Andrew Marvell once wrote, “How vainly men themselves amaze/ To win the palm, the oak, or bays.” Way back in the 17th Century, Marvell mocked our craving for trinkets of recognition. That poets knew about the masturbatory pointlessness of awards centuries before it was possible to listen to Christopher Cross speaks to their awesome powers of insight.
But even an awards skeptic would have to be impressed by the nominees in the Album of the Year Category at the 27th Grammy Awards, held all the way back in 1985. The Album of the Year is usually a blah category even by Grammy standards, but for one magic year it was almost completely filled with albums that remain listenable decades later.
Take, for instance, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer. The Grammys have always loved to gin up a comeback narrative, but this is a rare case where the comeback album is good enough that people at Tina Turner shows in 1985 would have wanted to hear the new stuff. Private Dancer isn’t all-killer, no-filler, and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” is a little slower and less interesting than I remembered, but honestly, it doesn’t matter. When Turner hits the chorus she tears a hole through the damn thing, and reminds us that she, unlike everyone else on Earth, is Tina Turner. It would have been a perfectly acceptable winner, particularly relative to the history of the award.
Even bigger on the radio that year was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. There is obviously a fair amount of silliness here--”Glory Days” could profitably be cut by 2 minutes or possibly altogether, there’s synths on top of synths layered with synths, and Bruce and Courtney Cox set back the art of dance by fifteen years. But if you’re inclined to like Springsteen even a little, you’re likely to enjoy everything here, and it’s hard to imagine an album better constructed to play to the top row at the Meadowlands. There have only been a few times in pop history when music this white and this popular was also this good. All these years later, I’m still surprised it didn’t win.
Perhaps an even better pop assemblage was Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual. I’ve given it a few spins in recent weeks to refresh my memory, and side one is perfect--three heartbreak songs, each with a different approach to the theme, balanced against an explosion of pure joy (“Money Changes Everything”; “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; “When You Were Mine”; “Time After Time”). Lauper delivers them in her trademark combination of New Wave theatricality, food court populism, and Northeastern girl group attitude. If I had a time machine which could be used only for the purpose of casting a ballot for the 1985 Grammys (“do not pass Go; do not kill baby Hitler”), it would pain me not to vote for She’s So Unusual. It’s still such a fun record.
But alas, I can’t cast a hypothetical vote for Lauper, because once upon a time a man named Prince glided across the earth. Purple Rain contains a killer opening track (“Let’s Go Crazy”), an epic closing track (“Purple Rain”), one of the greatest pop songs of all time (“When Doves Cry”), and the song that inspired Tipper Gore to found the PMRC (“Darling Nikki”). “When Doves Cry” somehow didn’t get nominated for Song of the Year, but that’s only a minor snub, because it should have earned Prince the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Purple Rain isn’t the consensus best Prince album, but that’s the nature of the Grammys (of the three people mentioned above, only Lauper was at her creative peak). Purple Rain is Prince at his most colossal. At every single moment he’s going for it. If awards are to be given to rock albums, surely this--almost entirely reaching the crazy ambition to write a genre-spanning album that is both deeply personal and yet somehow also aimed at everyone--is the thing to be crowned.
(editor's note: Scholars of the work of Richard Yates recently found the following tucked into the back of a drink recipe book in the archives of a bar in midtown Manhattan. It appears to be a section Yates edited out of the final draft of his classic mid-twentieth-century novel Revolutionary Road. In this section, main character Frank Wheeler fills out a Facebook Valentine's Day survey about his relationship with his wife April Wheeler. It is the great privilege of the EG Revue to publish such an important literary artifact.)
How’d you guys meet?At a party in Morningside Heights. I was four whiskeys deep, which helped. I’d never really been with a “first-rate” girl before. I’d dated a couple girls in New York, but one had “unpardonably thick ankles” and the other had a “tendency to mother me.” Anyway, April’s “shining hair and splendid legs had drawn me halfway across a roomful of strangers.” I thought she was a girl named Pamela, but she wasn’t. She was April, she was a first-rate girl, and she laughed at my jokes.
First date? About a week later we went out, and somehow by daybreak there she was, “lying miraculously nude beside me in the first blue light of day on Bethune Street.”
How long have you been married? Well, Niffer is about to turn seven. So seven years.
