum, desolation and the blues)

2012-01-13T07:43:00.000-06:00

I’m gonna have to go to college
’Cause you are the book of knowledge
Rita May

-- "Rita May," Jerry Lee Lewis singing Dylan

You got all the love
honey, baby, I can stand

-- "Buckets of Rain," Vic Chesnutt singing Dylan

There’s kissing in the valley
Thieving in the alley

-- "Seven Days," Ron Wood singing Dylan

The silver saxophones say I should refuse you

-- "I Want You," Dylan singing Dylan

1. "Rita May," Jerry Lee Lewis
2. "Just Like a Woman," Bob Dylan
3. "Buckets of Rain," Vic Chesnutt
4. "Joey," Bob Dylan
5. "Oh, Sister," Andrew Bird and Nora O'Connor
6. "I Want You," Bob Dylan
7. "Seven Days," Ron Wood
8. "She Belongs to Me," Bob Dylan
9. "Girl From the North Country," Conor Overst, M. Ward & Jim James
10. "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," Bob Dylan
11. "Like a Rolling Stone," Drive-By Truckers
12. "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," Bob Dylan
13. "One More Cup of Coffee," The White Stripes
14. "Desolation Row," Bob Dylan
15. "Billy," Gillian Welch
16. "4th Time Around," Bob Dylan

Going back to Coney Island (Doo doo doo doo)

2012-01-12T08:02:00.001-06:00

Innocent and running wild
Cool a fool and juvenile
Don't ever change your style
So alive with your Coney Island smile

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo

-- "The Contortionist," Garland Jeffreys

Glory of love, glory of love
Glory of love, now, glory of love, now
Glory of love, now, now, now, glory of love
Glory of love, give it to me now, glory of love see you through
Oh, my Coney Island baby, now
(I’m a Coney Island baby, now)

-- "Coney Island Baby," Lou Reed

Now, talking about people having a devil of a time
Eating up chicken and drinking wine
I'm on my way
I'm going back to Coney Isle

-- "Coney Isle," Roscoe Holcolmb

Hot women singers (with drums and bee swarms)

2012-01-10T07:56:00.000-06:00

Tuesday morning in Memphis. Coffee and writing and "Hot Women -- Women Singers from the Torrid Regions of the World" in my ears. It's a compilation, compiled by the great R. Crumb from old 78s. It's got Cajun and Cuban, French Carribean and Mexican, African and Greek. It's got art and liner notes by the great R. Crumb, who begins,

Let us now sing the praises of the women singers of old, from the hot and passionate Southern countries! Open up your ears and you shall have a powerful listening experience!

My favorite may be Aicha Relizania singing "Khraifi," accompanied by drums and a swarm of bees. (OK, flutes that sounds like bees.) It's a hot number out of Algeria, and was recorded there or in Paris, in September 1938. As with all these songs, I have no idea what the hell these hot women are singing about. Neither does the great R. Crumb, who says in the liners,

I only know what I like!

Hear, hear!

Like you never seen (Happy Birthday, Elvis)

2012-01-08T11:44:00.000-06:00

Just a country boy, he combed his hair
And put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air
And he shook it like a chorus girl
And he shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like you never seen
Like you never seen
Never seen

-- "Elvis Presley Blues," Gillian Welch

More songs about dusty roads and special riders

2012-01-06T07:25:00.000-06:00

I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road
If the Bible is right, the world will explode

-- Bob Dylan, "Things Have Changed"

Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road

-- Billie Holiday, "One More for My Baby (And One More for the Road)"

Cotton fields stretching miles and miles
Hank's voice on the radio

-- Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road"

This place ain’t doing me any good
I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood

-- Bob Dylan, "Things Have Changed"

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "Going Down the Road" and "Bad Reputation," Woody Guthrie
3-4. "Down the Dirt Road Blues" and "A Spoonful Blues," Charley Patton
5-6. "On the Road Again" and "Things Have Changed," Bob Dylan
7-8. "The Road" and "Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight," Emmylou Harris
9-10. "Six Days on the Road" and "Hot Burrito, No. 1," Flying Burrito Brothers
11-12. "101 is a Hard Road to Travel" and "Special Rider Blues," John Fahey
13-14. "One More for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" and "What a Little Moonlight Can Do," Billie Holiday
15-16. "Down By the Side of the Road" and "Mexican Home," John Prine
17-18. "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" and "Joy," Lucinda Williams
19-20. "Down the Road a Piece" and "A Damn Good Country Song," Jerry Lee Lewis

Memphis was a song on the radio and they wanted some (Happy Birthday, Sam Phillips)

2012-01-05T07:30:00.000-06:00

Sam Phillips (Jan. 5, 1923-July 30, 2003)

Mr. Phillips found old Johnny Cash and he was high
High before he ever took those pills and he's still too proud to die
Mr. Phillips never said anything behind nobody's back
Like "Dammit Elvis, don't he know, he ain't no Johnny Cash"

If Mr. Phillips was the only man that Jerry Lee still would call sir
Then I guess Mr. Phillips did all of Y'all about as good as you deserve
He did just what he said he was gonna do and the money came in sacks
New contracts and Carl Perkins' Cadillac

-- "Carl Perkins' Cadillac," Drive-By Truckers

Memphis was a song on the radio and they wanted some. They came to Sun Records to see Mr. Sam Phillips, and their wide eyes met his wild ones, their pleas fell on his cocked ear. They were young and dirt-poor and were not averse to a better life through song. It beat chopping cotton or driving a truck or whatever else they’d done to turn their dimes to dollars.

So out of Arkansas came Johnny Cash, sounding like doom looked. He had a voice of deep, swaggering sadness and wanted to sing gospel, but it was train tracks and prison bars instead. Jerry Lee Lewis, all piss and high test, strode up from Louisiana with a piano on his back, keys aflame just to show all those guitar players it didn’t have to be wood to burn. There were others from elsewhere ...

-- from "The Long Gone Daddies"

The itch to wander

2012-01-03T14:15:00.000-06:00

I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you

-- "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch

Now it was first light, and Ivy awoke. She took a can of black paint outside to where her old, white Caddy convertible was parked. She painted it from bumper to bumper. She stepped back, looked at what she’d done. She called it good. She broke for coffee and a few songs on the boom box, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues,” and “Call Me a Dog When I’m Gone.” Leaving songs. She sat out on the porch and tried not to think too awfully hard about what she was to do. She gave herself over to instinct, to impulse.

She felt the itch to wander. She gave it a scratch through the hole in the knee of her jeans.

She went back inside the shack for a can of white paint and out she came with a dripping brush and painted highway stripes up the hood and down the trunk of the old but newly black Cadillac convertible.

She stepped back again to look. She smiled and nodded. She thought of what her mama liked to say – the one thing her mama used to say that she said, still.

“I’ll be ready, Ivy Coldwater, if I never get to go.”

-- from a work in progress

Hope I live before I get old

2012-01-02T08:25:00.000-06:00

Don't act like you're above me
just look at your shoes

-- "Lip Service," Elvis Costello

Coolwalkingsmoothtalkingstraightsmokingfirestoking
Coolwalkingsmoothtalking, yeah

-- "Misunderstood," Pete Townshend

Well, I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk

-- "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen

Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die

-- "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," Neil Young

This is the story
of the power chord
and the glory

-- "The Soundcheck & the Fury," The Long Gone Daddies

(Happy) New Year's Day, 2012

2012-01-01T16:14:00.000-06:00

What will sustain us through the winter?
Where did last year's lessons go?
Walk me out into the rain and snow
I dream a highway back to you

-- "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch

Ode to New Year's Eve (More songs about drinking and cussing)

2011-12-31T17:30:00.000-06:00

The stars looked like diamonds
Then came the sirens
And everyone started to cuss

-- "New Year's Eve," Tom Waits

New Year's Eve afternoon. Coffee and blogging and putting together a playlist for tonight's revelry -- everything from "Sweet to Mama" to the "Georgia Crawl." Lots of old blues and string-band numbers. Some good ruckus. Jug bands and jazz kings, R&B shouters. ... And I've got the Black Keys and R.L. Burnside, Old Crow Medicine Show and The Clash. I've got Gillian Welch singing Radiohead and Gillian Welch singing Dylan and Gillian Welch singing Gillian Welch -- "The Way the Whole Thing Ends," in a nod, you know, to the passing year. I've got Radiohead singing Radiohead, and Dylan singing whatever the hell he wants. ... And Tom Waits singing about, of all things, New Year's Eve. I do love a beautiful lament. And some Pogues, too, "Broad Majestic Shannon" and "Turkish Song of the Damned." And Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks." Van singing, "If I ventured in the slipstream / Between the viaducts of your dream ... " And some soul, must have soul: Otis singing "Champagne & Wine," just for starters. A mess of electrified blues: Albert King walking the back streets and crying, B.B. King singing, "Nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving, too." ... And I've got all of side 2 of Neil Young's "Hawks & Doves," my favorite second side of any album, ever; Neil singing, "Got rock and roll, got country music playin' / If you hate us, you just don't know what you're sayin'." ... Maybe some Kinks. Love the Kinks. No Beatles, but some solo George and John and maybe even one by Paul. Love that "Monkberry Moon Delight." Bottle that shit, boys. ... Oh, let's see, and Michelle Shocked singing "Anchorage," the only song that can make me cry. And then, to bring me back up, maybe some Hank Williams -- ah, Hank, who died on this night, or the next morning, one, in 1952/53. God bless you, Hank. Come back and sing us a good one. Make it one of those happy songs with the sad-sack titles, "Long Gone Lonesome Blues" or "Moanin' the Blues."

Wrong songs, left turns (Odes to being good, or good enough)

2011-12-30T07:58:00.000-06:00

Rocks in my pocket and a devil on my back.
Rocks in my pockets and a devil on my back.
You won’t even come across the tracks.

-- "Good Til Now," Gillian Welch

I feel so good I'm going to break somebody's heart tonight
I feel so good I'm going to take someone apart tonight

-- "I Feel So Good," Richard Thompson

I've been a bad boy
I sung a wrong song
I took a left turn
I stayed too long

-- "Bad Boy," John Prine

No good, you say
Well, that’s good enough for me

-- "Bad As Me," Tom Waits

A Friday-night playlist (partial):

1. "Good Til Now," Gillian Welch
2. "Bad As Me," Tom Waits.
3. "You've Been a Good Ole Wagon," Bessie Smith.
4. "Bad Reputation," Woody Guthrie.
5. "Feelin' Good," Little Junior Parker.
6. "Feelin' Bad," Little Junior Parker.
7. "Good Man," Josh Ritter.
8. "Mr. Bad Example," Warren Zevon.
9. "Life is Good Blues," Laura Veirs.
10. "Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School," Warren Zevon.
11. "I Feel So Good," Richard Thompson
12. "Bad Boy," John Prine.
13. "A Good Time," John Prine.

And I followed you, Big River, when you called

2011-12-28T08:30:00.000-06:00

They all got out of here any way they could
The cold rain can give you the shivers
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee
All the rest of them rebel rivers

-- "Floater (Too Much to Ask)," Bob Dylan

Now, I taught the weeping willow how to cry
And I showed the clouds how to cover up a clear blue sky
And the tears that I cried for that woman are gonna flood you, Big River
Then I'm gonna sit right here until I die

I met her accidentally in St.Paul, Minnesota
And it tore me up every time I heard her drawl, southern drawl
Then I heard my dream was back downstream, cavorting in Davenport
And I followed you, Big River, when you called

-- "Big River," Johnny Cash

Wednesday morning. Coffee and writing and river songs -- Dylan's "Floater" and "High Water," Johnny Cash's "Big River." I love how Johnny met her "accidentally," and how he rhymes "cavorting" with "Davenport."

The picture is from the Mississippi River Greenbelt Park, in Memphis, on a recent Saturday afternoon. The river was high and seemed in a bit of a mood. I love the big river -- and I love the Ohio, the river where I grew up; hell, I love all of them rebel rivers -- but I give it wide berth. I don't mess with the big river, just keep my distance, take my pictures, type my words. My offerings to the thing, I reckon.

