Nanci Griffith Catches Some Sweet Blackbird's Wings

Nanci Griffith & That Sweet Blue Bonnet Spring, Catch Some Blackbird’s Wing Down at the Five + Dime

A yellow dress covered in pink and red cabbage roses, mint and emerald green leaves seemingly holding them to the fabric. She had mousy brown hair, bangs that descended like staggered drapes around her elongated heart-shaped valentine of a face with eyes so sparkling and alive they glittered into the cameras/

Her speaking voice sounded like a small child’s, matching her diction. Her words bathed with wonder at it all – street light halos, Woolworth stores, trinkets and hope, she lit up as she shared what she knew or saw or felt.
Under the covers in a too cold house my much older fiancée didn’t own in Coral Gables, he’d left to go do errands. I could draw close to the oversized television on the table at the end of the bed, sheets pulled up around me as I stared at this anti-Barbie singing smart such smart songs. Miami’s PBS station ran “Austin City Limits” at an early hour, and in the black-out-curtained window, it felt like a Girl Scout meeting gone a little long.

“Austin City Limits” was once truly a Texas texture, as Guy Clark would sing in “Rita Ballou.” Every now and then, they’d pick a few local writer/artists or bands, given them a show. Nanci Griffith, whose name I didn’t know, had just released Once In A Very Blue Moon on small indie Philo Records – and this was a showcase for those brilliantly turned sketches, almost scrimshaw miniatures of small town life.

Her voice, when she sang, was deeper, throaty, had that Stevie Nicks’ vibrato – or a pure, soaring crystalline quality. It melted over the kind of acoustic music that exists in the fertile delta between country and folk, where the violin is more fluid, the steel guitar more diamonds sprinkled across still water. It didn’t straddle the genres, as much as float back and forth like sheets on a breeze when they’re hung outside to dry in the sun.

She was obviously older than me, but was so young seeming, she was the grown-up answer to my far older than my own 12 year old appearance while slinging bylines for The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tower Pulse and Southern Magazine. There was a place for us kid-looking people with hearts older and more erudite than our looks suggested. And, her melodies were sweet but salty; the loves and adventures were pure and sized for an actual life someone could inhabit.

By the time Jason returned, I was out of mind about this woman I’d seen in the yellow dress like Helen, my extra grandma by choice instead of blood, wore while playing a guitar almost as big as she herself was. She had an upright bass and a cellist and a licorice whip thin guy who sang, so minimal chic but with this hair, and and and...

Full grown, exfiancee #2 glazed over. But he knew when I got on a tear, it didn’t stop. We got in the car, drove down to Spec’s, the South Florida record chain, and walked in. Me blabbering, him trying to figure out how to decode this problem. Turns out one of the clerks had had “ACL” on, saw the same thing I did – and walked us back to the folk section.

Once In A Very Blue Moon was in a bin for the taking. We did.

Walking out pleased with the purchase, I excused myself from any further conjugal duties and went back to my dorm room. I sliced into the shrink wrap, drew out the disc and put on side one. “Ghosts In the Music,” indeed.

It all poured out, puddled on the cold linoleum tiled floor of a room mostly packed up towards semester’s end. Endearing, charming, unselfconscious, it was small stories, big truths, moments you might not notice – but that might just define you.

It had been recorded at something called the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa with the same producer of John Prine’s Aimless Love. I couldn’t know so many of the players – Roy Huskey, Jr on upright bass, Mark O’Connor on fiddle, Phillip Donnelly on guitar – would become figures in my own story, nor that the background singer Lyle Lovett would be one of the singular voices of Nashville’s progressive traditionalist moment.

It was just magical, and perfect. Like a Truman Capote or Willa Cather novel, moments seemed pressed between pages and saved for the ages.

The obsession was such that I called Rounder, raved about this woman from Texas I’d never heard of – writing for The Herald enough I knew lots of record company people in those days before MTV, let alone internets and instant gratification – and asked them to please keep me posted. That I didn’t know what story or who for, but I wanted to write about her, absolutely.

My exfiancee thought I’d fallen into toxic shock from my obsession with Southern and Dust Bowl fiction. He just couldn’t... so we started taking separate cars as the candy-coated voice unfurled these sweet stories. Pulling up, banging what Griffith came to call “folkabilly,” on the cheap aftermarket cassette player attenuating the cassette I’d bought, her voice sounded a bit like a muppet gone tipsy.

Rounder didn’t forget my lunatic raving. They sent me an advance cassette of Last of the True Believers, an even more accomplished and confident album that still did the Currier & Ives meets Norman Rockwell vistas. Her sound had solidified; Rooney’s always tasteful production was at its greatest elevation. Each instrument was its own sparkling diamond around Griffith’s at times guttural, at others shimmering or tender velvet vocals.

Tower Records’ Pulse bit. My first conversation with Griffith via phone was delight; her Texas twang rolled down the line with girlish giggles for punctuation. She conjured a instant friend intimacy that suggested the same kind of friendship that made the innocence of “There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, Mary Margaret” such a covetous thing for a young woman starting to make her way in the real world.

We talked Larry McMurtry, O. Henry, steel guitar as a mood-setter, John Prine, dime store treasures, the journey. She’d had two albums I’d never heard of (again, it was world before the internet made everything instantly accessible), with dreams of having music take her around the world.

