After hearing it on the radio in a car last week, I wanted to listen to John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses,” because it’s good and because it’s eerily (still) appropriate to “these times,” and because I want to cover it, or I want someone (maybe Ty?) to cover it better than I ever could. But I don’t have that album on vinyl; I have this album. The big record, the master hit maker, the Cougar that came just before, and perhaps came between, a John and his message.
Have you listened to this lately? Can you listen to it, and then can you come over and sit on the couch with me and marvel in the simplicity of the production, the bare honesty of the scarce chords and the sound of a man actually singing?
It’s pretty good. The arrangements get a bit cheesy towards the climax of each song, especially on the less famous tracks. And it’s a little more personal than the subsequent album, Uh Huh, which gave us “Pink Houses,” and so you have to reach a bit deeper into the metaphors to find the disenchanted American dreams that lurk beneath the smalltown stories. But they’re there, and that sweet Telecaster is there, and those hand-claps are there.
Can we talk about the hand-claps?
Hand-claps, fellow listeners of the Internet, are one of the foundational pillars of rock and roll. They hit on the “two-and” and the “four” clap, or sometimes just the two/four, so simple and so elementary and so sittin-around-strummin’ that you might be on the Cougar’s porch yourself, just shootin the shit and putting some songs together. Hand-claps give voice to the essence of what we do when we write songs: we clap it out, together, and then somewhere farther along the way someone else comes in and uses a bunch of fancy other instruments to delineate that most basic of rock beats, and we lose the hand-claps. But not John. Because nobody does a hand-clap backtrack like the Coug (except, perhaps, creepy Phil Specter himself). It’s like the man doesn’t even need a drummer, he’s so rock and roll. It’s like, it makes me sit back and think about the brilliant simplicity of the 4-4 rock beat. It makes me think, suddenly and sharply, about how Gillian Welch finally built up to using drums on Soul Journey and maybe she was actually overdoing it, maybe she should have stuck with some basic hand-claps to more accurately punctuate her American stories. Maybe she should do a duet with the Coug.
I don’t even have much to say about this record other than to ask for a cover version of a song that’s not on it that relates to right now, meander my mind into what a melodic union of Gillian Welch and John Mellencamp might produce in terms of telling truly “country” stories from this particular country, and to point out the hand claps.
And, I guess, to point out that John Cougar Mellencamp is good. So good. And he is one of those Rock Guys (like Bruce) who somehow gathers along the way a countrified, presumably middle-America-Red-State-beer-n-baseball-hat image in the public perception. But then you sit and you listen to the words of his song and he’s red alright, he’s redder than a commie caught with his pants down. He’s a downright American socialist, this workin’ class fool, he’s talkin’ bout the problems and the lives and the stories—Jack and Diane, their story, the Friday Night Lights of their lives—of real, actual, American people. And those people don’t have any little pink houses anymore. Those people are fuckin’ suffering.
So give us a clap, John. We’ll all clap along this time, I hope.
We drink in the morning wind’s sunshine through the blinds. Lie on the pillows, crouch on the floor, and swallow the fruits of this rich, ridiculous place: cherries, fresh olive country bread, scrambled farm eggs with pecorino, zatar & cucumber salad, bacon from the oven, orange juice, cold baked salmon from last night, coffee thick and sweet.
Talk.
Say, these folks invented country music as we know it.
Say, what do you mean? Popular country music. Say, this stuff is their later stuff but it’s still so good. They wrote this? Say it’s stuff people were playing already, say Pop Carter put his name on it down at the office.
Ask, who were these songs first sung by? Compare and contrast with the legacy of white recording industries exploiting black southern blues musicians: poor white southern cultural artifacts, where do these stand?
Say, and why do us white urban now kids love this shit so much?
Talk about other things.
Tara and Tyler take photos, Tara reminisces a youthful visit to the Carter Family farm. Clogging and music on a Saturday night. Cliches of the genre, brunch on the floor.
Sal stands, goes to work. Hugs and fist bumps happen. Lian kicks back in the corner, smiling in between the shades of the slatted blinds. Max is sunny, as always. I am myself, too, I imagine.
Sing along. Don’t. Try to recall the difference between the hammer dulcimer, the regular dulcimer, the auto harp, and the four women pictured on the creepy cover. Pass the record sleeve around, agree that it’s creepy.
Ask, which one is June?
We wonder, about lives solid and transitional and changing and the same. Wonder about travel just completed or years in the future. Remember other worlds.
Eat the last of the salmon.
Bring out the butter and finish the bread.
Gather, get shod, hit the sun-yellowed blue-clouded streets to the tune of thousands of others, neighbors talking, kids wheeling, yuppies clustering, commerce thriving, low riders shuddering and sighing off on a side street. Walk, talk, with the songs still inside.
Return to the house hours later and realize the needle is still spinning. Cool it down. Flip it over. Start again.
I started a new job today. I’m working from home. It’s exciting. It’s full of newness. And it’s also my first experience in a virtual office environment, where there are other people working from home “with” you (as opposed to what I’m used to, which is being a self-employed, solo at-home worker).