Who was interested first? On the aforementioned night on Bethune Street, she told me that I was the most interesting man she’d ever met. Inasmuch as I am interesting, it would follow that she was interested.
Who said I love you first? Not sure. April was definitely the first one to say “I love you when you’re nice.”
Most impatient? I’d say April. She’s always been impatient to get to Europe. That was our plan before she got pregnant, and even then, she was impatient to, um, deal with the situation before I convinced her to keep the thing. That was when I got the job at Knox Business Machines, which, trust me, is not a thing I take seriously. Anyway, now April has this plan to work as a secretary in Paris so I can have time to find myself because--and this is her talking--”it’s unrealistic for a man with a fine mind to go on working like a dog year after year at a job he can’t stand, coming home to a house he can’t stand in a place he can’t stand either, to a wife who’s equally unable to stand the same things.” So I’d say she’s more impatient.
Most sensitive? Definitely April--she was training to be an actress before we met. That’s how she got mixed up with the community theater performance of The Petrified Forest that turned out to be such a shambles. I should have known better than to let her get mixed up with that damned thing.
Most stubborn? April. I keep telling her she needs to go into analysis. She’s too stubborn to really love someone, it seems to me. It’s hardly her fault, with that absent mess of a father on top of all the usual penis envy that all the medical journals apparently say that all the women have. But it’s a hell of a time getting her to go.
Falls asleep first? It depends. How much have I had to drink?
Cooks better? I definitely opened some cans of beans and so forth in my Village bachelor pad days. But it’s 1955. Who the hell do you think cooks better?
Better morning person? Probably her. I don’t really perk up until I’ve had my second martini.
Better driver? Me. April never wants to do anything in a car.
Best Sense of Humor? That’s a tough one. I have insights, I think, into some of the degrading nonsense out here in the suburbs, but I feel it’s important not to make absolutely everything a joke. On the other hand, April doesn’t smile very often, except for when she gets on one of her hysterical laughing jags.
Where do you eat out the most as a couple? If by eat you mean drink, then it’s definitely Vito's Log Cabin, where we sometimes go dancing with the Campbells. There’s a little jazz combo, and they get a good mix of people from Revolutionary Estates. It’s awful.
Who is more social? For Chrissake, who even wants to be social out here? How many conversations can you have about schools and picture windows and sedum (whatever the hell that is)? That said, it’s probably me. Back in college everyone said that Wheeler’s really got it going on upstairs.
Who wears the pants in the relationship? April put on some pants one morning not too long ago--the Saturday after her performance in The Petrified Forest, actually--and went out to mow the lawn. I’d been meaning to do it, but then we got into it after the play was such a disaster, and so I’d had a few and I didn’t exactly spring out of bed if you know what I mean. But there she was, out there on the damn lawn with her slacks and the mower, practically begging for Mrs. Givings to drive by and start snooping around with her questions about whether I was sick. I know what she’s really thinking, not that I give a good Goddamn.
Who hogs the remote? What the hell is a remote? Oh, it’s for the TV? That’s definitely one of the ways you know the world is going to hell; the kids with their cartoons and no one anywhere even cares to so much as think about what it might mean to get some actual culture in this country for once.
Post a picture of you and your valentine:
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19427697
I recently read a message board comment where someone asserted that the characters in The Sun Also Rises might be shittier people than the characters in The Great Gatsby. After I read this, I thought to myself, “man, in spite of my many robes, degrees, and learnings, I have no idea how to decide that one.”
And so, as part of my enduring quest for knowledge, I have produced this, the EG Revue’s rankings of the most awful people in the LGGANU (Lost Generation Great American Novelistic Universe). Their particular sins are noted in parentheses.