She was exotic as peacocks on the front lawn, as familiar as homemade bread or a well-washed linen shirt with a slightly frayed collar. Twee as some found it, she could bite into the world, too. Whether the reeling fiddle of “More Than A Whisper” was a grown-up love’s complicated nature and need for true manifestation, or the rushed and rushing bawdy declaration of life from a whore waiting on a trick “Lookin’ for the Time (Workin’ Girl)” with its profession “This sidewalk ice is cold as steel/ and I ain’t Dorothy, I can’t click my heels...” and the utterly business forward “If you ain’t got money, I ain’t got the time for you.”

Authoritative. Straight to the heart, the gut, the throat. It was a money shot, and she – the little folkabilly goddess in the white anklets and Hooverette house dress – didn’t flinch or waver. To say I loved it would be like saying Chanel is expensive.

Around that time, Tony Brown rolled into Florida to meet up with Steve Wariner, an artist he’d produced at RCA Records and had just signed to MCA Nashville. The Chet Atkins protégé was that same kind of wide-eyed kid as Griffith’s persona suggested. Driving Brown back to the Howard Johnson’s by the , urnpike after a night of hanging out and closing down a Palm Beach restaurant/boite, I pulled out my advance of the album – and threw it in my cassette player.

I’d made a speech about how I didn’t know whether it could work at country radio, if it made sense for a major Nashville record company, but this was special. He needed to listen. That voice poured out of the speakers of the little tin mosquito Nissan Pulsar I was driving, bounced around the car and lit the piano-playing A&R man up like a pinball machine.

“Can I keep it?” he asked. I let him have it, let him bounce out of my car into the mildew-scented hotel in the grove of sagging palm trees. The next day, his head most likely throbbing, he got in my car, so I could take him to where Wariner was sound-checking. He went on and on about how much he liked it, the writing, the voice, the person singing it.

Said in some ways, she reminded him of Wariner, who he was doing pre-production with. Someone who didn’t want to be more than they were, each sang about a life that was the right perspective for the room. Wariner – beyond the crushing guitar skills and sweet voice – truly was a small-town Indiana kid; Griffith, though, a product the local Texas songwriter rooms dreamed of larger worlds and other places.

The legend is Lyle Lovett turned Tony Brown onto Nanci Griffith. But that day in the sun-parched parking lot outside a strip mall honky tonk, the Elvis and Hot Band veteran witnessed like a new convert. We were two people talking over each other about how incredible this artist was; me saying I was so glad I hadn’t overstepped my bounds, Brown saying he needed to figure it out, but was going to..

At the same time, Steve Popovich, a rock & roll student of all music and the head of Polygram’s Nashville operation, heard “Love at the Five & Dime” – and told Kathy Mattea it was her next single. The West Virginia songstress with the dusky eiderdown voice that curried the folk out of mainstream country product smiled. She’d not followed up “Soft Place To Fall” with a hit, and she needed to breakthrough before it all fell apart.

Driving north on I-95 a few weeks later, “Love at the Five & Dime” came pouring out of the speakers – and it wasn’t Griffith’s version. It felt like a hit, slightly folkie, very homespun and charming in the way it told the story of Eddie and Rita, waltzing the aisles of a Woolworth store. Suddenly, Mattea’s sweet spot was colonized – and Nanci Griffith was a hit songwriter.

Momentum and dominos both move fast. Suddenly, Griffith’s record deal came through at MCA Nashville. She was touring Europe, becoming the queen of Ireland, a nascent then full-on friendship with dean of Nashville songwriters Harlan Howard.  “Letterman” and “The Tonight Show,” Rolling Stone, back when it was every two weeks and excruciatingly hard to get into. Was it Liz Thiels, the publicist? David Wild, the reviews editor, who adored roots music? Was it just how intriguing her special mix of elements was?

Did it matter? Even if country radio found her voice too bracing, Mattea had another #1 with “Going, Gone,” while the touring life saw Griffith become a full-on headliner around the world – and a theater-sized draw in the States, where she also headlined folk festivals.

Free to explore the lives of characters who intrigued her, able to make a good living making music she believed in, it was fluid. She moved to MCA Pop, then Elektras Records, worked with producers Glyn Johns, Pete Buck, Rod Argent, Don Gehman, Peter Collins, Ray Kennedy and served as a comrade and peer to Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Tom Russell, Townes Van Zandt.

Championing Julie Gold, Griffith’s “From A Distance” so transfixed anyone who heard it, it wasn’t long until Bette Midler recorded it. Midler’s version defined ubiquity for many years, reminding people we are all small and equal, that “God is watching us” not as an enjoinder, but a comfort in our hard times.

Like a good folkie, she lifted people up in song. A later album, The Loving Kind, boasted a title track inspired by the obituary of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case overturned laws banning interracial marriage, and the capital punishment indicting “Not Innocent Enough.” Earlier, Storms’ “It’s A Hard Life Wherever You Go” considered kids without chances in Northern Ireland, impaled racists in Chicago and measured the hope of America’s ‘60s idealism with a chorus that implores, “It’s a hard life, a hard life, a very hard life/ and if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know/ and there ain’t no place in this world for these kids to go...”

“Trouble in the Fields” from Lone Star State of Mind lamented the plight of family farmer, while the dobro-drenched, accordion-basted “Love Wore A Halo (Back Before the War)” from Little Love Affairs measured the outlaw lives of number runners, a Jersey hotel and perhaps some comfort paid for by the hour. Unlikely people, missed or stumbled over, they rose up under Griffith’s sense of detail and zeal.