A strong brown god – some old blues man called it that. Memphis Slim or Helena Pete or St. Louis Tom, I don't recall.

Charley Patton brought the rain

2011-12-27T08:55:00.000-06:00

He turned to go inside and she turned to watch the rain. It was pure noisy spite now. There was no reasoning with it; it would not respond to batons or wands. It didn’t fall from the sky but rather seemed to be flung from it. And she sang, for the first time in ages. She sang snatches of Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere.” She sang, “I was going to the hill country, but they got me barred.” And she sang Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks.” She sang, “Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good.”

From inside the house he heard a sound like music, singing. He turned and listened but then went back to his gathering. He figured it to be the wind.

-- from my short story, "I Feel Like Going Home"

Merry Christmas Eve from the cross roads

2011-12-24T07:30:00.000-06:00

My favorite Christmas song is the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," which begins, "It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank ... " Later, Shane McGowan sings, "I could have been someone," and Kirsty MacColl, in pretty much my favorite comeback ever, sings, "Well, so could anyone."

And I like the bit in "Hell Hound on My Trail" when Robert Johnson sings,

If today was Christmas Eve
If today was Christmas Eve
and tomorrow was Christmas Day

If today was Christmas Eve
and tomorrow was Christmas Day
Aw, wouldn't we have a time, baby?

But just to show you I can string some lights in the darkness, I love to hear Otis Redding sing "Merry Christmas, Baby." Yeah, love to hear him sing, "I feel mighty fine, y'all. I got music on my radio." And I love to hear Emmylou Harris sing "Light of the Stable." I love John Fahey's "Christmas Guitar" and Bruce Cockburn's "Christmas." There's a great Christmas record by the Chieftains and one by the Clancy Brothers, and I've got a record called "Acoustic Christmas" with Willie Nile singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" like he's a 13-year-old street punk in a choir robe -- it's hilarious, really. ... And I'm still coming to terms, you know, with Dylan's "Christmas in the Heart," but sure, why not. Sing it, Bob. And Merry Christmas Eve, y'all.

Merry Christmas (There will be sermons and dancing)

2011-12-23T07:30:00.000-06:00

Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

-- "Fairytale of New York," The Pogues

A Christmas playlist (with sermons and dancing) ...

1. "Gettin' Ready for Christmas," Rev. J.M. Gates (sermon).
2. "Getting Ready for Christmas," Paul Simon.
3. "Christmas in Prison," John Prine.
4. "It's Christmas Time," The Qualities.
5. "At the Christmas Ball," Bessie Smith.
6. "Santa Claus," Sonny Boy Williamson.
7-8. "The Christmas Blues" and "Silver Bells," Bob Dylan.
9. "I Saw Three Ships," Bruce Cockburn.
10. "Christmas Time's A-Coming," Emmylou Harris.
11. "The Skater's Waltz," John Fahey.
12. "The Rebel Jesus," The Chieftains with Jackson Brown.
13. "Death May Be Your Santa Claus," Rev. J.M. Gates (sermon).
14-15. "White Christmas" and "Merry Christmas, Baby," Otis Redding.
16. "Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas," Okkervil River.
17. "Grateful for Christmas," Hayes Carll.
18. "Fairytale of New York," The Pogues.

My favorite one of all (The Soundcheck & the Fury 2011 Music Awards)

2011-12-20T17:05:00.001-06:00

Now, I've tried drinking rye and gambling
Dancing with damnation is a ball
But of all the little ways I've found to hurt myself
Well, you might be my favorite one of all

-- Gillian Welch, "Tennessee"

The Soundcheck & the Fury's best albums of the year:

1. "The Harrow & the Harvest," Gillian Welch.
2. "The King is Dead," The Decemberists.
3. "Bad As Me," Tom Waits.
4. "So Beautiful or So What," Paul Simon.
5. "I Am Very Far," Okkervil River.
6. "El Camino," The Black Keys.
7. "Freak Flag," Greg Brown.
8. "Go-Go Boots," Drive-By Truckers.
9. "Here We Rest," Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.
10. "How to Become Clairvoyant," Robbie Robertson.
11. "Kiss Each Other Clean," Iron & Wine.
12. "The King of Limbs," Radiohead.
13. "KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories)," Hayes Carll
14. "Ashes and Fire," Ryan Adams.
15. "Small Source of Comfort," Bruce Cockburn.
16. "The Road From Memphis," Booker T. Jones.
17. "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," Steve Earle.
18. "The People's Key," Bright Eyes
19. "Blessed," Lucinda Williams.
20. "Smart Flesh," The Low Anthem.

Notes: It was a good year for music. They're all good years, if you listen hard. Even in the Eighties we at least had Jason and the Scorchers. ... You can pretty much put "The Harrow & the Harvest" in my casket when I croak, along with my Charley Patton coffee mug. As I said on this blog when the album came out:

My favorite record of the year. No. 1 with a silver dagger. Beautifully played, perfectly, really -- but the longest train ride ever from slick. Exquisite dust, boys. Songs of good whiskey, hard times, and dark turns of mind. Six white horses, cold Kentucky ground, and one of those silver daggers. "What's a little sweetheart like you," the singer sings, "doing with a bloody nose?

And sly? Why, hell yes, that. From "The Way it Goes" ...

Well, Miranda ran away
Took her cat and left LA
That's the way that it goes
That's the way

She was busted, broke and flat
Had to sell that pussy cat
That's the way that it goes
That's the way

See where all my follies led (Or: in praise of "The King is Dead") As I said, back in January, about "The King is Dead": They're playing sweet, simple, rousing songs (one even sounds like something by the Gourds) and there's no prog. There's no experimentation. (I hate experimental music. If you're still calling it experimental when you're done, the experiment failed. Get your ass back to your bedroom and write some damned songs.) But anyway -- the wonderful new Decemberists record, "The King is Dead." Gillian Welch sings on it, which I love, though I do wish she'd go make another of her own albums. It's going on eight years since the last. On the list of things I truly do desire, a new Gillian Welch record is No. 4. (World peace is No. 5.)

Tom Waits is my co-pilot: A few words on Tom, from the blog post I wrote for The Common:

"Bad as Me," Waits’ new album, is thirteen songs of woe and wander, dogs and war, cages and stages, turnpikes and prison walls, trains and freeways, an Edsel up on blocks. Seven years after he titled an album “Real Gone,” he’s back and restless as ever, still with that grifter’s sense of place – best move on, boys; they’re onto us. Names are named – Gunplay Maxwell, Flat Nose George, Mackey Debiasi. Destinations are called out like trains stops – Las Vegas, the gallows, and of course Chicago, where “maybe things will be better.”

But it’s only the last two letters of the word that hold any sway with our man Tom.

Go.

Lauded albums I didn't like: Bon Iver, "Bon Iver"; Fleet Foxes, "Helplessness Blues"; My Morning Jacket, "Circuital"; Wilco, "The Whole Love."

My favorite concert of the year: Bob Dylan at Mud Island, Memphis. From my review: Great, great concert -- my favorite Bob show, ever. He crooned and juked and blew harp. He made so you could hear the words, even when he croaked them. He blew up old classics, made them new songs entirely. He shot Nostalgia where it stood. Ah, the Ol' Song & Dance Man.

Three most-played songs of the year on my iPod: "Mama, You Been on My Mind," Laura Veirs' Dylan cover; "The Way It Goes," Gillian Welch; "Pope of Mexico," June Star.

Favorite music books of the year: "Devil Sent the Rain," Tom Piazza; "Save the Last Dance for Satan," Nick Tosches.

Latest obsession: Jazz. Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue."

Birds (Sermons of doom)

2011-12-20T07:30:00.000-06:00

The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I’m preachin’ the Word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes

-- Bob Dylan, "High Water Everywhere (for Charley Patton)"

Said roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never comin' back here no more
Moon in the window, a bird on the pole
Can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal

-- Tom Waits, "Clap Hands"

Danger bird, he flies alone
And he rides the wind back to his home
Although his wings have turned to stone

-- Neil Young, "Danger Bird"

A crowbar, a hammer, a delicate word
Opens the door to the scavenger bird

-- The Low Anthem, "Scavenger Bird"

One minute passed, taking slightly more than its allotted time. An unseen crow mocked the minute and the seconds that made it so.

The crow cawed proverbs and river stages. The crow cawed sermons of doom. And the boy wondered how much farther to the devil’s place.

“Up over the rise and down again, Billy Heavens, if you dare,” Lucy sang. “Up over the rise and down, Billy, if you do.”

There was another thicket or the same thicket again. There were the same brambles, the same thorns, scratching something deeper than dares on their pale skin. They were crawling now, almost level to the ground, breathing the dust’s fumes, tasting the dust’s grit. They did as snakes do, and the boy wondered what his grandmother would say about that, what the crow would caw, and then they saw it through a stand of trees: the devil’s place.

-- from my novel, "The Very Last Night of Boys and Girls"

If this blog were a bar...

2011-12-19T07:30:00.000-06:00

From the S&F archives:

If a blog were a bar (if only, if only) this would be a neighborhood dive where the jukebox sings old Muddy Waters blues songs followed by some young punks beating on banjos and washtubs and everything but each other. Followed by Bob Dylan, singing about the last flood or the next one.

You could sit in the corner by your lonesome, if this blog were a bar, reading some Faulkner or Steinbeck or Tennessee Williams, or maybe jotting down some bar-napkin reveries of your own. Then you might wander over to the bar, where the regulars wag cigarettes and argue about who was better, the Texas Playboys or the Light Crust Doughboys. The conversation wanders and strays. Politics and war. Religion, faith. Baseball, back in the days of flannel, chaw juice and Red Smith. That Bogart movie with Hoagy Carmichael in it. Stuff, nonsense. The best ribs in Memphis, and the Mississippi Sheiks on the jukebox now, singing, “I’ve Got Blood in My Eyes for You.”

A man says to a woman, "I love you more."

"More than what?" she says. "More than before? More than gin?"

The man pauses to think. "More than before but less than gin."

Someone buys the house a round. Someone else quotes from Dickens. Bleak House, it is. “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

A moment of silence, but only a moment. There's Neil Young on the box now, singing, "Hey, hey, my, my ..."

If my blog were a bar (if only, if only).

Stuck Inside of Memphis with the Immobile Blues Again (More songs about getting real gone)

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000-06:00

Feeling tomorrow, like I feel today
I'll pack my grief and make my getaway

-- "St. Louis Blues," Bessie Smith

We won’t have to say goodbye
If we all go

-- "Chicago," Tom Waits

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch.
2. "Clarksdale Getaway," Charlie Musselwhite.
3. "Jackson," Johnny Cash.
4. "Funky Mississippi," Rufus Thomas.
5. "Chicago," Tom Waits.
6. "Lookout Cleveland," The Band.
7. "El Paso," The Gourds.
8. "Darlinton County," Bruce Springsteen.
9. "Lake Charles," Lucinda Williams.
10. "Sweet Home Chicago," Robert Johnson.
11. "God Rode Through Clarksdale," Rob Jungklas.
12-13. "St. Louis Blues" and "New Gulf Coast Blues," Bessie Smith.
14. "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," Bob Dylan.
15. "Mississippi Boweavil Blues," Charley Patton.
16. "The Boys from Alabama," Drive-By Truckers.
17. "Drive South," John Hiatt.
18. "Deep Down in Florida," Muddy Waters.
19. "End of the Road," Jerry Lee Lewis.
20. "How High the Moon," Emmylou Harris.

More songs about Mama

2011-12-15T12:31:00.000-06:00

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

-- "Mama, You Been on My Mind," Bob Dylan

A Thursday afternoon playlist:

1. "Tell Mama," Etta James
2. "Shake Shake Mama," Mance Lipscomb
3. "Rag Mama Rag," The Band
4. "Mama You're a Mess," Kid Smith and Family
5. "Nehi Mama Blues," Frank Stokes
6. "Mama Roux," Dr. John
7. "Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long," Bruce Cockburn
8. "Blue Streak Mama," Frazey Ford
9. "Tell Me Mama," Little Walter
10. "Mama, You Been on My Mind," Bob Dylan

The Pep Steppers shall enter first

2011-12-15T07:30:00.000-06:00

The look of outrage had retreated from his hollow cheeks and was shored up now in the caves of his eyes, like a fugitive from Sheppard's kindness.

-- Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First"

Thursday morning. Coffee and writing. Hoyt Ming and his Pep Steppers playing "Indian War Whoop," from 1928, by way of the Anthology of American Folk Music.

As for me, I've got nothing for you this morning but that perfect sentence up above from Flannery. May it get you through today and on into tomorrow.

The Second Age of Rollick

2011-12-14T07:39:00.000-06:00

Wednesday morning. Coffee and writing and Gillian Welch singing, "On the day I came to Scarlet Town, you promised I'd be your bride / but you left me here to rot away, like holly on the mountainside."

Tonight my writers group meets. It's my turn to have a story read, so I'm bringing "The Second Age of Rollick." It's about a musician -- I know, I know, aren't they all. Here's a bit from it:

He could sound like an explosion down at the fireworks plant, like the world was ending and some new time in man’s history, the Second Age of Rollick, would soon commence. He filled the sky with sparks and hellfire, scraps of scripture writ blue in a neon blur. Smut you could dance to. That was when he played it fast.

Then he could slow it down. Then his fingers were wicks; candle flames slinked unbidden, smoke curled and swirled, and teenage girls became grown women who could do as they damn well pleased. Either way, fast or slow, it was said from pulpits and barstools alike that you couldn’t believe in him and God.

It's about fame and how it fades. It's about pride, ego, whiskey, and other poisons. It's about the distinction between great men and good ones. OK, you're onto me: It's just a 10-page. 3,047-word excuse to get to write the sentence "Smut you could dance to."

Sanctuary and Desire in the American South

2011-12-13T07:30:00.000-06:00

A bit from my favorite short story, on the occasion of its 29th rejection:

The young man was coming up behind. He had been rumor and then hearsay and now he was almost upon them, a fact to be considered. Still, turned toward the house, they heard him more than saw him. He was singing in a sort of old-man voice. He was singing the one about how the cuckoo is a pretty bird, it warbles as it flies. It was not a pretty voice like on the radio. It had grit and mine dust in a thick coat upon it.

The soak smiled and turned to see.

The young man had a mess of brownish hair and darker brown impish eyes. He was small and thin and wore a shabby tuxedo coat that wasn’t much against the winter cold, but he didn’t seem too terribly impressed with this Southerly take on the season.

“Yonder comes your – ” the soak said to the group.

“Is it him? Who is he, again?” the boy wanted to know.

“The protest singer,” said the shorter of the shovel men.

“What in hell’s he protesting against?” It was the boy again. It was three days now and the old man had yet to up and die; he was beginning to feel misled. He was missing the neighborhood football game or maybe some actual fighting.

“Law of gravity, by the look of that hair,” said the tall man with the shovel.

The young man carried a worn black guitar case. He set it down as he came up to the group. He said, “Afternoon.” The men with the shovels said, “Afternoon,” as if it were the rumored name of some drifter wanted for questioning in the disappearance of Morning.

More songs about sin, lies, and Bessie Smith

2011-12-09T07:36:00.000-06:00

Was it her sweet love or the way that she could sing?

-- "Bessie Smith," The Band

I wish she’d unlock
Her voice once an’ talk

"I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)," Bob Dylan.

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Bessie Smith," The Band.
2. "Sinful Blues," Bessie Smith.
3. "Sinful to Flirt," The Scrimshanders.
4. "Sin City," Flying Burrito Brothers.
5. "Sinister Kid," The Black Keys.
6. "Billy the Kid," Ry Cooder.
7. "Billy the Bum," John Prine.
8. "Billy Liar," The Decemberists.
9. "Lie to Me," Tom Waits.
10. "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)," Bob Dylan.

Kings and sweethearts, lonely boys with bloody noses

2011-12-08T07:46:00.000-06:00

What I'm reading: Short stories by Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, poet Carrie Jewell's "After the Revival," the Oxford American's Southern Music issue.

What I'm listening to: The Black Keys' "El Camino," Bo Diddley, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" re-issue, Richard Thompson's "Strict Tempo!" re-issue, The Roots' "Walk Alone" and "How I Got Over."

What I'm wondering: Is that boogie guitar sound in the Black Keys' "Lonely Boy" a nod to ZZ Top's "Eliminator" album, or is it just me?

Favorite albums of the year, so far: 1. "The Harrow & the Harvest," Gillian Welch. 2. "The King is Dead," Decemberists. 3. "Bad As Me," Tom Waits. 4. "So Beautiful or So What," Paul Simon. 5. ???

Favorite line, for the moment, from my favorite album of the year: "Now, what's a little sweetheart like you / doing with a bloody nose?"

Number of Rolling Stone's Top 50 albums of the year that I bought: 10, including No. 10, Robbie Robertson's "How to Become Clairvoyant," a good candidate for my No. 5 spot.

First snow

2011-12-07T08:23:00.001-06:00

Afterwards there was the strange drugged fall of snow.

-- Eudora Welty, from her story "First Love"

Fall on me, if you're falling
Fall on me

-- Greg Brown, "Rain & Snow"

I'll be with my baby
at the first fall of snow

-- Hank Williams, "At the First Fall of Snow"

The old man had a thick head of white hair. Black streaks ran through it with a sort of cold logic, as if etched by a mathematician who had taken up art to get him through winter. He had thickets of eyebrows that were dark but for the first frost of white flecks across the lower edge. His eyes were darker still, and they were glassy. He had a mustache that was more white than dark, as if first frost had brought with it snow that was rare for these parts. The mustache turned up at the ends; it looked as if it might fly away, flee that ancient face, at any moment.

-- from my story, "Sanctuary & Desire in the American South"

Come on, you dogs, and sing

2011-12-05T07:30:00.000-06:00

Monday morning. Coffee and writing. Gillian Welch singing,

So come on, you ragtime kings, and come on, you dogs, and sing
And pick up the dusty old horn and give it a blow

More songs about women and fools

2011-12-02T07:22:00.000-06:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "Claudine" and "Before They Make Me Run," Rolling Stones.
3-4. "No Action" and "Lip Service," Elvis Costello.
5-6. "Seven Days" and "1-2-3-4," Ronnie Wood.
7. "I Let My Daddy Do That," Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs.
8. "All Those Girls," Jolie Holland.
9. "Barroom Girls," Gillian Welch.
10. "Some Girls," Rolling Stones.
11. "Nehi Mama Blues," Frank Stokes.
12. "Keep It Clean," Charley Jordan.
13. "Darkness of the Delta," Panama Francis.
14. "Walk Right In," Bill Harvey & his Orchestra.
15. "When I Grow Too Old Too Dream," Nat King Cole Trio.
16-19. "Tell Mama," "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man," "Security," and "Seven Day Fool," Etta James.
20. "Miss You," Rolling Stones.

Do the funky lampshade

2011-11-30T07:22:00.000-06:00

Me? Oh, you know. The usual, this and that. I like jump blues and Howard Hawks movies and pretty much anything Steinbeck ever wrote (but the little books, "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday" and such, best of all). I like the banjo in a rock setting. I like train songs and headache powders (I'm a BC man). I like funky lampshades. I prefer dust to sheen, analog to digital. I've never written a story, a book, with a cell phone in it. My characters are still buying 8-tracks, I think. My characters think Uncle Dave Macon is Hot New Country. I like cheap beer and dog races and dive bars, road trips to nowhere and Tom Waits singing, "We won't have to say goodbye, if we all go." I like murder ballads and drinking hymns and a good argument. I don't dance, but you go ahead.

Got tamales and they're red-hot

2011-11-28T07:30:00.000-06:00

Me? Oh, you know. This and that, the usual. I like the songs of Dylan and the stories of Faulkner and a damn good tamale. I like restaurants that are better called shacks and joints, with framed pictures of Albert King hanging on the wall by the restroom door. I like long sentences and Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives & Sevens and a short glass of beer after a long day of work. Well, tall glass, short day, whatever. I like catfish and the semicolon. I like gangster movies and coffee strong enough to drive the getaway car. I like grits. I liked "True Grit," the movie (new version), maybe slightly more than the book. Still waiting for somebody to make a movie of "A Confederacy of Dunces." Love that book. And others, of course. So many, many others, like ...

... to be continued

The Long Gone Daddies see the light ... of print

2011-11-24T10:17:00.001-06:00

The night doesn’t ask much, my daddy used to say, a whiff of gas and a working radio. Come dark, he said, you can pull in ancient sounds from hundreds of miles away – blue stomps from the big cities, lick-skillet country come down from the hills and up from the hollows, gospel on the lam from grace.

My daddy told me a good many things, for never being around much. He told me stories of the road and the songs he found there. Songs of sweet evil and blue ruckus. Murder ballads. Odes to ghosts. Drinking hymns.

It was night, always, in my daddy’s stories. The night will have what you’re having, he said, a slug from whatever bottle’s handy. The night, like the devil, got all the best songs. So my daddy said. So he did.

I never did sleep well, as a boy. Or maybe we Gaunts are just naturally restless.

-- opening section of a short story, adapted from the opening chapter of my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies," published by the good souls at The Common.

Black vinyl days

2011-11-23T06:53:00.000-06:00

I’m a 45 rpm
I’m two minutes, ten
I’m the sound
you can’t get out
of your head

-- The Long Gone Daddies

Records black as country midnight

2011-11-22T07:20:00.000-06:00

I’d found the old records. I had to root and sneak in closets and cellars, but they called to me. I heard them through floorboards, in dreams. I followed the sound and found them, records black as country midnight. And me, scared of the dark – and drawn to it.

-- from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies"

Small wonders

2011-11-21T07:23:00.000-06:00

They had stumbled blind into some province of drenching cold, a berg of death. Everything was in question now.

-- "Peace," Richard Bausch

... and a long night began of streaks, halos, and comas.

-- "Ninety-two in the Shade," Thomas McGuane

Now I guess I should give you swaying trees and the rare geometry of cows in the meadow or the like – to break it up. But, sorry, me and this one are over.

-- "Ray," Barry Hannah

Georgia Slop, Memphis Yodels and prayers for New Orleans (More songs about suitcases and guitars)

2011-11-18T08:06:00.003-06:00

City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

-- "Mississippi," Bob Dylan

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Back to Memphis," Chuck Berry.
2. "Georgia Grind," Louis Armstrong.
3. "Guitar Town," Emmylou Harris.
4. "Tennessee," Glllian Welch.
5. "Hillbilly Highway," Steve Earle.
6. "Dalhart, Texas, 1967," John Fahey.
7. "Blue Grass Twist," South Georgia Highballers.
8. "Georgia Slop," Los Lobos.
9. "Memphis Yodel," Jimmie Rodgers.
10. "Nashville," Doug and Telisha Williams.
11. "East Nashville Skyline," Todd Snider.
12-13. "Mississippi" and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," Bob Dylan.
14. "Memphis Flu," Elder Curry and Congregation.
15. "Memphis Flu," Felice Brothers.
16. "Louisiana 1927," Randy Newman.
17. "Prayer for New Orleans," Charlie Miller.
18. "Out in the Country," The Meters.
19-20. "Lake Charles" and "Jackson," Lucinda Williams.

Greatest songs of all time: No. 33, "Back to Memphis," Chuck Berry

2011-11-16T07:26:00.000-06:00

I went hungry in New York and Chicago was no better
But today, my dear mother wrote and told me in a letter
Son, come on back to Memphis and live here with your Mama
You can walk down Beale Street, honey, wearing your pajamas

-- "Back to Memphis," Chuck Berry

“You couldn’t orchestrate my daddy,” Luther says. “He’d play his songs where he stood and sleep where he fell. Then he’d move on. You’d see him and then you wouldn’t. He’d fall asleep in Jackson and wake up in Memphis. He wore the cover of darkness like Elvis wore those fancy, spangled capes of his.”