Tom Buchanan (accessory to murder; accessory to manslaughter; racism; infidelity; domestic violence; went to Yale)
Daisy Buchanan (vehicular manslaughter; shirt fetish; was probably drunk the whole time she was pregnant)
Mike Campbell (defaults on debts to friends; terrible restaurant patron; is more anti-Semitic than his friends, which is saying something)
George Wilson (straight-up murders a dude; amazingly this only gets him to #4 on the list)
Lady Brett Ashley (relishes producing chaos; selfish in relationships; leaves the bloody ear of a bull in the drawer of hotel nightstand for maid to find; probably didn’t tip)
Bill Gorton (shit-stirrer; uses a lot more racial slurs than you remember)
Jay Gatsby (oversees vast criminal enterprise; fails to respect boundaries with neighbors; has spent nearly a century being a bad influence on Lloyd Dobler types)
Robert Cohn (infidelity; assault and battery; writes mediocre novels)
Owl Eyes (symbolically linked to distant indifferent God; judges people by the contents of their bookshelves)
Jake Barnes (enabler; betrays the ethical code of bullfight aficionados; wastes the valuable time of a Parisian sex worker)
Myrtle Wilson (infidelity; fails to respect rules of the road)
Jordan Baker (cheats at golf; tells long-winded Kentucky-based anecdotes)
Meyer Wolfsheim (fixes the World Series in such a way that it is won by a team from Ohio)
Nick Carraway (finance bro; went to Yale; is “Minnesota nice”)
Pedro Romero (tortures animals for a living)
The Green Light (launched a thousand tedious term papers)
Frances Clyne (has a point; won’t let it go)
Montoya (kinda judgy)
Klipspringer (leaves shoes everywhere)
Count Mippipopolous (honestly, the Count seems like a good hang)
In conclusion, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway are important works of American fiction which contain many jerks. This has been demonstrated first with an introduction, and then with a ranking of twenty jerks. As I look back at the list, I see that four of the top six are from Gatsby, and Fitzgerald’s classic has the higher body count (well, human body count anyway). So I guess The Great Gatsby contains worse people than The Sun Also Rises.
The reading of poems at Presidential inaugurations is a relatively new event in American history. A couple weeks ago, Amanda Gorman became only the sixth poet invited to read at a Presidential inauguration. Five of these inaugural poems have been presented in the last 28 years, with the only exception being Robert Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration.
There’s probably an essay to be written about why inaugural poetry might have emerged at this late date, at least among Democrats, as a nascent tradition. Is it just Kennedy’s charisma still looming over his party? Is it an example of a secularizing country (or party) looking for a non-religious means of solemnifying a civic event? Is it a perverse joke wherein a three-minute poem is rolled out to atone for denigrating the arts and humanities at all other times of year?
As someone who teaches students about the history of poetry, I have a more speculative question: what might inaugural poetry have looked like through the years if it were a longer-standing tradition? What poets and poems might have appeared? The obvious truth is that if poems had been read at every inauguration ceremony, most of them would have been milquetoast work from poets long-forgotten. Such is the nature of art placed in the service of decorum. It’s not like anyone with actual power would ever let Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, or Danez Smith anywhere near that dais.
But since inaugural poetry has, through most of American history, been a thing that never happened, I’m free to daydream about what might have been especially good poems for the occasion. I thought about going truly nuts and proposing a poem for literally every inauguration since 1789. But since I have an actual job which currently presents me with a maze of brush fires, I limited myself to picking a handful of poems from the early-to-mid twentieth century that might have been particularly powerful commentaries at one of our core civic ceremonies.
There are a lot of Williams poems I could choose, since few major poets outside of Whitman have been so inclined to take America itself as their subject matter. But “It Is a Living Coral,” Williams’ celebration of the Capitol building, feels especially poignant after January 6, so we’ll assign WCW the task of dignifying the inauguration of Calvin Coolidge.
Williams’ poem, which first appeared in 1924, turns the solidity and mass of the Capitol into a living, lovely thing: “a dome/ eight million pounds/ in weight/ iron plates constructed/ to expand/ and contract with/ variations/ of temperature/ the folding/ and unfolding of a lily.” Williams then spins into a giddy catalog of the paintings and sculptures that fill the Capitol dome, and the poem starts to feel like a not-quite-orderly montage of American history. With his pure energy and capacity for slightly irreverent awe, Williams makes this “archaic” building a metonym for a nation he hopes can be as flexible as it is massive.
Despite the title, this poem is primarily about the US; it just takes Moore a few lines of epigrammatic takes on foreign country countries before she settles into her main topic, America, “where there are no proofreaders, no silkworms, no digressions,” and where “letters are written/ not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,/ but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!” It would be fun to watch Senators and Justices try to puzzle out whether and how much this is supposed to be funny, and to what degree the joke is at their expense.