She would do a pair of covers projects, this woman who’d generously covered everyone from Tom Russell to Robert Earl Keen to ex-husband Eric Taylor, that celebrated her influences. Other Voices, Other Rooms gathered up 17 songs from Bob Dylan, Kate Wolf, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Jeff Walker, Woody Guthrie, Janis Ian, Buddy Mondlock and Harry Belafonte with Carolyn Hester, Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement, Arlo Guthrie, longtime collaborator James Hooker and Linda Solomon’s “Wimoweh” boasting Odetta, the Indigo Girls, Kennedy Rose, Holly & Barry Tashian, John Gorka, David Mallett, her father and Jim Rooney.

A supple versatility, a fluid sense of folk made the project seamless – and earned her her first Grammy Award. Best Contemporary Folk Album, an honor that matched the present to the past and the future. Other Voices measured how much veneration she brought to the art of songwriting, the ones who came before. Raising a light for the generations to come, she shone on – and fans flocked to the light.

But Voices’ Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”-evoking video for “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” duet featuring the song’s writer John Prine that nailed the way reverence, searching, kindness and the echo of emptiness converge. Black and white, grainy, urban, Griffith in white and Prine in black, they are angels living in our world as supernatural forces and mortal beings. Beyond the whimsy, there was a sense of truth matching the reality of being a star in the musical sense.

Just as important as her O. Henry character sketches and embrace of the postcards and polaroids that make up a life, the woman with a mouth like a bow conjured a tenderness that permeated her songs. Love was sometimes perfect and attained; occasionally flawed and wild. But as often, it was failed and someone – usually the woman – was leaving, frustrated, sad, but never beaten by what had transpired.

As a music critic carving a path when there weren’t really women covering music, as a female working her way through six engagements and many suitors always trying to be reasonable as I left, as a girl raised on books and dreams and hopes and songs, Griffith seemed a chimera before me, radiant and resplendent as Our Lady of Bookworms or the Patron Saint of Coffeehouse Angels. Could she really be real?

Any single woman with a career or a drive to find their place in the world – in those days before Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rickenbacker-downstroked suburban tales – found a richly-colored construction paper fortunecatcher every time Griffith released an album. Those stories of old couples we hoped we’d turn into like True Believer’s “One of These Days,” but also the unflinching make it happen drive of “Ford Econoline” that allows for self-propulsion, for dreams that required some form of screw it.

There was the romance of it all. No matter which album you landed on, that romance of life, the sweet nectar of somebody’s smile or a flick of a wrist taking a cigarette to their lips, it was all spark and igniting properties. Wherever, however, drink it in, swallow it down – and let whatever it was rush to your head. Don’t lose your senses, but go ahead and enjoy every last tingle.

That was the thing about the bookish, kindergarten teacher-looking songwriter: she could smoke’em if you had ‘em and drink’em down with the best. She would show up half kewpie doll, half brainiac and leave the room in ashes, all hearts splayed. Who wouldn’t wanna do that?

Many, many years ago, dressed in a pink and white gingham dress with buttons down the front and pale pink Buster Brown shoes, I went to UCLA to see Nanci and Guy at some hushed concert hall. I made the decision to dress for her people out of respect, but also to honor the way she’d lit my way coming into my own as a writer.

After slipping backstage between their sets to say my hellos, I had to slink out halfway through Griffith’s performance, drive into West Hollywood and make my way to the Whiskey A-Go-Go where I looked beamed in from another galaxy. Security guards a 100 yards from the door couldn’t believe someone looking like this could be on the guest list, nor could the guy at the Will Call window where the show was about to go on. Of course, I didn’t care that at the height of spandex, slashed tshirts and Aquanet, I was a giant neon goody two shoes. I was on the list, and they were ushering me in.

As the Nasty Habits took their positions in the world’s smallest nurse uniforms, I made my way through the snickering throng. Sam Kinison bounded onstage to introduce Motley Crue, who were kicking off their Girls! Girls! Girls! album en fuego. Riling the crowd up, the band came on like a jet engine hitting prime thrust -- the crowd reacted accordingly.

“What the hell do you have on?” asked my surly comic friend when he got back to us. “God, Holly...”

I explained where I’d been, what I’d seen, screaming over Nikki Sixx’s throb and Mick Mars’ squealing guitar. He took me in, started to laugh, shook his head. Dressed like a pirate, with a rag tied diagonally across his overprocessed hair, he pulled me close and hugged me, whispering, “Well, okay, respect.”

Respect. More than anything that’s what Nanci brought the world: respect. She smoked. She drank. She recorded other people’s songs to make sure people heard them, shared duets with everyone from the BoDeans to Mac MacAnally, Tanita Tikaram to Darius Rucker.

She loved Loretta Lynn, could talk about her for hours long before Jack White made her a hipster madonna, and Carolyn Hester, a folk goddess almost nobody today remembers. She never played the ingenue, nor did she throw sex around like a hipcheck in ice hockey.

She may’ve veered towards country radio, or closer to adult alternative at times, but she was always utterly herself. She knew how to be true to her literary influences in her songwriting, yet never lose the thread of who she was most of all.

Now she isn’t. Slipped through a crack in time, just – POOF! – and gone.

A couple years ago, her manager sent me to the house to do some interviews for a possible memoir. She was so happy to see me, remembered times I’d interviewed her, places I’d seen her play and so many friends we had in common. It was sweet and fun, like running into an old friend in an unlikely airport.

She treasured her memories, the people she’d met, all the twists along the way. Talking she’d light up, clearly delighted by the memory. But somehow, she wasn’t ready to tack down her past. Yes, it had all happened. She’d had a miraculous life, done amazing things, seen the world many times over, shared stages with incredible musicians.