-- from the novel, "The Long Gone Daddies

The first punch was of the sucker variety. Next there came a roundhouse. Both missed, mostly, but they were game efforts, considering. A rib was grazed, and then a cheek. The alcohol talked. It said, “Now you goddamn done it” and “I ain’t but started doing it, son,” and so then flew a whole flurry of punches. There were two, and then others joined the fray, it became the thing to do that night up in that Memphis juke joint. It had become a real barroom brawl.

Eddie Majestic, the cause of it all, was in the middle of it, on the floor, looking for an opening to the door, the street beyond. He was doing the Memphis crawl. He didn’t aim to go to the emergency room tonight. He could see the boots of the man whose woman he’d asked to dance; well, dance wasn’t the word he’d used. The woman had seemed open to discussion, but the man, he took high offense. His boots had a red tinge to them and seemed to have been made from some exotic hide. Eddie Majestic’s hide wasn’t nearly exotic but he thought he’d like to save it, still and all.

-- from the novel, "The Very Last Night"

The singer walked past the shovel men and past the boy and stopped where the town soak sat with his tobacco and paper. He wasn’t rolling that cigarette so much as curating it, as if it were meant for some museum display. Now he finished and stood and they took off together, the singer and the soak, toward town and what lay beyond, toward Memphis, and the moon. The town soak inquired of the singer’s hangover and listened, with a sort of envy, as the singer spoke of its horrors.

-- from the short story, "Sanctuary and Desire in the American South"

Ivy Coldwater had her own way of driving. She’d drive fast on the fast songs, slow on the slow songs; she was hell to trail. It was Chuck Berry now on the tape player as she left town. It was Chuck’s song about Memphis – not the most famous one, the long-distance-information one, but the one called “Back to Memphis,” altogether a much superior song, Ivy thought; it’s the one where Chuck gets a letter to come back home to Memphis, to his mama. She says you can walk down Beale Street, honey, wearing your pajamas. Ivy thought Chuck Berry’s rhyming mama with pajamas was up there with the polio vaccine and the best of Voltaire, in the annals of human achievement.

It was something like Ivy Coldwater’s thirty-third favorite song of all time – she kept a list, ever-changing – and maybe even the theme music for this trip, this journey, this whatever-the-hell-it-was. Ivy could not say; she did not know. She thought – vaguely, idly, almost as if her thoughts were somehow thinking her, just as her dreams were dreaming her – that she was going back to Memphis. But she sure as hell wasn’t going there directly. She’d never gone directly anywhere in her life. She’d let the car decide, let the road decide, the tape in the tape player, the radio, the fates. Maybe God would speak to hear via state highway signs or historical markers. Maybe images would appear in clouds – chevrons or pointing fingers, the faces of saints or Delta bluesmen or Hernando DeSoto. If she ran across a ghost, she’d stop and ask him directions.

-- from a novel in progress

Tom Waits is my co-pilot

2011-11-15T07:08:00.000-06:00

Late in the opening song of his new album, Tom Waits shouts over a squall of blues harp and raw guitar: “All aboard! All aboard!” ... continues at The Common.

Steal my records (More songs about Claudine and Codeine)

2011-11-11T07:13:00.001-06:00

I'm going to walk right up to heaven dodging lightning rods
I'm going to have this very personal conversation with God
I'll say you've got the information why don't you say so
He'll say, well, I've been around and I still don't know

-- "Mystery Dance (Alternate Version)," Elvis Costello

I wish you would
I wish you would
Come pick me up
Take me out
Fuck me up
Steal my records
Screw all my friends
They're all full of shit
With a smile on your face
And then do it again
I wish you would

-- "Come Pick Me Up," Ryan Adams

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Hot Mustard," Fletcher Henderson
2. "Jimmie Standing in the Rain," Elvis Costello
3. "Face to the Highway," Tom Waits.
4. "Black Star," Gillian Welch.
5. "After the Gold Rush," Thom Yorke.
6. "Time is Tight," Booker T. and the MGs.
7. "Everybody Needs Love," Drive-By Truckers.
8. "Codeine," Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.
9. "Come Pick Me Up," Ryan Adams.
10. "Mystery Train," Elvis Presley.
11. "Mystery Dance (Alternate Version)," Elvis Costello.
12. "Claudine," Rolling Stones.
13. "Passion Smoke," Wartime Blues.
14. "Can't Feel A Thing," Lucero.
15. "The Way It Will Be," Gillian Welch.

Babylon on nine dollars a day

2011-11-09T07:30:00.001-06:00

Charlie went directly to the Ritz bar with the furious idea of finding Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched his drink at the Peters', and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul came over to say hello.

"It's a great change," he said sadly. "We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the
States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?"

"No, I'm in business in Prague."

"I heard that you lost a lot in the crash."

"I did," and he added grimly, "but I lost everything I wanted in the boom."

"Selling short."

"Something like that."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Babylon Revisited."

The book is a 1951 edition of "The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald." I picked it up used. I don't remember where -- maybe the Goodwill book store. It had been owned, at one point, by a woman, a student, named Barb H. She marked passages with a yellow highlighter and underlined some sentences, and she wrote notes in the margin and elsewhere. On the page quoted above she wrote,

lost child, wife
honor in boom

There was also a scrap of paper in the book, about the size of a couple of postage stamps but more the shape of, I don't know, Maine. On one side it said,

if you write notes it looks like you're bored. That couldn't be!!

I'm using the note as a book mark. As for the highlighted passages and underlined words and notes in the margin and elsewhere, I suppose that could be annoying, but it's not. I like it all. The book is old, after all -- it turned 60 this year. It's been around, if not quite to Paris and Babylon. It's been lived with, read and studied, thrown on a shelf and then dumped in a box. It's been given away. It's been forgotten, lost, found. Maybe it's even been thrown in anger, or had a drink spilled on it. That would be perfect, wouldn't it ...

Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare -- the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn't add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places ----

---- The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

Peanuts and blasphemy, a band playing somewhere

2011-11-08T06:36:00.000-06:00

"Did you ever see an amusement park?"

"No, Father."

"Well, go and see an amusement park." The priest waved his hand vaguely. "It's a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place -- under dark trees. You'll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts -- and everything will twinkle. But it won't remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon -- like a big yellow lantern on a pole."

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

"But don't get up close," he warned Rudolph, "because if you do you'll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life."

-- from F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Absolution," originally intended as a prologue to "The Great Gatsby."

I was raised Catholic. These days I say I'm a twice-lapsed Unitarian, which is true. I don't go to church but I do love old churches -- All Saints' Chapel at Sewanee, Westminster Abbey, the little old country church that's been reconstructed in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis. ... My wife and I used to say, when our son was a boy, that we home-churched. ... I remember my last confession. I left a bar at halftime of a Final Four basketball game (it was the year North Carolina State won it all), ran up a few blocks to my church, unloaded my sins, ran back to the bar for the second half, and took up again with my beer-drinking. I suppose that in itself was a sin, although I'm not sure how, exactly. They never told us little Catholics that it was wrong to drink -- at least their examples never said it was. I believe I grew up Catholic thinking that you could drink and even smoke and carouse a little and still be a good Catholic and get to heaven; that part of Catholicism I still believe. ... My parish had a fall festival on the school and church grounds, and the beer garden was in the back yard of the convent. I had no huge beef with the Catholic Church, just what I will call quibbles, though I know that's not what the Catholic Church would call them: I didn't believe in the pope, or confession. I have some other quibbles but let's not quibble. ... I guess you'd say that when it comes to religion, I'm not much for middle men. So, anyway, I strayed or drifted, I jumped or was pushed. I wandered and wondered. I'm wondering, still. I believe you should do -- why, whatever you want; but of course! ... Oh, me of little faith? No, not really. ... Oh, and I love Dylan's gospel period. There, I said it. You can have "Blowin' in the Wind" and I'll take "Slow Train." Blasphemy, I know.

More songs about Sophia and Clyde

2011-11-04T07:46:00.001-05:00

Mixtape for good friends, on the occasion of our crashing at their house ...

1. "Mama, You've Been on My Mind," Laura Veirs.
2. "Monkberry Moon Delight," Paul McCartney.
3. "Bonnie and Clyde," Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.
4. "Me & Mr. Jones," Amy Winehouse.
5. "Never Gonna GIve You Up," Black Keys.
6. "Tenhert," Tinariwen.
7. "Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren)," Rolling Stones.
8. "Getting Ready for Christmas," Paul Simon.
9-12. "Don't Carry It All," "All Arise!," "Rox in the Box," and "Down By the Water," Decemberists.
13. "Harlem River Blues," Justin Townes Earle.
14. "Come Pick Me Up," Ryan Adams.
15. "Codeine," Jason Isbell.
16. "The Way It Goes," Gillian Welch.
17. "After the Gold Rush," Thom Yorke.
18. "Si Tu Vois Ma Mere," Sidney Bechet.

Slim and none

2011-11-02T07:36:00.002-05:00

To-do list:

1. Write more.
2. Blog less.
3. Tweet not at all.
4. Listen to more Django Reinhardt.
5. Finish "Moby-Dick."
6. Polish troublesome middle section of that concerto for two banjos and swizzle sticks.
7. Find a way to work the phrase "Apropos of rum" into a sentence at work.
8. Listen to more Slim Harpo.
9. Phantom Engineer in the fifth at Southland.
10. Win the big $245 million Powerball and blow it all on old Tampa Red 78s.

Tom Waits for another Halloween

2011-10-31T07:20:00.000-05:00

If we had a few more Halloweens a year, I might be able to turn enough little kids onto the music of Tom Waits that our man would someday sit atop the pop heapscrap wearing a crown of triple-platinum.

Alas, I get one night. I get Halloween.

Every year on the dark night, I put the boombox out on the front porch stoop and play Tom's "Bone Machine," the scariest of the master's works. It opens with bones a-rattle and our man singing in the chorus,

And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming
of you

So the box booms and sends Tom's raspy wheeze across the land -- well, my street, called Summerfield Lane -- and little ears perk and hear it, and a little voice says, "That ain't 'Monster Mash,' is it, sister?"

Couple of years ago, one kid lingered to dance on the front porch stoop as the music bellowed and the bones rattled and my hopes for America's youth soared on blackbirds' wings into that darkest of nights.

33 percent more funky

2011-10-28T07:30:00.000-05:00

A Friday night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Funky Mississippi," Rufus Thomas
2. "Funky London," Albert King.
3. "Funky Tamazula," Nortec Collective
4. "Funky Kingston," Toots and the Maytals
5. "Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky," Peter Wolf.
6. "Everything's Gonna Be Alright," Little Walter.
7. "Everything is Broken," Bob Dylan.
8. "Everything is Free," Gillian Welch.
9. "She is My Everything," John Prine.
10. "She," Gram Parsons.
11. "She Belongs to Me," Bob Dylan.
12. "She Took Off My Romeos," David Lindley.
13. "She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye," Jerry Lee Lewis.
14. "She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight," Lonnie Johnson.
15. "Shimmy She Wobble," Otha Turner.

Days of high cotton and make believe

2011-10-26T19:47:00.000-05:00

Well now, that didn’t take long. Counting the loot, that is.

There was a ten, a five, a small brace of singles.

“Now, Lucy – ” he began.

“You walked in that damned bank with a gun in one pocket and a note in the other and you got change for a twenty?” she said.

He said that was roughly the way it went down.

They’d climbed off the hood of the Fleetwood. They were out now in the scruff and dust of Delta farmland, on the edge of cotton field, the sun beating down on them. They were having a scene.

“Now, Lucy – ” he said again, as if those two words, used in the proper combination, would explain everything.

“So let’s review,” she said, calming herself. “You walked into that damned bank with a gun in one pocket and a note in the other, and you got change for a twenty?”

He said again that, yes, that was pretty much the upshot of it.

“The way you tell it,” Billy said, “it’s almost like you were there.”

She was counting the money, trying to make it a small fortune, but it kept coming out the same. No, in fact it shrunk.

“There’re only four ones here,” she said. “There’s only nineteen dollars.”

Here she raised her voice to somewhere between shrill and that pitch only boll weevils could hear. That low, soft lilt was nowhere to be heard. “You had a gun,” Lucy said, “and she shorted you?”