Here in the virtual office, there are widgets for tracking hours, different digital interfaces and management systems, and clients where the word “client” means a computer program through which you use other computer programs. Applications. Deliverables. Some of these words are not new. You can see them on Mad Men and on my resume. And some of these vocabularies change with decades, as our technologies do.
What hasn’t changed is that women make less money than men, for the same work, with the same work experience, and often with more education.
Dolly knew this. The tedium described in “9 to 5″ is just as real now for many women as it was when she sang it 30 years ago. It goes for a lot of men, too, but women still face amazing amounts of discrimination in the workforce, from consistently lower wages to the way “they just use your mind and they never give you credit” to always being seen as overbearing in negotiations where a guy would be perceived as “strong.”
[Lady Sovereign, the British short white girl rapper, has another take on the "9 to 5" concept in which she falls asleep on the way to work and dreams she's forced to change her image by her record company, posing in scantily clad situations next to expensive cars. If I wasn't tired of computing from a first full day at a new job, I might compare the two.... but that's another post....]
Here in the virtual office, I’m also free to listen to music, not on headphones, which makes work about 10,000 times better right off the bat. I listen, and think about lying on the floor of my mom’s living room and listening to Dolly Parton when I was a kid, not really understanding the impact of her lyrics, many of which so beautifully focus on inequality of all types (poverty, relationships, etc). To listen now, the songs feel smaller. They seem quieter, the dated aspects of their production more prominent. But one thing remains loud and clear: this woman can write a song. “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors”… every “hit” on this greatest hits comp deserves to be there.
Take “I will always love you.” We know it because Whitney Houston made it a mega-hit in 1992, almost 20 years after Parton first recorded it. After I wrote about Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger and mentioned he had penned another hit that he didn’t record, Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” a friend of mine asked me if I thought the mark of a good song was chart-topping success, and I don’t… but I do think sometimes the mark of a chart-topping successful song is good writing.
Dolly wrote this as a country song, a quiet and wispy melodic statement of love that when she sings it comes across as sad, a mournful reflection complete with a plaintive “I love you” spoken during the instrumental interlude. Whitney made the song bigger — more dramatic, with big quiets and louds and the accent on “I” and “you”, not “love.” No matter what you think of Houston in general and this song (one of the most overplayed and best selling in recent cultural history), you gotta admit– the bones of the song are good. They’re as good as whatever is underneath the bizarre Barbie exterior of this tiny, powerful musician who started out wearing rags to school in the backwoods of Tennessee and became a pop culture icon, an Academy Award-nominated actress, a theme park topic (who by being so employed of her entire, struggling community), and a good ole time to listen to forever after.
Yes, she is bizarre and tacky at times. Yes, I don’t really understand all the plastic surgery, particularly mixed with the feisty feminist leanings. And yes, there are bloated instrumentations at times. But that’s Dolly. She can still make you cry with a frail run of her trembling-yet-steady voice, a simple plea from a rejected lover, or her sheer fucking can-do spirit.
So sing it, working girl. It’s time for happy hour.
When I was ten years old, my father bought me a ¾-sized acoustic guitar and accompanying after-school lessons at a music shop downtown. At the first lesson, my teacher asked me what kinds of songs I wanted to learn. I barely remember the conversation, but I certainly remember what I answered: Willie Nelson. That’s what I, at ten years old, wanted to learn to play. And not just any Willie Nelson song—the first song I ever learned on guitar was “Bloody Mary Morning.” At the time I had no idea what a Bloody Mary was, but I knew that song from both my mom and my dad. My mom had at one point had to explain to me what “something stronger to start off the day” might be (hint: it’s liquor). But mostly I just liked the way it sounded: Pure. Guitar and a voice and a harmonica and a fingering and rhythm that was going to be really difficult to learn. Simple but smart, and simply good.
Soon after I started learning the fingerpicking pattern for Bloody Mary Morning, the guitar got pushed aside because I didn’t have time to do that and attend my intensive ballet lessons after school. [A quarter of a century later, and I am still playing guitar and wishing I had not stopped learning it formally. Ballet? Yeah, um, it’s been a while.] But my love of Willie persisted. I felt like with Willie, whether the cheesier songs or the more minimal ballads, you were getting more than a song. You were getting a story, a character, and an almost movie-like flood of images with every quiet strum of his guitar. My most-loved Willie albums are 1998’s Teatro and Red Headed Stranger, which both offer up a spare, lonesome sound infused with Western-influence guitar technique to haunting, cinematic effect.
Red Headed Stranger is a record that, like the song “Bloody Mary Morning,” I can’t recall ever encountering for the first time. It snuck in, somewhere back there: one of those works of art—like certain songs or fictional characters or cinematographic points of view—that have been in me since I became aware of knowing songs, or knowing the lyrics to those songs, or having taste in cultural things. Since forever. It’s also one of those records that I think is perfectly itself, beautifully realized and infinitely memorable—so much so that when I pick it to be the soundtrack to another suddenly sunny San Francisco morning, I’m a bit concerned I won’t have much to say about it.