I hope that someday a Republican invites a poet to read at the inauguration, as inaugural poems have thus far been a strictly Democratic affair. Moore would have been honored to read at the 1929 inauguration, as she came from a pro-GOP family that held Herbert Hoover in great esteem for his WWI-era relief efforts. At the end of her poem, Moore insists that if culture is hard to find in America, “must one imagine/ that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality.” It would also be nice to imagine that poetry needn’t be confined to one party.
In an alternate universe where poems had been read at every inauguration, it’s safe to assume that the list of poets would have been exclusively white for a very long time. I’d like to believe that a person of color would have been chosen as an inaugural poet long before Maya Angelou in 1993, but if I’m being honest, I also suspect that inaugural poetry’s color line would have endured longer than Major League Baseball’s.
So I very much doubt that Sterling Brown would have been selected to read at an inauguration in 1933. But in an alternate universe where a black poet could have read at FDR’s first inauguration, Washington D.C. native Brown, whose best poems are deeply democratic and American, would have been a fantastic choice.
“Strong Men'' in particular is a perfect poem for public performance, and not just because it sounds amazing. Brown celebrates the cross-generational resilience of African-Americans in the face of slavery, violence, and segregation, but he is also optimistic about the future: “Strong men keep a-comin’ on,/ Gittin’ stronger.” And surely, in a year as difficult as 1933, such a statement of optimism would have been a powerful thing.
“The Book of the Dead” is the final section of Rukeyser’s long poem of the same name, which appeared in 1938, and combines poetry, interviews, and documentary research to tell the story of the hundreds of workers who died of silicosis as a result of shoddy safety practices at a West Virginia mining operation. Of all the poems I’ve mentioned, this is probably the least likely ever to be allowed to be read at an official American political ceremony, not only because of its topic, but also because of Rukeyser’s politics, which were well to the left of Roosevelt.
But that said, the individual poem “The Book of the Dead,” which is a much more traditional lyric poem than most of the rest of the book, has long struck me as one of the great poems about what America is, and what it could be. Rukeyser writes the poem in Dante-echoing tercets, which is fitting for a book about workers descending into an industrial hell. But within that form Rukeyser crafts a sprawling Whitmanic travelogue through the American countryside. Indeed, much of the poem is very pretty, though Rukeyser avoids Whtiman’s tendency to float up from the soil to the ether, and instead challenges the reader to support the workers crushed by their nation’s quest for progress. Near the end, she implores us to “Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,/ to photograph and to extend the voice,/ to speak this meaning.”
If I just describe what this poem is about, you’ll wonder why I chose it for such an august occasion. The speaker wanders through midtown Manhattan, checks out some construction workers, contemplates lunch, window shops, looks at billboards, thinks about movie stars, eats a burger, and remembers a few of his recently deceased friends (one of whom is Jackson Pollock). All of this unfolds over a couple pages of loose, chatty, enjambment-propelled free verse. O’Hara conveys the energy of a pleasant nothing of a day, but like all great art that alchemically captures something so ephemeral, it also feels poignant. Perhaps it feels especially poignant nowadays, when the pleasures of strolling aimlessly through a crowd are denied us.
Whatever else America is, it’s definitely Times Square and cheeseburgers and getting lost in the bustle. Inaugural poems needn’t all be stuffy; we’re not British, after all. And so we’ll let O’Hara, poet laureate of the everyday, take the hypothetical stage.
An inaugural poem for 1965 surely should have celebrated the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. Hayden’s poem about Douglass, which had first appeared in The Atlantic all the way back in 1947, packs celebration, prophecy, and challenge into a mere fourteen lines. Hayden imagines a day when freedom “is finally ours,” when it will be as instinctive as “brain matter, systole, diastole,/ reflex action,” and become something more than “the gaudy mumbo-jumbo of politicians.” When that day comes, we will finally be worthy of being from the same nation as Frederick Douglass, “this former slave, this Negro/ beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world/ where none is lonely, none hunted.”
I should stop quoting it and you should just go read it. Recited at a presidential inauguration, Hayden’s poem would elevate the occasion rather than the other way around.