Well, you would have thought they really were bank robbers. Lucy’s green eyes blazed and her red hair flew.

Billy stepped back and said, “Now, Luce, it’s not like that at all. On the counter there by the teller’s window, you see, they had a coffee can with a little slit in the plastic lid and construction paper stripped around it – you can see where I’m going with this, I think – and on the paper was a shiny picture of a little girl with some words about her sad plight, which was that she was sick and in need of a transplant of some sort.”

“And so you, Mr. Billy Heavens, bank robber, stuffed a dollar in the coffee can.”

She was standing on the edge of that cotton field with one hand on a barrelhouse hip, the other piling all those long locks of sundown red atop her head.

Well, Billy had been God and he’d spared her. He’d been polite society and he’d judged her. He’d been Big Bill Broonzy to her Memphis Minnie. Now he stood kicking dirt with his white sneakers and watching out from yellow bangs the girl in a red-haired, green-eyed, long-legged fit of temper.

He stood there, all sheepish again, but all he could think of was that backseat, and knowing what to do once they got there.

-- from my novel, "The Very Last Night of Boys and Girls."

Ghostly ballads in a grieving whiskey voice

2011-10-24T17:58:00.000-05:00

There are new people in the apartment below, the third tenants in the last year; a transient place, this Quarter, hello and good-bye. A real bona-fide scoundrel lived there when I first came. He was unscrupulous, unclean and crooked — a kind of dissipated satyr. Mr. Buddy, the one-man band. More than likely you have seen him — not here of course, but in some other city, for he keeps on the move, he and his old banjo, drum, harmonica. I used to come across him banging away on various street corners, a gang of loafers gathered round. Realizing he was my neighbor, these meetings always gave me rather a turn. Now, to tell the truth, he was not a bad musician — an extraordinary one, in fact, when, late of an afternoon, and for his own pleasure, he sang to his guitar, sang ghostly ballads in a grieving whiskey voice: how terrible it was for those in love.

"Hey, boy, you! You up there ..." I was you, for he never knew my name, and never showed much interest in finding it out. "Come on down and help me kill a couple."

-- "New Orleans (1946)," from Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

Give me early Capote, when he was Southern, a writer rather than celebrity, when he was twisting the language in all manner of fanciful shapes, and you can have the field.

The England Sessions: To rouse the spirit

2011-10-23T07:30:00.002-05:00

Come all ye rolling minstrels
And together we will try
To rouse the spirit of the earth
And move the rolling sky

Those that dance will start to dance
And those who don't will sway
In time to lis' our merry tune
That we play for you today

"Come All Ye," Fairport Convention

The England Sessions: Brew for breakfast

2011-10-22T07:30:00.001-05:00

How you get a-rude and a-reckless?
Don't you be so crude and a-feckless
You been drinking brew for breakfast
Rudie can't fail

"Rudie Can't Fail," The Clash

The England Sessions: That was a voice

2011-10-21T07:12:00.000-05:00

Well, I can see me now, I'm back there on the dance floor
Oh, with a blonde on me arm, red-head to spare
Spit on my shoes and shine in me hair
And there's Al Bowlly, he's up on a stand
Oh, that was a voice and that was a band
Al Bowlly's in heaven and I'm in limbo now

-- "Al Bowlly's in Heaven," Richard Thompson

The England Sessions: Before it is too late

2011-10-20T07:10:00.000-05:00

Destroy your safe and happy lives, before it is too late
The battles we fought were long and hard,
just not to be consumed by rock n' roll...

-- "Memphis, Egypt," The Mekons

The England Sessions: Fill us a pitcher

2011-10-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

My name is Bold Doherty
From the North Country
Where there's a still upon every stream
Landlady be quicker
And bring us more liquor
And fill us a pitcher that's stronger than cream

-- "Bold Doherty," Waterson: Carthy

The England Sessions: Clang, clang

2011-10-18T07:20:00.000-05:00

Clang clang, go the jail guitar doors
Bang bang, go the boots on the floor
Cry cry, for your lonely mother's son
Clang clang, go the jail guitar doors

-- "Jail Guitar Doors," The Clash

The England Sessions: Streets of Soho in the rain

2011-10-17T07:20:00.000-05:00

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's
Going to get himself a big dish of beef chow mein

-- "Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon

The England Sessions: Where he came to hide

2011-10-16T07:20:00.000-05:00

So this is where he came to hide
When he ran from you
In a private detective's overcoat
And dirty dead man's shoes
The pretty things of Knightsbridge
Lying for a minister of state
Is a far cry from the nod and wink
Here at traitor's gate
'Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down
And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around

-- "Man Out Of Time," Elvis Costello

The England Sessions: Curs'd be

2011-10-15T07:23:00.000-05:00

Within the fire and out upon the sea
Crazy man Michael was walking
He met with a raven with eyes black as coals
And shortly they were a-talking

"Your future, your future I would tell to you
Your future you often have asked me
Your true love will die by your own right hand
And crazy man Michael will curs'd be"

-- "Crazy Man Michael," Fairport Convention

The England Sessions: Let me go, boys

2011-10-14T07:22:00.000-05:00

If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

-- "If I Should Fall From Grace with God," The Pogues

The England Sessions: The Stratford Blues Again

2011-10-13T07:15:00.000-05:00

Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells

-- "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again," Bob Dylan

On the occasion of my 50th birthday

2011-10-05T00:26:00.000-05:00

Interview with myself on the occasion of my 50th birthday:

S&F: So, 50 and not a whole hell of a lot to show. A handful of story credits and two unpublished novels. I guess you're going to make the case that you're a --

DW: I'm a late bloomer.

S&F: I was going to say misunderstood genius.

DW: The misunderstood genius is never understood until he's dead. The later bloomer has his day, if he stays at the work.

S&F: You really believe that?

DW: Nah, not really. I sometimes think I'll die with a stack on unpublished novels on my desk.

S&F: No time soon, let's hope.

DW: Well, I'm not sure two novels is enough to call a stack, anyway. They're not even big, fat novels, like my wife likes. She thinks anything less than 600 pages is a tweet. I tell her the bookstores should use produce scales on her, charge her by the pound.

S&F: You've said before that your literary goal is to become your wife's favorite writer.

DW: Fucking Dickens.

S&F: You need to write your "Bleak House."

DW: I'm afraid I'd be quite the poor man's Dickens. I'd write "Bleak Mobile Home." I think I'll stick to being myself. I'll keep writing what I like, what moves me, and maybe the world will come around. Or not. My one novel is a coming of age, which my former agent (not the one who died, but the one who quit me) said is not what editors want these days. And my other novel is about a rock 'n' roll band, which a big-time New York agent told me at Sewanee last summer will NEVER sell. And my next novel opens in West Memphis, Arkansas, at the greyhound track -- the ladies of the book club will love that one!

S&F: You're a hard-headed son of a bitch, I'll give you that.

DW: Thanks. Best birthday present I've had all day.

More songs about hot stuff and bees' wings (London Calling edition)

2011-09-30T07:21:00.000-05:00

Oh, the last I heard she's sleeping rough
back on the Derby beat
White Horse in her hip pocket
and a wolfhound at her feet

And they say she even married once,
a man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan
was too much settling down

And they say her flower is faded now,
hard weather and hard booze
But maybe that's just the price you pay
for the chains you refuse

-- "Beeswing," Richard Thompson

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "My Baby Gives it Away" and "Street in the City," Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane.
3-4. "Sister Disco" and "Guitar and Pen," The Who.
5-10. "Keep Your Distance," "A Bone Through Her Nose," "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again," "Take Care the Road You Choose," "Beeswing" and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," Richard Thompson.
11-13. "A Rainy Night in Soho," "A Pair of Brown Eyes" and "Lullaby of London," The Pogues.
14-16. "Alcohol," "Skin and Bone" and "Have a Cuppa Tea," The Kinks
17-20. "Love in Vain," "Rocks Off," "Sweet Virginia," "Hot Stuff," The Rolling Stones.
21-24. "This is England," "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A.," "Armagideon Times," "London Calling," The Clash.
25. "All the Way From Memphis," Mott the Hoople.

That's what the coffee said

2011-09-28T06:46:00.000-05:00

Here's what you do today. Brew a strong cup of coffee in your favorite mug. I like mine so strong it gets up on the table and quotes Faulkner and Little Richard, both. But we're talking about your coffee; so, brew to suit. And get a book to read -- an actual physical book you hold in your hands. Sorry, but on this point I'm afraid I'll have to be a stickler. It's your choice of book, of course, but you can do a hell of a lot worse than the one in the picture. Lewis Nordan's sentences will get up on the table with Faulkner and Little Richard. Now, then. What's left? Oh, the cigarettes. I don't touch the things, myself, but you may. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

This old grey dog gets paid to run

2011-09-27T07:41:00.000-05:00

Saw a Greyhound coming
Stuck up my thumb
Just as I was being seated
The driver caught my arm
Said that'll be cash,
On the barrel head, son
This old grey dog gets paid to run

-- "Cash on the Barrel Head," Louvin Brothers.

The dogs burst from the gate, all muzzle, blur and flank. The blue, named Phantom Engineer, went to the lead, but only just; the black, Pete’s Bog, was at his right ear. The brindle, Special Rider, was at the back of the field, as if the great fray of greyhound racing was beneath his elegance. In the middle was the pack: a melee of speed and color. Joe supposed the ramshackle red fawn, Poor Boy, was in there somewhere.

-- from "Poor Boy, Long Way From Home," a novel in progress

Greyhound, greyhound
Why you wanna treat me mean?
Greyhound, greyhound
Greyhound, why you wanna treat me mean?

Yeah, you know you a low-down dog
Take my baby away from me

-- "Greyhound Blues," D.A. Hunt, from the album, "Let Me Tell You About the Blues: Memphis."

Charley Patton and a world unknown

2011-09-26T07:22:00.000-05:00

I'm going away / to a world unknown

-- Charley Patton, from "Down the Dirt Road Blues."

Patton hollered and growled, rather than sang; he sounded like someone suddenly and belligerently addressing you from a nearby stool in a darkened bar. On top of that, his diction was nearly opaque. His vowels were stretched out, inflated from within; they expanded until they were all but unrecognizable. ... Patton was too much for me, like the first time you really taste strong black coffee as a kid. He left an aftertaste that burned. And yet, exactly because his sound felt so repellent, I wanted to come to terms with it. It seemed, almost, to be daring me to recognize it as a human sound.

-- From "A Light Went On and He Sang," by Tom Piazza, an essay from his book, "Devil Sent the Rain -- Music and Writing in Desperate America."

I don't trust anybody who doesn't have a favorite blues singer. Mine is Charley Patton, and Piazza's essay does the best job this side of Dylan's "High Water (For Charley Patton)" of explaining why Patton wasn't just worthy of favorite-bluesman status but was a man apart, a whole other animal, king cat of the Delta and of worlds unknown, the best of them all. Later in the essay, he makes the case for Patton's genius -- a genius, when broken down to its parts, is not so unlike Dylan's:

Patton's timing is staggeringly effective, his rhythm is elastic yet absolutely steady, and his intonation -- for all the roughness in his voice -- is perfect, and perfectly controlled.

Amen.

More songs about life and gangsters

2011-09-23T07:40:00.000-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-2. "Country Trash" and "The Night Hank Williams Came to Town," Johnny Cash.
3. "Rootie Tootie," Hank Williams.
4. "Ramblin' Fever," Merle Haggard.
5. "Johnny Ace is Dead," Dave Alvin.
6-7. "Daddy Rollin' Stone" and "Gangster's Blues," Phil Alvin.
8-10. "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo," "Creole Rhapsody" and "The Mooche," Duke Ellington
11-12. "All That Meat and No Potatoes" and "The Joint is Jumpin' " Fats Waller.
13-14. "Queen of the Minor Key" and "High Shelf Booze," Eilen Jewell.
15. "Golden State," John Doe.
16. "See How We Are," X
17-18. "Memphis, Egypt" and "Club Mekon," The Mekons.
19-20. "Danger Bird," and "Homegrown," Neil Young.