But to talk about it, you could feel it weighing her down. If she was measuring her past this way, what else was left? She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t know. Not that we ever talked about that in those terms. Sometimes you just know people who look back too much run the risk of turning to salt and blowing away.

Not Nanci Griffith. She was one who held her own course, made her own journey. Of course, she would quietly slip away while no one was looking, just like one of the girls in her songs. She knew where she was going, knew Guy and Townes and Prine and Cowboy Jack and Steve Popovich and Phillip Donnelly and so many more were waiting.

When you’re headed to that, why would you stay? Long ago, she wrote “Gulf Coast Highway” with two friends, a song about love and death and spring in Texas, parsing the way progress siphons off the delicious parts and places of life. The melody feels like steam rising from a blue line on an old map in that kind of swelter only Southern towns near water can muster, the chords moving slowly like a cloud of melancholy.

Yet, “Gulfstream Highway” is a song of triumph and a letting go. When I heard the news, it was the third or fourth thing I played, because the joy in life’s fading is perhaps the thing -- after all the cultural dissonance, all the lives lost -- we need most.

As she sings towards the song’s end:

“Highway 90, the jobs are gone
We tend our garden, we set the sun
This is the only place on Earth blue bonnets grow
And once a year they come and go
At this old house here by the road

And when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away to heaven
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring...”

www.hollygleason.com

Justin Townes Earle: Godspeed, Saints of Lost Causes + Little Rock & Rollers

I know there's an angel just for rock 'n rollers
Watching over you and your daddy tonight

            -- Steve Earle, “Little Rock & Roller”

Justin Earle never seemed to be afraid of anything. A lanky little boy, he’d turn up sometimes caught on fire and ready to take on the world. By the time, his dad had some success, the dark-headed child with the hubcap eyes that took in everything was immortalized on the second side of the iconic debut Guitar Town.

Caught between Earle’s self-defining declaration “Fearless Heart” and the a capella bluegrass of “On Down The Road,” “Little Rock & Roller” was an aching phone call home. From a payphone somewhere near the Arkansas line. A tiny bit of chanson verité, the erstwhile lullaby – a father stunned his child can answer the phone stumbles into the reality of “I guess I didn’t know you could do that/ Lord help me, have I been gone that long?” – in some ways set Justin Townes Earle’s destiny in motion.

Telling the child not to get his mama, savoring the few stolen minutes before getting back on the bus, Earle absorbs all he can – and tells his son not to be afraid, to get some sleep, to dream and know he’s always loved. Funny how what was once literal can be metaphoric and then literal again.

Justin, with the middle name invoking his father’s mentor and friend Townes Van Zandt, was destined for songs. Even more than the drug addiction he battled from puberty, there were pains in his heart, a joy inside, too, that needed to live in songs. And so, after a few local bands, the inevitable rose – and Justin Townes Earle started carving out a place for himself in the Americana world.

In 2008, The Good Life appeared on Chicago’s insurrective Bloodshot, home to Robbie Fulks, the Mekons, Alejandro Escovedo, the. Bottle Rockets and Neko Case. Stark, it featured Dustin Welch, Chris Scuggs and a very young Amanda Shires on the cover. But just as his father reset Nashville with his bulked-up blue collar rock-country, JTE turpentined everything down to the essence – and wrote a record that. was lonely, broken, hopeful and a bit brash.

That old school charm –chartered in part by Mississippi roots master R.S. Field --  offered an almost time warping trip into ‘50s/’60s taverns where Wurlitzer jukeboxes reigned and the Opry was something people waited for on Saturday night radio’s across the Midwest and Southeast.

A charming record, it introduced a young man with a lot of baggage, two big names to carry around and a musicologist’s sense of what he wanted to embrace – and. where he wanted to go. There was a Dickensian (Charles, but also Jim) innocence to the young man who’d already. OD’d five times – and. had lived to tell, not brag.  

Long legs demi-tucked up and sprawling out under the table of the funky sports bar in East Nashville, on the verge of leaving for the first tour for his first album, we laughed about the déjà vu and the inevitability of it all. Hard to believe the child I’d first met during the sessions for his father’s Exit Zero, the follow-up to Guitar Town, was embarking on the same dream.

Harder still to believe, in a true Ecclesiastes manner, I profiling Justin for The Los Angeles Times, the same way I’d written his father’s first national piece for Tower Pulse all those years ago. We laughed about that, about feeling old, sometimes lost and out of place, but knowing that fate understands what we all merely tilt at.

We talked about the life he’d led, the drugs, the street running, the bad company, the broken heart, the lost child and always the hope. Music and addiction give that to you, but the talent – that’s something you have to home. There’s no genius pass when you’re a songwriter, no “just let it fly” when you were raised around the kinds of artists and music JTE was.

He won the Americana Music Association’s 2009 Best New/Emerging Artist. He showed up in Billy Reid, looking every bit the dapper young artist on the rise in a red velvet suit, closely tailored and retro enough to mirror his sound.
His manager Tracy Thomas, who’d worked for E-Squared when Steve and Jack Emerson founded a small label, looked every bit the proud mama. Known for her tenacity and ability to soothe troubled souls, the woman who’s gone on to manage Jason Isbell and was a force in the Drive-By Truckers’ world, Thomas was midwifing a tender heart who wrote with empathy and the cracked determination of an empty generation seeking their place.