It’s safe to say that no poet would ever be invited to Washington to “respond” to the President, but since this exercise is entirely speculative, I’m going to imagine Jay Wright reading at Richard Nixon’s second inauguration. Wright’s 1971 poem “The Homecoming Singer” is initially full of energy, as the speaker travels across a Nashville “livid with lights,/ as if the weight of all the people/ shooting down her arteries had inflamed them.” But the poem gets quieter and more contemplative until eventually concluding with the speaker in a dream where he hears a woman sing a sad, operatic song that “brings up the Carolina calls,/ the waterboy, the railroad cutter, the jailed,/ the condemned, all that had been forgotten/ on this night of homecomings, all/ that had been misplaced in those livid arteries.”
In the middle of the Nixon era, Wright dreamt of a song for those who are actually silenced, actually forsaken; not a silent majority but a silenced reality. In all of its sadness and anger, Wright’s poem is also a meditation on what “coming home” could mean for those swept aside, or for the poem’s lonely speaker, or for a nation where displacement is a way of life. It is, in a sense, a poem about the realities that are hidden by traditions, which in a roundabout way would make it perfect for the occasion.
538 reports that Vegas is taking bets on the poem Amanda Gorman is scheduled to read as part of the Super Bowl festivities.
I'm not gonna lie: the idea of gambling on a poem about sports combines three of my six or seven favorite things, so I am intrigued. But the betting options on offer strike me as not all that interesting. For instance, I'm baffled that "neither" is not an option for which team name Gorman uses first. I would bet every penny of revenue generated by this blog on "neither."
So here, for your home amusement, are the EG Revue's wagering proposals for the Super Bowl poem. Note that I don't know how to balance odds correctly, as I am not an actual bookie, so the number are rough.
1. The first end-rhyme in the poem will be:
A. Masculine [last syllable of rhyme stressed; i.e. shade/wade] (-130)
B. Feminine [last syllable of rhyme unstressed; i.e. inherit/repair it] (+110)
C. There will be no end-rhyme (+1000)
2. Over/Under on usages of the word "field" (this includes "field" embedded in compound nouns, like "battlefield"):
A. Over 1.5 (-110)
B. Under 1.5 (-110)
3. Which of the following words will appear first in Gorman's poem:
A. Charge (+160)
B. Light (-150)
C. Brigade (+1000)
D. None of the Above (+120)
4. The primary denotative meaning of the first usage of the word "Montana" will be:
A. The state of Montana (+250)
B. NFL Hall of Famer Joe Montana (+800)
C. Al Pacino's character from Scarface (+30,000)
D. The poem will not use the word "Montana" (-350)
5. Which will be longer:
A. The length of the poem, in seconds, with the timer starting when Gorman speaks the first word of the poem (+220)
B. The length of the first scoring drive of the game, in seconds of elapsed game clock, as recorded in official box score (-200)
This summer, I watched the Springfield, MO music documentary The Center of Nowhere, which was a lovingly-made
bit of boosterism that included some genuinely cool interviews and historical
footage. It was pleasant, if a bit sad, to watch it in a year when I can’t get
back to Springfield for the usual occasions. I found after watching the film that
I was immediately assembling my own list of my favorite songs by Springfield
bands. And so, after a few months of hemming, hawing, and typing, I have
assembled a list of my ten favorite songs of Springfield, MO.It would be much more fun to drive down to
the Ozarks, catch up with friends, and argue about this stuff over a whiskey or
four, but I guess a blog post will have to do for now.
The number of years since I moved away from Springfield at
age 18 far exceeds the number of years that I lived there when I was growing up.
Listening to music from the Ozarks has long been a way to feel connected to a
place that still means a lot to me, even if that place seems to the rest of the
world like a backwater.
I hope that the following list will be taken in the spirit
intended, which is as one music fan’s love letter to the town where
he grew up. I have no more authority than anyone else to make such a list, and
far less authority than some people. So think of it as a mixtape as much as a
ranking. And I always scribbled way too many liner notes on mixtapes.
Okay, some caveats and clarifications:
*I make no claims to this list being definitive. If you care
about Springfield music, your mileage will almost certainly vary, and that’s a
wonderful thing.
*I’ve listened to a lot of stuff from Springfield over the
years, but as I said, I haven’t actually lived there full-time since 1995. So I
don’t necessarily know all the new bands, and what I do know is inflected by the
recommendations of friends. Brett Miller and Jenny Edwards in particular have
pointed me to a lot of good stuff, though neither of them bear any blame for my
deficiencies of taste.