Red Headed Stranger is a “concept” album that, at the time it was released (1975), revolutionized the country music world. It is minimal, spooky, and dark—yet still contains terrific country-style songs. In the 70s, Willie Nelson and his cohorts were earning the label “outlaw country” because they were making music that contradicted the more pop, produced sound that was coming out of Nashville. Willie became a superstar with this mega-selling record and even won a Grammy. So, you know. “Outlaw” is sort of relative here.
Back to the “concept” part of concept album. This can mean many things to many people; to me it means an album that is written and recorded and designed as a whole. It means it centers on one theme, or one story. One concept to connect it all. For me, the “concept” album’s dangers are that it can become bloated, overwrought, overstated. When it works, it works entirely. And Red Headed Stranger works.
Piano and guitar and Willie’s tenuous tremor of a voice are the overriding elements here. Close your eyes and you’re in a country opera… or more like a Western film.
Indeed, what Willie Nelson and his outlaw band did with this album was make a Western record while everyone else was busy concentrating on “Country.” And it is Western, with all the associations that term carries with it, whether of the “wild” or Hollywood variety or both: the open skies of Montana, the bizarre justice mores of the American West at the dawn of the twentieth century, hard and cruel white men riding around on horses unable to express their emotions except through acts of violence.
He found them that night in a tavern in town
in a quiet little out-of-the-way place.
And they smiled at each other as he walked through the door
And they died with their smiles on their faces.
The plot is pretty simple: preacher loves woman. She cheats on him. He kills her and the guy she’s now in love with, who was a past love she’d left behind when she came out West. (Which is sad for obvious reasons of killing people, but also because the new couple seems to be so happily in love.) So, that’s two relationships ruined and two people dead. Then the preacher is sad, too, and rides horses around the great West, sometimes killing people and ruining countless other lives and relationships in the process.
The central character is classic Western material: a formerly believing, ordered man who becomes, through a romantic betrayal and his violent reaction to it, a “stranger” to all, riding the “untamed” land on his beautiful horse with a new, trigger-happy persona masking his deep loneliness and grief. This is the type of frustrating but legendary macho/vulnerable murderer/hero that the Western genre is so good at giving us.
Is this a glamorizing ode to violence, including violence of the domestic variety and the violence brought to the land by the westward expansion of white folks? Totally. It is certainly that. Just like most Westerns.
Despite, or perhaps because of these issues, the Western has always felt sad to me—the myth of it being a sad facet of our culture, as well as the reality of it being sad for many regular, struggling people at the time who must have made the journey West, contributed to the genocide of another culture and the failure to realize the rewards upon which the whole mess was predicated. There were a lot of dreams placed on us out West here, and most of those dreams were false and/or broken for the large majority of the people involved.
And, just like Western films, this story of a violent and lonely man and his journey is only palatable to the audience because it is a tale of vulnerability as well as hardness. This is Montana, in “the year of ’01.” This is the typical hard-knocks mythical West, in which a man is allowed to kill a women who tries to steal his horse, but not really supposed to cry when his girlfriend breaks his heart. So why do we like this red headed murdering stranger so much?
Because he does cry:
He cried like a baby
He screamed like a panther in the middle of the night.
And he saddled his pony
and he went for a ride
And it’s because of the preacher’s sadness that Red Headed Stranger becomes not just a classic country album, but a classic Western album. This is thanks to Willie Nelson’s songwriting abilities. The songs, many of them ballads, are sad, and often flash the listener back to other, better times in the lives of the characters, times of unending love and courtship and unlimited possibilities. They do lyrically contribute to the cool myth of the lonesome cowboy, but mostly they are about loss.
Red Headed Stranger is also an ideal example of an album that is an album. Taken one at a time, the songs yield a couple hits – “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain,” for one, which Nelson didn’t write but was forever identified with because of his performance of it here —but they lose their narrative impact when split up. Many of them are only refrains, fragments of songs lined up in a cohesive order. As a record, from start to finish, there is a story being told here, a sound being developed from the minimal building of haunting chord fragments through to the final reprise. Take it and mix it up and throw it on an iPod, and it’s not the same. Also, without the particular medium of vinyl, you don’t get this (click to embiggen):
The entire back cover of the record jacket is a storyboard, an illustrated short-hand for the entire narrative of the album, drawn in cartoon style with excerpts from the lyrics. How cool is that?! An album complete with characters, scenes, dialogue, and a freakin’ storyboard. Willie Nelson made a Western movie for us, and he put it on wax.
Also:
I think most people know by now that Willie Nelson wrote the song Crazy, which was made iconic by Patsy Cline. If you didn’t know that… well, now you do. While we’re on the topic of super famous songs that were written by country songwriter icons, Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You,” the song with which Whitney Houston sold a gazillion records. So, “country” is also a bit of a myth. Mostly, good songwriting is good songwriting. Doesn’t matter which chart it tops.