Midnight at the Movies and the gospel-flecked Harlem River Blues continued the walk-about through roots, influences and old school aesthetics. Like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Justin understood how to make the antique contemporary, to create a vital sense of now out of something that was so lovingly out of time.
He struggled, too. Yes, he won at 2011 Americana Music Award for Best Song for “Harlem River Blues,” hair parted down the middle like Alfalfa from “The Little Rascals,” round glasses and that scarecrow body. Looking as much Dust Bowl chic as hipster nerd, it seemed Justin was finding a way to be his own man. even if the white-knuckle whispers suggested his demons were always close by.

Still, Justin had that angel quality that made people root for him. Calling from Denmark for a story about Children of the Credibility Revolution, he was thoughtful, disarmingly honest, willing – perhaps too willing -- to talk about the misadventures that were as Earlean as the prodigious gifts of writing and culling music at the source.

When Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now, an album he’d been flirting with when we’d talked, arrived, it was a naked sort of wrestle that reckoned and buckled under the truth of how we mess our lives up. That was Justin’s native ground: loneliness, broken hearts, abandonment, yearning, alienation and always the way shadows inevitably creep up on you.

That sadness and the shuddered off sense of “I’m okay” permeated so much of the music, the kid whose looks were as much Hank Williams Senior as they suggested his own parents offered a refuge for anyone battling disappointment. Listening to Justin Earle, you didn’t feel so alone in your alone. Someone else had been there, his songs suggested, and knew the pain; but also lived to tell, to conjure these soft melodies, these words to let you know you’d make it.

Only somehow, Justin never quite got to the other side. Always slip-ups, backslides, missing chunks. Ultimately, a man’s choices are his own. Justin knew that, too

“Look, I was 20 years old, a junkie on the street,” he said all those years ago. “If you don’t think that’s a dose of reality...I. figured out pretty quick that nothing’s owed me cause of the name I carry.

“Sure, it may get the door open, but then it’s a pretty heavy door, cause it comes with expectations. I’m not intimidated by [the name]... And I’ve always been a fighter – I’ve got the. two fake front teeth to prove it --  so I’m not worried about it.”

Single Mothers and Absent Fathers followed four albums for Bloodshot. Recorded for emo/punk powerhouse indie Vagrant, the two-album song cycle explored that legacy, the wounding and also the marks left. Like everything, there was room on the tracks to let the light come in and the pain out. 

By the time Justin landed on New West, Kids In The Street had a joie du something. Always one to find the bright in the dark, Earle seemed to be seeking a new kind of joy. On the verge of parenthood, perhaps there was a turn. As much a love letter to the scrappy Nashville where he grew up, one of the first razed areas in Nashville’s gentrification, its sweetness outstripped everything. Fatherhood can do that for you.

Still, for all the crossed fingers and held breath, all the second chances and nine lives lived, there was a fragility to Justin that underscored everything. Not quite Jeff Buckley, he understood that the brittle places are the ones that made us precious – and in that, in those songs, perhaps he forged the thing that had gone unstated. His art was not washed in brio, even when he brought bravado to the table – and that allowed the disaffected, the uncertain, the depressed and rejected a comfort and even a bit of dignity.

That his last project was The Saint of Lost Causes seems prescient in the rearview. Evocative, vibey, it pulled you in, twisted his sense of historic, all those influences, he invoked a white working class blues with guitar tones that buzzed and churned inside. He took on truths for the losers, the poor, the cast off, pulled songs out of disparate genres and always put his own sad-eyed self out there.

A gamut run, The Saint of Lost Causes surveyed all the things he’d explored. “Appalachia Nightmare” was raw knuckled Winters Bone kinda stuff, while the acoustic juke of “Don’t Drink the Water” impaled the toxic waters of Flint, Michigan balanced by the must live euphoria of the rockabilly “Flint City Shake It.” There was the atmospheric of “Memphis in the Morning,” a shuffling minimal blues street corner invitation “Say Baby” and the steel-guitar’n’cocktail drum kit self-reckoner “Talking To Myself” to offer the phases and stages of one man trying to move through the world.

Tragedy, triumph, torment. At 38, Justin Earle was too young to be gone. Yet at 38, it’s almost a miracle there were this many years, this many records and songs. Still...
When the social media posts went up, because that’s what we do, someone drew on what was perhaps the best unintended elegy from his catalogue for. his official platforms. Always restless, always seeking, he summed his life up perfectly.

“I've crossed oceans

Fought freezing rain and blowing sand

I've crossed lines and roads and wondering rivers

Just looking for a place to land...”

No cause of death was given, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe all that matters is that he lived...

Today, tears and songs are all that’s left. For all the people who loved him, the ones closest and two rings out, it’s unthinkable – and for those of us, even those who were the occasional beneficiaries of his conversations and his smiles, there’s the jarring notion of how temporal all this is. 

Don’t Go To Strangers - Russell Smith: An Ace, An Old Friend + An Echo of a Moment

Thirty thousand or so feet above everything, late and tired. With the ear buds in, the demos – all top shelf kind of awesome – go rolling by. Heady stuff, and the kind of songs mere mortals never get to hear, because they’re saved for artists whose singles can generate the kind of money that pays more than mortgages, expensive cars and college tuition.

And then that voice. That voice. The kind of voice that can get on top of a basic rock drum kit with a clean, solid beat and a guitar that coils and swaggers as it works the melody like a hooker in a pair of expensive heels, just let those vowels ride it like the wave they’ve all been waiting for. Six foot nine and glassy, he best waves are all sheen and crash – and the steam coming off that humid tenor, not quite smoky, not quite earthy clay, was undeniable.