*There’s obviously the question of how to define “songs of
Springfield.” I’m defining it to mean songs written and performed by artists
associated primarily or exclusively with Springfield or its immediate environs.
There are obviously other ways one could do this. A list of nationally known
artists who spent some small portion of their career performing or recording in
Springfield might lean heavily to Brenda Lee, the Carter Family, or Robbie
Fulks; a list of songs written by Springfieldians but made famous by national
artists would give you “Danger Zone,” “The Letter,” and “Always on My Mind.”
But my list is about songs that are of, by, and to a great extent for
Springfieldians.
*I am the age I am, and like anyone I’m partial to the music
of my teens and twenties. In my case, this means the 90’s and 00’s. I also have
my own genre preferences. I particularly enjoy Americana performed by
smartasses and indie rock performed by dorks. I like hooks. I mistrust
virtuosity. All of that is reflected here.
*This is a Springfield list. Not a 417 list. There’s no
Branson. No Knobbers. No Shojis. Anything located within five miles of a
fucking wax museum is out. That said, I did consider including the “Fire in the Hole” theme song.
*Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing. Here’s my list: The EG
Revue’s Ten Favorite Songs of Springfield, MO.
Everything else I’m putting on this list is at least ten
years old. I really like both of these songs, but I haven’t yet had the chance to
burn out on them and then come back later, which is always the biggest test.
So, they get placed in a #10 tie, which will probably strike me as far too low
or high a few years from now.
Izabel Crane on “Spring Fed River” continues the long tradition
of Springfield artists revisiting gospel in other genres. It’s a baptism song
of a sort, but a decidedly secular one. I could imagine Isabel Crane gaining an
audience beyond Springfield. Certainly anyone who likes Gillian Welch ought to give this a listen.
Dragon Inn 3’s Double
Line is one of my favorite albums of the last couple years. Philip Dickey
of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin near-fame (more on them later) went
out and recruited a band of vocal ringers, and they recorded some synthed-out Crockett-and-Tubbs
jams. “Bad Boy” is the best thing the 1980’s have given to Springfield since
Charlie Spoonhour.
It’s possible that Matt Netzer, who sings on this one, is a
good enough friend that I should exclude Honky Tonk Chateau from consideration.
But on the other hand, this song’s great, so I’m rolling with it. Also, I
didn’t really know Matt yet when this album came out, so I first experienced it
as “a thing I bought at CD Warehouse”[1]
rather than “a thing I bought at my friend’s album release show,” which seems
an important distinction.[2]
There was plenty of hard-driving grain belt rock coming out
of the Show-Me State right around the turn of the century, and this song is a
fine example of the form. I’m not entirely sure what the song is about beyond
“relationship troubles” and “driving,” but what other topics do you really
need?
The subtext of this list is whiteness. This is a very white
list of artists, and while some of that is due to the limitations of my own listening
interests, it is also a reflection of the fact that Springfield is one of the
whitest cities in the US. Springfield was 89 percent white in the 2010 census, and
remarkably enough, that means the city is much more diverse than it was when I grew
up there during the 80’s and 90’s. The musical genres to which Springfield has
made its biggest contributions reflect those demographics: country, rockabilly,
folk rock, roots rock, bluegrass, alt-country, indie. We haven’t made a dent on
the polka charts, but give it time.
Both of these songs are about white privilege and law
enforcement. In “No Sir,” Big Smith’s Mark Bilyeu writes about an anxious
traffic stop in Oklahoma, where he definitely doesn’t want his car searched.
But in the end, he doesn’t have much to worry about. The fact of the matter is
that “The only words in Spanish/ On Highway 44/ Say ‘Checkpoint straight
ahead’/ So you know who they’re lookin’ for.” The young white protagonist is
able to “wriggle through the net” of the justice system, free to pursue a
career performing hillbilly music, well-aware that people who don’t look like him
might not have fared so well.
The Skeletons are even more blunt in their rewrite of a
Leadbelly classic: “Thirty days in the workhouse,/ Don’t you shed no tears./ If
I’d been a black man/ They’d a’ give me thirty years.” It’s “don’t you shed no
tears” that makes this one sting. Lou Whitney was willing to lean into unlikable
narrators, and it’s plenty revealing that the speaker assumes we would shed
tears for the slap on the wrist given to a white shitheel but not for the
thirty years given to a black man. The Skeletons tended to play this song with
a manic, unhinged intensity, whereas Big Smith’s take on the same basic topic
in “No Sir” is mournful. But perhaps manic and mournful is an appropriate set
of responses to an American reality that sits at the intersection of tragedy
and insanity.