Rain, smoke, devilment and the blues

2011-09-21T07:32:00.000-05:00

Rodgers was really the first white performer to sing the blues convincingly on recordings; he got the essence of it.

-- "Jimmie Rodgers Died for Your Sins," Tom Piazza, from "Devil Sent the Rain -- Music and Writing in Desperate America

Last books read: "The Missing," Tim Gautreaux, and "Black Sabbatical," poems by Brett Eugene Ralph.

Currently reading: "Devil Sent the Rain," Tom Piazza, and "Lord of Misrule," Jaimy Gordon.

On deck: "Bright's Passage," Josh Ritter; "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive," Steve Earle; "Portraits and Observations -- The Essays of Truman Capote."

Latest records bought: "Lower Your Arms," June Star; "Paddy in the Smoke: Irish Dance Music from a London Pub"; "Aereo-Plain," John Hartford; "Tassili," Tinariwen.

Favorite songs of the moment: "The Great Atomic Power," Louvin Brothers; "Long Hot Summer Days," Sara Watkins; "Pope of Mexico," June Star; "The Way It Goes," Gillian Welch; "Dixie Pig Bar B-Q Blue," John Fahey.

Current favorite lyric: So come on, you ragtime kings, and come on, you dogs, and sing / And pick up the dusty old horn, and give it a blow ("Hard Times," Gillian Welch).

Current favorite Dylan song: "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry."

Current favorite Dylan cover: "Mama, You've Been on My Mind," Laura Veirs.

Latest concert: Jim Dickinson Folk Festival, with Lucero, Sons of Mudboy, Jimbo Mathus and others, at the Levitt Shell, Memphis.

Ranking of the late Jim Dickinson on the list of the coolest, wisest people I've ever interviewed in my day job: First.

Currently writing: A novel about a poor boy, long way from home.

Play a train song

2011-09-20T07:20:00.000-05:00

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine

-- "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," Bob Dylan

He could make that guitar sound like a train, a chicken, or any damn thing – bedsprings at midnight or a battlefield at dawn.

“Make it sound like a train, Daddy,” I’d say.

“The Cotton Blossom or the Sunnyland?”

He knew all the rail lines, every one sounding like some made-up name. I’d pick one.

“The Twin-Star Rocket,” I’d say.

“Oh, damn, boy. That’s a fine one.”

-- from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies"

There were no seats to be had on the coaches. The reason for this was that there was to be a triple hanging at the Federal Courthouse in Fort Smith and people from as far away as east Texas and north Louisiana were going up to see it. It was like an excursion.

-- "True Grit," Charles Portis

Play a train song, pour me one more round
Make 'em leave my boots on, on the day they lay me down

-- "Play a Train Song," Todd Snider

More songs about sin and treason

2011-09-16T07:24:00.000-05:00

"I got a call last night
it was from my brother,
said, "I need your help
bring a pistol and a shovel,
uh, huh."

-- "Pope of Mexico," June Star

Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-3. "Breakdown," "Pope of Mexico" and "Wolves," June Star.
4-6. "Windfall," "Tear Stained Eye," and "Medicine Hat," Son Volt.
7-9. "Soul Sister," "Blue Canoe" and "Jimmy Carter," Blue Mountain.
10-12. "Lo and Behold," "Odds and Ends" and "Million Dollar Bash," Bob Dylan and the Band.
13-15. "Sin City," "Hot Burrito, No. 1" and "Wild Horses," Flying Burrito Brothers.
16-18. "Sweet Virginia," "Sweet Black Angel," and "Dead Flowers," Rolling Stones.
19-21. "Angel From Montgomery," "Paradise" and "Mexican Home," John Prine.
22-24. "Ballad of Treason," "Divine Bell," "Everybody Does it Now," Abigail Washburn.

Exquisite dust

2011-09-15T07:50:00.000-05:00

Thursday morning. Coffee and writing. Gillian Welch singing,

Now, I've tried drinking rye and gambling
Dancing with damnation is a ball
But of all the little ways I've found to hurt myself
Well, you might be my favorite one of all

My favorite record of the year. No. 1 with a silver dagger. Beautifully played, perfectly, really -- but the longest train ride ever from slick. Exquisite dust, boys. Songs of good whiskey, hard times, and dark turns of mind. Six white horses, cold Kentucky ground, and one of those silver daggers. "What's a little sweetheart like you," the singer sings, "doing with a bloody nose?

And sly? Why, hell yes, that. From "The Way it Goes" ...

Well, Miranda ran away
Took her cat and left LA
That's the way that it goes
That's the way

She was busted, broke and flat
Had to sell that pussy cat
That's the way that it goes
That's the way

Strange Things Happening Every Day

2011-09-13T07:10:00.000-05:00

Strap yourself
To the tree with roots
You ain’t goin’ nowhere

-- "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," Bob Dylan

I think I'll move down into Memphis
And thank the hatchet man who forked my tongue

-- "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch

Historically, the Mississippi had always brought bad tidings to Memphis -- yellow fever epidemics, another boll weevil blight, news of the latest stock-market crash, or the twin pestilences of Sherman and Grant. Surely, it was the height of idiocy to mess with such a groove-worn fate.

-- Hampton Sides, in an Outside magazine story about swimming across the Mississippi River, in 2007

The stranger stood at the river for the longest time. He was still and silent and may have been praying. The crowd, back up on the bluff in lawn chairs and on blankets, did not begrudge him this time. “It ain’t like there’s a line forming,” Monroe said to his wife as she dabbed a cloth diaper at their baby’s lips. The baby sputtered and then smiled, his one trick, and Monroe’s wife, whose name was Darlene, smiled back as she always did, for the baby, named Edward, was a gift and a miracle and proof that God had not grown altogether tired of man.

-- from my story, "Strange Things Happening Every Day," The Pinch, spring 2009

River hymns

2011-09-12T07:34:00.001-05:00

It's dark and wide and deep,
towards the sea it creeps

I'm so glad I brought along my mandolin
To play the river hymn

-- "The River Hymn," The Band

... he said there was nutriciousness in the mud, and a man drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to.

-- "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Mark Twain

See this ancient riverbed
See where all my follies led
Down by the water and down by the old main drag

-- "Down by the Water," The Decemberists

They rowed until they collapsed and then let the currents take them. They lay on their backs and listened to the river swish like choir robes at a funeral; they swayed to that burgundy sound. And they floated, a one-johnboat procession across the river of land. It looked about like land you could walk across, that river of land being the color of mud, muck, dusk, and her skin.

-- from my story, "I Feel Like Going Home"

Jigs, rags, vamps, and dreams on the Lost Highway

2011-09-09T07:05:00.000-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial):

1. "Do Right Woman," Flying Burrito Brothers.
2. "Hey Little Mama," Frazey Ford.
3. "Mama, You've Been on My Mind," Laura Veirs.
4. "Country Honk," Rolling Stones.
5. "The Great Atomic Power," Louvin Brothers.
6-7. "Steam Powered Aereo Plane" and "With a Vamp in the Middle," John Hartford.
8-9. "Song for John Hartford" and "Ghost of Woody Guthrie," Chatham County Line.
10. "More Pretty Girls Than One," Woody Guthrie.
11. "Brownsville Girl," Bob Dylan.
12-14. "I'm a Long Gone Daddy," "Move It on Over" and "Lost Highway," Hank Williams.
15. "The Devil and the Farmer," Waterson:Carthy.
16-18. "Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands," "Keep Your Distance," and "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," Richard Thompson.
19. "Paddy Fahey's Jig," Martin Byrnes.
20-21. "The Broad Majestic Shannon" and "A Pair of Brown Eyes," The Pogues.
22. "Apocalyptic Country Rag," The Poison Whiskeys.
23-25. "My Morphine," "Scarlet Town," and "I Dream a Highway," Gillian Welch.

Greatest songs of all time: No. 3, "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," Richard Thompson

2011-09-08T07:20:00.000-05:00

Said Red Molly to James, "That's a fine motorbike
A girl could feel special on any such like"
Said James to Red Molly, "My hat's off to you
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952"

An ancient song about a motorcycle -- top that, boys. A ballad of an outlaw who doesn't say, "If I die," but rather, "If fate should break my stride," and a moll with red hair and black leather ("my favorite color scheme.") Love and swagger. Bloodshed, set to a beautiful tune. An epic tale and, oh hell, yes, a good, old-fashioned ride.

Greatest songs of all time: No. 101, "I Wanna Get Funky," Albert King

2011-09-07T07:14:00.000-05:00

And in the wings is lurking funky old Albert King, ready to come on and play blues which B.B. knows will never match his own for elegance, but which certainly do sound as if they come from the bad part of town. -- Stanley Booth, in "Rythm Oil"

What do I know about funky? Less than I know about cool. I always wanted to be cool for a day. Cool for a day, like a contest you could win. But I never dared to be funky, and damn sure not in the Albert King way. Like Stanley Booth says, Albert's funky blues come from the bad part of town. They carry a knife, a whiff of danger. They could rob a bank with their swagger alone. And they have a weight about them, a heft, like something bad has happened and might again, it being late and all, but with some night left, yet. "I wanna get funky," funky old Albert King sings, in a sort of slinking incantation taken up by his custom-made, pink Flying V guitar. "I wanna get down. Yeah." The man says volumes in just that last word, "yeah." The man tells tales.

A head full of ideas

2011-09-05T08:59:00.000-05:00

Monday morning. Labor Day edition. Coffee and writing and Dylan singing,

Well, I wake in the morning / Fold my hands and pray for rain / I got a head full of ideas / That are drivin’ me insane / It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

I'm writing on a file called "2011novel," which is either extremely hopeful or some fat bait for that beast comeuppance. I'm a big believer in comeuppance. In comeuppance, I do fear. But the writing's going well, the story is there, the characters, balls in the air and all. It's about Ivy Coldwater. It's about faith, religion, high water, and the blues -- the sacred, balanced on the rim of a whiskey glass, teetering. It's hard work, writing stories. It's heavy lifting, trying to make stories into novels. But it's hardly scrubbing the floor. And I love it, is the thing, even when it's most like work.

Monday. Labor Day edition. Coffee and a head full of ideas. I'd best get them down. Happy holiday to you all, and don't you work too awfully hard.

Southlandish

2011-09-02T07:22:00.000-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1-9. Dixie Suite: "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," The Band; "Dixie Drug Store," Grant-Lee Buffalo; "Down Along the Dixie Line," Gillian Welch; "Dixie Flyer," Randy Newman; "Dixie Pig Bar B-Q Blues," John Fahey; "Dixie Fried," Carl Perkins; "Airplane Fell Down in Dixie," Ray Wylie Hubbard; "Dixie," Bob Dylan; "Dixie," Jas Mathus.
10. "Hit 'Em Up Style," Carolina Chocolate Drops/Luminescent Orchestrii
11. "Streamline Woman," Muddy Waters.
12. "Devil's Got to Burn," James "Blood" Ulmer
13. "Crazy Mixed Up World," Little Walter.
14. "Shimmy She Wobble," Otha Turner.
15. "Come On in My Kitchen," Robert Johnson.
16. "Hot Stuff," Rolling Stones.
17-18. "Sweet Thing" and "Evening Gown," Mick Jagger.
19. "Faraway Eyes," Rolling Stones.
20. "Return of the Grievous Angel" Gram Parsons.
21. "Miss the Mississippi and You," Jerry Lee Lewis.
22-23. "Miss the Mississippi" and "Mississippi," Boy Dylan.
24. "Mississippi Goddam," Nina Simone.
25. "Southern Shout," Dixieland Jug Blowers.
26. "Dixie Chicken," Little Feat.

Greatest songs of all time: No. 13, "Devil Got My Woman," Skip James

2011-08-31T07:21:00.000-05:00

Clomping in her Doc Martens, Thora Birch as self-consciously outsider high school graduate Enid finds out what's on the other side of outside when she lets Steve Buscemi's old-timey culture fetishist Seymour sell her an LP at a garage sale. As the warped vinyl spins on her little box -- and you can pick up the whispery sound of the warp on the soundtrack album -- she hears Skip James' 1931 "Devil Got My Woman," hears the high, otherworldly voice from Mississippi promising "Nothing but the devil, change my baby's mind," believes it, and, lying back, staring at the ceiling, rises only to put the tone arm back on the same track, all night long.