I could feel the blood draining from my face. A chorus, everything falls away – except the beat, which finds the voice weighing the reality of the situation as a rush of the tempo picks up and the song builds again. The velocity of the arrangement displays the urgency, the singer stacks the truths, knowing “If I leave right now...,” he can change everything.

But the singer knows, she’s leaving. Not just leaving him, but leaving for somewhere. California, a dream, a life, some other than what she’s had with the hero. Russell Smith, a son of Lafeyette, Tennessee, had always been able to twist the complexities of life and wring them into fecund songs.

The demo says Tom Shapiro, no slouch of a songwriter. Obviously, one of – if not the only – writer on “If I Leave Right Now,” with the boast, “I could reach around and clip. Those pretty wings/ Before she flies to her California dreams/ She could never say no to me/ I know she won’t go...”
Sit there and drink, chase the girl and bring her back. Is it ambivalence? One more toxic male who won’t bother? Or some hard-boiled cowboy who knows some women aren’t meant to be held down, held back, held.
Mouth dry, my stomach lurched. What do you say? Who do you tell?

In life, there are those moments that seem so significant, then mean seemingly nothing at all. But you’re tagged, by the charge, the laughter, the whispered long distance, coiling and uncoiling the telephone chord in those hours when normal people are asleep. You talk about literature, rock & roll tours, missing the Grammys the year you win “beating Dolly & Porter, and that just shouldn’t happen.” You discuss theories of sobriety, people you know, people you don’t, people you’ve heard of, as well as the holes that open between people, caverns that swallow the good things and leave jagged shores of anger, misunderstanding, frustration.

Oh, and an album called This Little Town.

See, Russell Smith had been the big shot lead singer of the Amazing Rhythm Aces, known for the tawdry unapologetic cheap hook-up “Third Rate Romance,” the cheating lament “Amazing Grace (Used To Be Her Favorite Song)” and the Grammy-winning almost. gospel “The End Is Not In Sight.” He’d also written big ‘80s hits for John Conlee (“Old School”), Randy Travis (“Look Heart No Hands”) and T Graham Brown (“Don’t Go To Strangers”), later Texas guitarist/vocalist Lee Roy Parnell (“The Rock”).

Leave it to an L.A transplant to Sony Nashville’s A&R. Department named Larry Hamby, who also signed Blaster Dave Alvin as a solo and DC folkie Mary Chapin Carpenter, believed the post-Urban Cowboythrall had room for a sultry Music Row meets Muscle Shoals rocker with roots in gospel, country, bluegrass. The downstroke firm, the ability to hit the note head-on, but also to slither in was a best of both worlds proposition – and the writing was personal, detailed, yet you could see all kinds of people in the laments, the shuffles, the midtempo. ruminations.

It wasn’t an album destined to change the face of anything, but in a lounge lizard Nashville framed by men with back-combed chest-fur pillowing gold nugget medallions, bolo ties and girls with rooster spiked hair, it felt worn and honest. The songwriting was solid – the title track captured small town communication with the wistful truth “Mrs. White tells Mrs. Brown/Before you know it’s all over town,” the faded kid making do “Jenny Hold On,” the dobro-bending, Louvin-feeling harmonies on “Anger & Tears,” the big city girl “riding through the concrete canyons of New York” haunting him on “The Colorado Side” – and that voice, equal parts good bourbon, dried tobacco leaves and very old brandy.
More than anything, Smith wrote of loss, compromised dreams, the hard piece of heartache. Even more profoundly, he didn’t write master tragedies, but squalid truths that existed behind bad neon that flickered and buzzed, cheap motels with chipped linoleum, a dank smell and sheets that didn’t feel good. It wasn’t that people weren’t faithful, it’s that life made it so hard to be true; Smith – unblinking – wrote what he saw.
“When The Night Comes To Call,” like Joe Cocker’s “When The Night Falls,” was a grown-up consideration of congress. But for Cocker, it was the known, the consumed by a fidelity of the soul. Smith wasn’t that holy; he recognized the raw desire and the need to feel another, especially one who evoked what was already lost. There was a stateliness to hanker, the right hand on the piano rising and the left kneading bottom chords, a Bob Seger-feeling acoustic guitar. sweeping up any stray bits of emotion.

No regrets here, no judgement. Sometimes being lost in the flesh is all you can do. Why look back? Why look down? Burn the moment ‘til it’s gone, embrace what is – and feel that delivery by. raging fire.
Country music used to be for adults. There was a sexual knowing, frankness even, and acceptance. True love isn’t always, but the need for release, for connection, the illusion of kindness is relentless. And so, This Little Town.

Liz Thiels, a publicist with unwavering taste and a strong sense of narrative, understood why an artist like this, one more tangential than straight WSM Country would move me. Not just the Eagles tours, or Don Kirschner’s “Rock Concert” appearances. Opening acts were once as strong as the headliners, often – like Little Feat or NRBQ, even the Replacements – more adventurous.
The interview – by phone, the first of so many ponderous phone calls – was vast: how songs formed, truths pulled away from the obvious, hooks done properly held them down. Was it for Country Song Round Up? Tune-In? Tower Pulse? Doubtful The LA Times, or Rolling Stone.
Doesn’t matter, like so many of the publications above, Russell Smith is gone.

