When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.
The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.
And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.
(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)
But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.
This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.
And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.
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