-- Greil Marcus, writing about the movie "Ghost World," on salon.com

James's songs were dark stuff, musically adventurous and morally unforgiving. If Son House's music was a veritable battlefield between sin and redemption, the battle is already lost in James's "Devil Got My Woman" ...

-- "The History of the Blues," Francis Davis

shivers.

-- "shut up hannah," a commenter on the web site songmeanings.net

Ivy sang a little of the old Skip James blues, “Devil Got My Woman.” She sang, “I’d rather be the devil, than to be some woman’s man.” Ivy could sing a little blues, all down low and scratchy, but she couldn’t go up high and moan like only Skip James and some ghosts could do.

-- from my story, "I'll Take You There"

Greatest songs of all time: No. 79, "Dixie Fried," Carl Perkins

2011-08-30T07:16:00.000-05:00

Well, on the outskirts of town, there's a little night spot
Dan dropped in about five o'clock
Pulled off his coat, said, "The night is short."
He reached in his pocket and he flashed a quart

He hollered, "Rave on, children, I'm with ya!
"Rave on, cats," he cried.
"It's almost dawn and the cops are gone.
And let's all get Dixie fried."

Carl Perkins was a rare triple-threat talent on the Sun Records roster -- he could sing and play and write his own songs. Those songs had the wit of Chuck Berry, but they weren't for teenage ears. The way he sings the word "quart" in the first verse of "Dixie Fried" is nothing shy of obscene. Go, cat, go! They should have had him in shackles before he hit the chorus. Ah, "Dixie Fried" -- my second favorite song title, ever, after Charlie Feathers's "Defrost My Heart." It doesn't sound recorded so much as distilled, way the hell out in the woods where the law won't go. As for our man Dan, well ...

Now, Dan got happy and he started raving
He jerked out his razor, but he wasn't shaving
And all the cats knew to jump and hop,
Because he was borned and raised in a butcher shop

Loose threads, country lanes and kudzu

2011-08-29T07:25:00.000-05:00

From my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies" ...

Most afternoons, we go for long drives in the powder-blue Caddy. We keep the windows down and turn the music up loud. The wind whips and there’s not much talking to be done. This one day, we drive down south of Memphis, into Mississippi. Off in the distance, kudzu has grown to the size of mountains, taken on the form of beasts. The beasts dance a stomp on the flat land. “The Kudzu Ruins of Upper Mississippi,” my daddy John Gaunt says, and sings,

I’m a kudzu vine
I’m a kudzu vine
That’s what I wanna be
I wanna crawl and creep
I wanna spread my leaf
I wanna cover you with me

His voice shares some qualities with the hum of the engine. It’s not a pretty voice but it can take you places you might not otherwise have ventured. It’s a fearless, knowing voice. My daddy sings the words again and lets them drift away as we leave Highway 61 for some little country lane.

My daddy drives slowly now, at barely more than a poke. “In fact,” he says, picking up the loose thread of a conversation we’ve had only in his head, “I’ve been home any number of times to see her. But see her is all I did. I watched her as she sat on the back porch, reading on those books of hers. I watched her run errands downtown. She’s a fine-looking woman, still. She’s a fine-looking woman with sad eyes. One day, I watched her stand on the top step out in front of the house as the sun went down, her just standing there and thinking – what? One night, she had the windows open and the shades were up, and she put on that one record of mine and she danced alone to it. I just about up and walked through the front door. But I thought better. Or anyway, I thought different.”

We come to a little crossroads. There’s a hand-painted sign, white with black lettering, that says, "Jesus is coming are you ready?" Beyond that, after a left turn, another sign says, "Well?"

My daddy smiles and says, “I don’t know what it says about me, but I’ve always found Mississippi a more fascinating place than outer space. Not that I’ve been to outer space, mind you. Just going by what I hear of the place.” He has an easy smile. He always did.

More songs about Crown Vics and voodoo candles

2011-08-26T07:14:00.000-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial) ...

1. "Bad as Me," Tom Waits.
2. "Mr. & Mrs. Jones," Amy Winehouse.
3. "I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down," Ann Peebles.
4. "Use Me," Bill Withers.
5. "Lover Man (Oh, Where Can You Be?)," Billie Holiday.
6. "Next Girl," Black Keys.
7. "You Gotta Move," Cassandra Wilson.
8. "I'm Glad" (1966 demo), Captain Beefheart.
9. "The Set-Up," City Champs.
10. "Voodoo Candle," Jay Farrar.
11-12. "Let's Burn Down the Cornfield" and "Tell Mama," Etta James.
13. "In the Basement, Pt. 1," Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto.
14. "The Joint is Jumpin'," Fats Waller.
15. "Hurricane Season," Trombone Shorty.
16-18. "Miss the Mississippi and You," "Crown Victoria Custom '51" and "Down the Road a Piece," Jerry Lee Lewis.
19-20. "Ol' '55" and "I Don't Wanna Grow Up," Tom Waits.

Darkness on the edge of country

2011-08-24T07:56:00.001-05:00

Wednesday morning. Coffee and writing and a fine mess of country music -- Hank Williams's "Honky Tonk Blues" and "Mind Your Own Business," the Maddox Brothers and Rose singing those "New Muleskinner Blues," some George Jones and Patsy Cline, maybe a little Uncle Dave Macon or the Flying Burrito Brothers, Johnny Cash's "Country Trash," and that Merle song about how his mama tried.

I don't know how I first found my way to country music. I'm from Kentucky but not of hillbilly stock. I'm not out of the hills or hollers. But I do remember the first time I heard Hank Williams's voice -- WFTM AM-1240, Maysville, Ky. -- the same way I remember my first taste of beer. It had a mule's kick, too strange for me, too potent. Ah, but the second time ...

Maybe it was Emmylou Harris. Maybe she was first. "Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town" came out in 1978, the same year as "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "This Year's Model" and "Bruised Orange." Those records all got me through 1978. They've gotten me through some other days and nights through the years. They'll surely be called upon to get me through a few more.

And I remember buying a Merle Haggard record -- "Big City," I believe. Later that year, I think, Elvis Costello's country covers record came out. I played the hell out of that one, and it led me the original sources. George Jones. Hank. Gram Parsons. And in college, that one Willie Nelson live record got played as much anything by Neil Young, that hillbilly from Canada. Good country, up there -- Hank Snow, right? He was Canadian. Shania Twain, too -- ah, but you can't damn a whole country just on account of that. Well, maybe only a little. But anyway ...

Wednesday morning, still. More coffee and further writing. Now it's Merle, my man, singing about when coke was still cola and a joint was a bad place to be ...

My horizons are just fine where they are, thanks

2011-08-22T07:17:00.000-05:00

I stopped by Borders the other day and came away with this small haul, at 40 percent off. Let's see -- two novels by musicians (Josh Ritter and Steve Earle), a collection of music writing by a newspaper music critic (Robert Hilburn), a novel by a Southern writer (Tim Gautreaux), and a collection of non-fiction pieces by a writer (Truman Capote) who was born in the South and whose best work (says me) was set there. A rut? Nah, I read to be transported, too. But I just want to go down the road a piece, is all.

More songs about red shoes and riot gear

2011-08-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

A Friday night playlist (partial):

1-2. "There's a Riot Goin' On" and "Luv N' Haight," Sly and the Family Stone.
3. "Maggot Brain," Funkadelic.
4-5. "Know Your Rights" and "Straight to Hell," The Clash.
6. "Police & Thieves," Junior Murvin.
7. "Armagideon Time," Willie Williams.
8. "The Harder they Come," Jimmy Cliff.
9-11. "Sneaky Feelings," "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" and "Less Than Zero," Elvis Costello.
12-13. "This is Radio Clash" and "This is England," The Clash.
14-16. "Boots of Chinese Plastic," "Don't Cut Your Hair" and "Break Up the Concrete," The Pretenders.
17. "Bo Diddley," Bo Diddley.
18. "Crown Victoria Custom '51," Jerry Lee Lewis.
19. "Hadacol Boogie," James Luther Dickinson.
20. "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," Hank Williams.

Give out but don't give up

2011-08-18T07:17:00.000-05:00

From the Soundcheck & the Fury archives:

I write in the mornings, first thing. I write from seven until eight and then I feed the greyhounds. Then at five after eight I'm back, writing until about eight-thirty, sometimes with the dogs on the floor dozing after their breakfast or perhaps marveling at the amount of coffee I manage to spill on the twenty-year-old carpet in the upstairs bedroom that's become my office.

They'll never give tours of the place, but it's a cool office. The desk is between two windows facing the street. On the wall over the desk is a framed photograph of a New Orleans jazz man, my friend Rasheed, playing his soprano sax in the alley shadows on the night of the first Mardi Gras after Katrina. And there's a Muddy Waters concert poster and framed album covers ("Buck Owens and His Buckaroos in Japan!" and "Beale Street Saturday Night") and an R. Crumb drawing of the bluesman Son House in a furry black-and-white animal-print frame that I found for a couple of bucks at a Memphis estate sale. On the desk, to the left of my laptop, is a little lamp with an tiger-striped shade, and behind the laptop screen, a row of some of my favorite music books: Guralnick's two-volume biography of Elvis; "Rythm Oil" by Stanley Booth (inscribed with a quote from dead Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis: "Give out but don't give up"); Robert Gordon's biography of Muddy Waters; bios of Bill Monroe, the Carter Family, Johnny Cash; Bob Dylan's "Chronicles"; "Invisible Republic" by Greil Marcus; "Where Dead Voices Gather," Nick Tosches' book about the yodelling blackface singer Emmett Miller. There's the phone, a printer, a modem, a router; alas, I'm a piss-poor luddite but I try.

I have a real typewriter, a fifty-year-old Underwood teaching model with no markings on the keys, but it's downstairs in the dining room, for show, beside a copy of Dickens' "Bleak House" -- my wife's favorite book, by her favorite writer -- and two decorative crows. But that's downstairs, in the dining room. I was telling you about the upstairs bedroom that's become my office, where I sit every morning and try to become my wife's favorite writer, to write her favorite book.

Ode to August the 16th

2011-08-16T07:04:00.000-05:00

From my novel, The Long Gone Daddies:

So our boys played street corners for change and small bills. They played subways, city parks, traffic jams, the sidewalk outside Yankee Stadium. Luther told the ball fans that Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley died on the same day, in different years. He said he didn’t know what to make of that, but it’s true. August the 16th. He said that day should be celebrated like a holiday, a holy day, and mourned with kegs and candles. Even without Luther saying it was also the day of his own birth, tears welled and coins were dropped in an upturned Yankee cap. It was gas money. It was rambling fuel. Our boys had a long haul ahead.

They fancied themselves this brand new thing, this unheard sound, this unsung song, all the while secretly knowing they were the oldest story there was. They were Elvis all over again – that hot stew of country, blues, gospel, whatever they could scrounge. Which made them, what? A broken record? Which was fine. So they decided to hit the road, to scavenge some more. To get what they could gather and make it their own.

The many moods of Handy Dandy

2011-08-15T07:22:00.006-05:00

Monday morning. Coffee and writing and Dylan singing,

Got nothin' for you, I had nothin' before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around

That's from "Mississippi," which has become something like, I don't know, my sixth favorite Dylan song, ever. Top 10, anyway. There's "Things Have Changed" and "High Water (for Charley Patton)" and, yeah, of course, "Like a Rolling Stone." Let's see, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," and something (pretty much anything) from the "Desire" album. Oh, and "Handy Dandy," you know. No protest songs, though. I like the Song and Dance Man much better than the Voice of the Generation. The Song and Dance Man can wear a cowboy hat, top hat, whatever the hell -- whatever suits his many moods and modes. He can dress like a fine tramp dandy, or, like he did when I saw him play in Memphis last month, at the Isle of Mud, like some truly hip train porter. The Voice of the Generation, who by the very nature of that title was property of the generation, always had to wear the same damn thing -- shackles.