Just saw the news, somewhere. Russell Smith, RIP. Basic facts, a few song titles, the request – in lieu of flowers – to donate to the Macon County High School Band. Internment in the Testament Primitive Baptist Cemetery says that, finally, the man who sang, “my soul cries out for rest, but the end is not in sight...” has found his final reward.

Funny the things you remember about first meetings. He wasn’t much taller than me, and his hair was like soft, dark brillo. Wearing all black, slimming, lengthening. Not auspicious for a man seeking to be a country star – something he laughed about, appreciating the irony; later skewering fame jockeying with “Jerry Fontaine (& His Screaming Guitar).” Somehow, with eyes that sparkled with life, it felt right for the songs.

Like a captured animal, he was killing time in a holding banquet room in the Stouffers Hotel, where he would soon sing in a ballroom for people he needed. Was it Country Radio Seminar? A NACA Convention? IBMA? IEBA? I do not remember, nor did it matter. He’d written hits; he’d won a Grammy. He didn’t need, just wanted a reason to get out there and play.

And for all the Southern soul to his soft rock-tempered country, he really liked the hard stuff. Loved Tammy, as well as Conway, and Jones. He would talk about obscure tracks, laugh about the way vowels got stretched, notes tumbled or suspended, then smack his lips about how good it was.

A member of MENSA, a kid who watched Tennessee find its way, a seeker or maybe a wonderer, he was mostly a father of two boys, a recent divorcee with a wife who left for the one thing a man can’t give her. He was bitter, trying to cope, seeking higher ground, hoping for more, harder than he ever intended. He was funny, and he liked to talk.
And so we did. Politics. Religion. Broken hearts. Promises that unraveled. Hopes that you steer by. Al Green. Foster & Lloyd. Movies no one saw. Faulkner. Twain. Laughter. Outrage. Sam Kinison. What was going to happen to country music. Would it matter? And why are existentialist wells such a pain to fall into?

You fall into confessions and communion with people. Never planned, rarely sacramental. Just there you are, profane and seeking. In this case, I was California – and he was Tennessee. He told me he thought I looked like a kid, couldn’t believe I was the music critic Holly Gleason. I replied something about sounding taller on records. We laughed.
For a period of time, we would meet up. David Kidd, when it was two stories. Hide and seek in a book store, or more “find me.” But you could park yourself somewhere interesting, and when the other showed didn’t matter. And when they did, always plenty to talk about.
And as intriguing as his singing voice was, there was something about his speaking voice. Warm, with a real strength to it. And softness. A voice you could sink into, feel welcome and reassured. Everything we’re looking for in life, only it’s a mirage. You could hear them when he talked.

Funny thing, though, about being friends with grown-ups, real life takes them away. You can twist for days in someone’s life, run your fingers over their books, marvel at their heavy wooden furniture, or family photos, but it’s not the same as being there day in and out. It’s not like pitching a tent, claiming your ground and dropping an anchor.
No, you drift and the line breaks. What you love about the other person, it doesn’t go away. Occasionally, you’ll have a random encounter, a run-in or an overlap. You smile the smile of one who roots for the other, asks all the right questions, look all the way to the. Back of their eyes – and watch the soul shine.

One latte spring night we sat outside the Bluebird, on the curb, talking about nothing. Just because. The night bugs weren’t swarming, but had to occasionally be wiped out of our mouths, and still we sat, talking and laughing. It was easy like that, elusive in ways the sex he often sang of wasn’t.

Not quite that last bit before daybreak, he made some joke about being old and hoping he could get up. Then confessed he had the boys coming over early, reached out, offered me his hand and said, “We both probably oughta be getting home.”
And that was that, melting into the steel grey of a new day fixing to happen.
It’s been years now since whenever the last time I saw him. There were incredible songs – the heartbreaking post-divorce “The Home for Unwed Fathers” comes to mind – and Amazing Rhythm Aces reunions; collaborations as the hilarious soulgrass Run CnW, with his friends Jim Photoglo, Bernie Leadon and Vince Melamud.

What you have with people can be so vivid, so incandescent, it always shines when you close your eyes. You can hear the voice, and that butterscotch thread melts inside you. It’s easy to keep moving, working, being – and get pulled away.
Until you’re sitting on a plane, slicing through those same lost hours, hearing a voice without introduction and everything gives way. Even when you hold your poker face, your inner dam collapses. But after so much time, what do you say?

Tonight, nothing. Russell Smith is gone. But really, he’d been gone, just a hint of scent on the humidity here and there. Maybe someone who knew we knew each other, carrying news. Or a random bit of music. And it’s okay, or as okay as it can be.

Having had that life intersect mine for however many months, it was glorious. As glorious as the music, as alive and flickering as a flame. I could rue the time lost, or I could be amazed at what was. Me, I’ll choose the music, and the memories, be thankful for what I had – and maybe remember to embrace the ones who’ve moved beyond a little more.

15 July 2019

Las Vegas, Hear Me Crying

Las Vegas.

There are no words. I’m not even sure prayers, as I feel so raw and empty from all of it. Even growing up with pretty strong exposure to mental health care issues, I’m having a hard time even finding a frayed thread to hang onto.

Like Columbine…

like the slaughter in the Colorado movie theater…

like Sandy Hook…

like the nightclub shooting in Orlando, Cincinnati, Indiana…
like sleepy Chardon, Ohio…
like, like, like, like, like…
there is no explanation that begins to start explaining. No right words, no origination place to truly come to a start of “how.”

In a year that’s already been marked by much sadness, much indignation, much loss, much unthinkable tragedy, 22,000 people go to a country concert – and fifty are dead, two hundred injured. To have a fun night out? To throw your fist toward the sky, lean into a song and feel the freedom of what music does? 
There are no words.

How many times have I been clustered about a stage at Mandalay Bay? Or any number of places out in the wide open, out where people crowd together on an infield, an endzone? Watching the music, throwing myself over to what songs can do – heal, inspire incite dreams and serotonin. Music is a way to face the world, to be lifted up, to forget what pulls us under.

Now this? More than 50 dead. More than 400 injured. The numbers keep growing. Shot down from above, without a chance in the world. Not that a chance should even enter into it. Not like this, not there. Not for 22,000 people who came out on a Sunday night to have one last rush of songs and fun before their weekend closed.

There are no words.

Or reasons.

Stephen Paddock, 64, Semi-retired. Owned two small planes. Getting a divorce. Had a girlfriend. Sent his mother cookies. Liked burritos. It’s all out there, courtesy of the worldwide web. Google, and click, search, find. Piles and piles of facts.

So much to know: where he’s worked, what kinds of guns were in the room, how many. What property he’s owned. What was paid, what price it sold for. The fact he mad no military background, no political affiliation, no religious affiliation. “Just a guy hanging out,” his brother said.

Where are the words?

Eight or ten long range weapons. The thirty-second floor – a perfect overview of a bunch of people getting ready for the week or letting go of the weekend. “Night Train,”  “Hicktown,” “The Way I  Know,” “Amarillo Sky,” “Laughed Until We Cried,” “Gonna Know We Were Here,” “Tattoos on This Town,” “Big Green Tractor,” “She’s Country,” “Dirty Road Anthem,” all songs for working people for whom their life is enough. No violence, no disruption, no hate being sown.

And so. More than 50 lives are done. More than 500 injured, the new reports are saying.
There are no words.

In a world that loves recrimination, where Amendments and agendas tangle, pull, rub us raw, larger questions rise. The nation was built on the Second Amendment. NRA Country is part of how so many acts market their records, speak “to the base.”  Where do we draw the line?

I am haunted by a late night conversation with Eddie Montgomery, a man whose own life has been riddled with more tragedies than any one man should face, at the bar at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas over a decade ago. Him explaining to a city girl about country boys and guns:  “You respect them, Miss Holly. You know what they can do, and you treat them according to it. You keep’em up, or locked. You make sure your kids understand that they can kill, and they’re not toys. And when they’re old enough to hunt, you let them understand that, too.”

It echoed a conversation another ten years prior with Richard Young from the Kentucky Headhunters, an avid hunter who explained thinning herds keeps animals from starving to death during the winter. It seemed a less cruel way to avoid what might be inevitable. I didn’t know then.

Right now, I don’t know, either.

I can see the bumperstickers: When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.
I think about all the people I know who hunt – from Mr. Morton with his ducks when I was in the 2^nd or 3^rd grade to Gary LeVox from Rascal Flatts. I know they’re not the problem, as it sets this morning.

And I know I do not know, beyond something has to change. Beyond turning away, beyond saying “it’s not my world,” beyond “this is an aberration.”

It’s funny, every time Country Radio Seminar would come around – and the vinyl NRA Country signs would go up along the big glass breezeway to the exhibit hall, my stomach would churn. I’d stand and stare and wonder, “What price marketing?” and “Do they understand how far this reaches, what all they’re really endorsing?”

It was never my place to say, and no one asked me. But standing here I wonder, as someone who evokes eye rolls and clenched teeth with all my annoying questions, where is the line? How honest do we want to be about the tremendous velocity of the world in which we live, our increasing numbness to other people’s states of heart and mind and the cruelty that passes for how we often treat each other?
I do not know. I do… not… know.
Except today in Las Vegas, 58 people, the number rises again, will not see another day… and the concentric rings of people who loved them, worked with them, shared families or children or laughs with them now have a hole torn in the fabric of their lives.
Except today in Las Vegas, 515+ people will have to begin recovering from profound injuries to their bodies. But also, their sense of safety in the world, their sense of how the live and work and breathe.

Except today in Vegas, 22,000 people will have varying amounts of trauma, of horrors, of things they can’t explain. Their sleep may be disrupted with cold sweats and flying awake, or nightmares they can’t pull themselves out of. Their life may be punctuated by shaking uncontrollably without knowing what triggered it, or losing their sense of place and time, or flashbacks from out of nowhere, but many of them will have landmines in their lives they don’t see coming,.

A few may be okay.  Just fine, absolutely perfect in spite of what they saw or heard. Grateful they got through it. Those are the blessed ones with no propensity for PTSD.  Or survivors’ guilt. God bless them.
And then there are the rest of us, who ride those highways, hang out backstage at those events. We know it’s not the norm. It doesn’t happen often, which is why I can’t turn away.  Because it did.

It’s more than our innocence. That was lost in Paris when the Bataclan was rushed, when that slaughter happened. It’s more than our whistling by the graveyard at this point, the club killing in Orlando showed that it can happen here.
Beyond unthinkable, it is. It just is.
Seeing the shooter, hearing his brother talk about him, my heart hurts. He looks like just another guy down the street: a nice older man who’d go to Spring Training games, maybe hold down a stool at the local bar talking life’n’sports with the other regulars, who’d take his grandkids to Chuck E Cheese – or in this case, out for burritos.

There are no words. Beyond – today -- telling someone you love much you care.

www.hollygleason.com