Blue moons, mystery trains and black limousines (or: Death Week a Go-Go)

2011-08-12T07:20:00.000-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (Elvis Death Week edition):

1. "Stranger in My Own Home Town," Elvis
2. "Night Train to Memphis," Jerry Lee Lewis
3. "Long Black Limousine," Elvis
4. "Went to the See the Gypsy," Bob Dylan
5. "Blue Moon," Elvis
6. "Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)," Cowboy Junkies
7. "Mystery Train," Elvis
8. "Mystery Dance," Elvis Costello
9. "Crawfish," Elvis
10. "Crawfish," Jesse Stone
11. "Burning Love," Elvis
12. "Burning House of Love," X
13. "Baby, Let's Play House," Elvis
14. "Graceland," Paul Simon
15. "That's All Right," Elvis
16. "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother," B.B. King
17. "Milkcow Blues Boogie," Elvis
18. "Elvis Presley Blues," Gillian Welch

Elvis Presley was a mama’s boy grown up strange, a public-housing scourge in pink with an oil drip. But he had those hips and he had that voice. Carl Perkins heard it from over in Jackson and he made fast for Memphis.

They all did. Memphis called out and they came. Memphis was a song on the radio and they wanted some. They came to Sun Records to see Mr. Sam Phillips, and their wide eyes met his wild ones, their pleas fell on his cocked ear. They were young and dirt-poor and weren’t adverse to a better life through song. It beat chopping cotton or driving a truck or whatever else they’d done to turn their dimes to dollars.

-- from my novel, "The Long Gone Daddies"

This is my blog on drugs

2011-08-10T07:28:00.002-05:00

Cocaine's for horses and it's not for men
Doctor says it kill you but he don't say when
Cocaine, all around my brain

-- Bob Dylan, "Cocaine Blues"

Becky Johnson bought the farm
Put a needle in her arm
That's the way that it goes
That's the way

-- Gillian Welch, "The Way it Goes"

There's a way that we feel, when the world is through kicking our ass

-- The Star Room Boys, "Cocaine Parties"

I snorted my father and I'm still alive

-- Son Volt, "Cocaine and Ashes"

Roll another one, just like the other one

-- Little Feat, "Don't Bogart that Joint"

Mister President, Mister Immigration Man
Let me in, sweetie, to your fair land
I'm Tampa bound and Memphis too
Short Fat Fanny is on the loose
Dig that sound on the radio
Then slip it right across into Buffalo
Dick and Pat down in old D.C.
Well they're gonna hold some shit for me

-- Rolling Stones, "Rip This Joint"

There aren't many drugs in my stories. I give my characters beer and whiskey and the blues, and figure that's enough to get them fairly twisted and well gone. Occasionally, one of them will come up with a joint, I don't know where. In "I'll Take You There," Ivy Coldwater apparently has one hidden in a tackle box, in the shack where she paints, out behind her house. As the story ends, she's thinking of going out to the shack with a big silver pail filled with beers, crank up some old soul songs by the Staple Singers, and find that joint. She's been arguing with her mama about God and heaven and going to church on Wednesday nights. She needs to unwind. She's a grown woman, knows her mind. She's going to "smoke it slow and get a little high, six feet or so, and look down at herself as she paints." These artists, you know.

Blues for guitar and vocals

2011-08-08T07:35:00.000-05:00

They’ll stone you when you’re playing your guitar

-- Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35"

The guitar almost played itself
There was nothing I could do
It was getting hard to tell
Just who was playing who

-- Guy Clark, "The Guitar"

He began to play. It was a walking blues, a good stretch of the fingers. He leaned over the guitar, head bowed as if confiding to the thing. Notes loped, notes moseyed. He sang,

I saw the light
I saw the light
I saw the light up ahead

Neon, she said.

-- from "The Long Gone Daddies"

Woke up this morning, blues all around, Sugar Babe: a Friday-night playlist

2011-08-05T07:14:00.007-05:00

A Friday night playlist (partial):

1. "Neil Young," Will and the Bushmen.
2-4. "Out on the Weekend," "Little Wing," and "Down by the River," Neil Young.
5. "River Road," Pawtuckets.
6. "Medley: Deep River/Old Man River," John Fahey.
7. "God's River," Emmett Miller.
8. "She's Got River Jordan in Her Hips," Clifford Gibson with R.T. Hanen.
9. "Mississippi River Blues," Leon Redbone.
10. "Mississippi," Bob Dylan.
11. "Funeral Song for Mississippi John Hurt," John Fahey and His Orchestra.
12-14. "Stackolee," "Big Leg Blues" and "Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me," Mississippi John Hurt.
15-19. "Hurt," "Delia's Gone," "Chattanooga Sugar Babe," "Southern Accents," and "I'm Goin' to Memphis," Johnny Cash.
20-21. "Crump St." and "Local Jones," City Champs.
22-23. "Can't Feel a Thing" and "Here at the Starlite," Lucero.
24-25. "Tennessee" and "The Way the Whole Thing Ends," Gillian Welch.

Yea! Heavy and a bus to Texarkana

2011-08-04T07:22:00.006-05:00

Thursday. Coffee and writing and traveling songs ...

You said you loved me the best
Then you just up and left
Darlin’ you’re senseless
You’re a truck with no brakes
A semi on skates
Baby you’re restless

-- Eilen Jewell, "Reckless"

Black joke and the bean soup
Big sky and the Ford Coupe
Old maid and the dry bones
Red Rover and the Skinny Bones Jones
47 mules to pull this train
We're getting married
In the pouring rain
You need your differential and
Plenty of oil
You load the wagon til
The end of the world

-- Tom Waits, "Top of the Hill"

Well, the comic book and me, just us, we caught the bus

-- Bob Dylan and the Band, "Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread"

I'm gonna ride my llama
From Peru to Texarkana

-- Neil Young, "Ride My Llama"

Victorious dust

2011-08-02T06:48:00.001-05:00

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat ...

The opening sentence of "Absalom, Absalom!" is 123 words, with a single comma. So after throwing us to the thicket on this "long still hot weary dead September afternoon," you'd think the master would hand us a tall deep endless cold glass of something wet, just for our troubles. You know, a simple declarative sentence no longer than a weed. Instead, we get a 160-word corker of a second sentence -- would have been 161, you know, but for "nothusband" being one word. We've been pulled from the thicket by the scruff of our necks and thrown into the kudzu ruins of North Mississippi, feeling drunk without ever getting that drink, even. We may never get out, with any luck at all ...

The Ol' Song & Dance Man

2011-08-01T07:16:00.000-05:00

Monday morning. Coffee and writing and Bob Dylan singing, "I got the porkchops, she got the pie / She ain't no angel and neither am I."

That's from "Thunder On The Mountain," the eleventh song of his set Saturday night here in Memphis on the Isle of Mud. Great, great concert -- my favorite Bob show, ever. He crooned and juked and blew harp. He made so you could hear the words, even when he croaked them. He blew up old classics, made them new songs entirely. He shot Nostalgia where it stood. Ah, the Ol' Song & Dance Man.

The setlist:

1. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
3. Things Have Changed
4. Tangled Up in Blue
5. Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
6. Mississippi
7. The Levee's Gonna Break
8. Sugar Baby
9. Highway 61 Revisited
10. Forgetful Heart
11. Thunder on the Mountain
12. Ballad of a Thin Man

Encore:
13. Like a Rolling Stone
14. All Along the Watchtower
15. Blowin' in The Wind

Like the sweet song of a choir

2011-07-29T07:35:00.006-05:00

A Friday-night playlist (partial):

1-2-3. "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," "Drunken Angel," Joy," Lucinda Williams.
4. "Move it on Over," Hank Williams.
5. "Elvis '53," the Long Gone Daddies.
6. "Burning Love," Elvis Presley.
7. "Back to Black," Amy Winehouse.
8. "Tell Mama," Etta James.
9. "I've Got Dreams to Remember," Otis Redding.
10-11. "No Headstone on My Grave" and "A Damn Good Country Song," Jerry Lee Lewis.
12. "Down by the Water," the Decemberists.
13-14-15. "Honey Now," "My Morphine," "Tennessee," Gillian Welch.

Maybe in West Memphis I'll find my joy

2011-07-27T06:52:00.005-05:00

Wednesday morning. Coffee and writing on the novel and Lucinda Williams singing,

I'm gonna go to West Memphis and look for my joy
Go to West Memphis and look for my joy
Maybe in West Memphis I'll find my joy
Maybe in West Memphis I'll find my joy

The new thing -- I'll take a great fool's leap and call it a novel, because I've gotten past my normal point of abandonment -- is set, early on, at least, in West Memphis, around the dog track. It's about a man, trying to get home to see his dying father, finding himself at the dog track with a great fool's notion that he can place one winning bet and set his heretofore stalled life on some better course. You know, find his joy.

Here's a bit from it...

Joe looked again at the others. One dog was black as a panther and another was white with brown ticking like flung paint. There was another white, a female and smaller than the rest, with a half-black face and a black spot in a shape that reminded Joe of Louisiana, south of Baton Rouge. And there was the dark slinking brindle, in red silks with a white number one stitched on the sides. Joe would have paid to watch that brindle just walk, but he was down to his last twenty dollars and it was not entertainment he sought. He had to turn that twenty into something more. And so he was back looking at the red fawn. It was stuck in his head, somehow, that such a ramshackle dog would win the race because he didn’t have anything going for him but to win. It was time. He was due. It was such thinking that had led Joe to his present state.

A damn good country song

2011-07-26T07:12:00.002-05:00

Tuesday morning. Coffee and writing and Jerry Lee Lewis singing ... well, whatever the hell Jerry Lee wants, right?

The photo above is one of my favorites of The Killer. He looks a satisfied man, at peace. But there's something sly in the smile, too, as if he'd calmed his demons by slipping a little something in their drink.

The picture hangs over the back-room bar of Blues City Cafe in Memphis, where you can get a drink under JLL's sly, satisfied smile, or order some carryout tamales. On the drive home, play some Jerry Lee, loud, would be my advice. Maybe one of those great country songs from the 1970s ...

Well, I've took enough pills for big Memphis town
Ol' Jerry Lee's dranked enough whiskey to lift any ship off the ground
I'll be the first to admit
Sure do wish these people would quit it
You know it's tough enough
To straightin' up when these idiots won't leave you alone.
Jerry Lee Lewis's life would make a damn good country song

More songs about angels and misfits

2011-07-25T07:04:00.004-05:00

I got this graveyard woman, you know she keeps my kid
But my soulful mama, you know she keeps me hid

-- Bob Dylan, "From a Buick 6"

Well, they buried little Delia
In the church yard deep
With Louis Collins at her head
Stacker Lee at her feet
The angels laid them away

And out of Delia's bed came briars
Out of Louis's bed a rose
Out of Stacker Lee's came Stacker Lee's cold lonely little ghost
The angels laid them away

And I'm looking over rooftops
And I'm hoping that it ain't true
That the same God looks out for them
Looks out for me and you
The angels laid them away
The angels laid them away
The angels laid them away

-- Josh Ritter, "Folk Bloodbath"

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

-- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

The day was hot. Mourners crowded the house and spilled out onto the dock, where they stood and talked. It was so hot, a bird dropped down out of the sky and walked in the shadows of the mourners to cool off. There was lively talk, gossip, sometimes laughter. A typical Southern wake.

-- Lewis Nordan, "The Sharpshooter Blues"

Q: What’s with the black suit, white shirt, black tie outfit you always wear? Do you have anything else in your closet?
A: I’ve got four black suits that I circulate, and they are my cemetery clothes — my uniform that keeps me ready for battle.
Q: Your cemetery clothes?
A: It’s ready to die, brother. If I drop dead, I am coffin-ready. I got my tie, my white shirt, everything. Just fix my Afro nice in the coffin.

-- Cornell West, interviewed in The New York Times Magazine.

I could have swore the box said Hollywood blanks

-- Felice Brothers, "Frankie's Gun"