6. Someone Still
Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Sink/Let It Sway” (2010)
SSLYBY is my favorite Springfield band by a pretty wide
margin. They were attuned to the blog-rockin’ 00’s in a way that gave them a
small-but-devoted audience well beyond Missouri, but they’ve always sounded to
me like a band from the Ozarks in the same way that Big Star or REM or the Elephant
6 bands sound like they’re from the South. They don’t play it up, but it’s in
there.
“Sink/Let It Sway” is one of Yeltsin’s catchiest songs, and
a real showcase for what a great guitar sound they had. And while it’s true
that “Best Music Video from Springfield” is a fairly slim category, the Point Break tribute filmed for this song
is without rival.
I’ve always remembered this song as a fun little
quick-hitter of 90’s alterna-pop, but listening to stuff for this list, it
jumps out to me how much “He Fixes Things” sounds like the Skeletons: it’s got
driving growly guitars and tight drums, it’s hooky, it’s unafraid of being a
little silly, and it’s not a second longer than it needs to be.[3]
Much of the best music out of Springfield has been willing to indulge in not
just humor but corniness (Springfield ain’t Branson, but it ain’t far from
Branson). “He fixes things but he broke my heart” seems at first glance like it
ought to be the chorus of an AM country song, but it works delightfully as a
90’s rock song.
This song always reminds me of that era when downtown was
nothing but Nonna’s, the antique stores, the DMV, and the weirdos. Every time I
get back to Springfield, it seems more and more impossible that such a time
ever existed.
It’s fun to imagine the reaction of some University Heights
father walking past his daughter’s room, just a few months before she graduates
as part of Parkview’s first senior class, and overhearing her listen to this growly
rockabilly record. “Linda,” declares the paterfamilias, “if this boy takes
these kinds of liberties with English grammar, what other liberties might he
take?”
I hope Linda was done being grounded in time to join her
fellow Lassies at the sock hop.
“Bop-a-Lena” was a bigger hit for Self (and “I’m Sorry,”
which he wrote for Brenda Lee, was a way
bigger hit), but to these ears, “Ain’t I’m a Dog” is the A-side.
Alright, time for some honesty that might anger some
Springfieldians: I kinda hate the Daredevils. “If You Wanna Get to Heaven” is
boring. “It’ll Shine When It Shines” is saccharine. “Chicken Train” makes me
want to go full Belushi on a mouth harp.
But then there’s “Jackie Blue.”
“Jackie Blue” is so good, y’all. “Jackie Blue” sounds like
someone raised on Ozarks church music discovering cocaine, malaise, and women
who like cocaine.[4] No
matter how good your stereo is, “Jackie Blue” always sounds like a tinny
speaker nailed to a utility pole at Hydra-Slide. It sounds like denim cutoffs
and root beer at the Fair. It sounds like a lifeguard at Fassnight Pool who’s
more worried about her tan than her job.
As far as radio airplay is concerned, this is the biggest rock
song ever recorded by a Springfield band. And so the Daredevils’ smoothest
contribution to the freaky 70’s lands at #3 on this list, which was also its
peak position on the Billboard Hot 100.
2. Someone Still Loves
You Boris Yeltsin, “Think I Wanna Die” (2008)
Back when SSLYBY still played shows it seemed like the crowd
mostly got excited about the more anthemic stuff, but for me “Think I Wanna
Die” is their greatest hit. Lyrically, it has quite a bit of fun wearing a
Morrissey mask. Musically, it’s a sidewinder—it spins and darts and hesitates
and builds, hooky as hell the whole time.
The line where they apologize for being twee cracks me up. Most
of the music on this list is more than a little chicken-fried, and when SSLYBY
came along one of the many delightful things about them was that they were
perfectly willing to be the least dangerous band in Springfield. Which in this
case extends not just to being twee, but apologizing for it.
Springfield is the birthplace of Route 66. That isn’t a
marketing slogan, by the way. It is literally true that some guys sat down in a
hotel in Springfield in the 1920’s to select a number for the Chicago-to-LA
highway. And so, the top song on this list almost has to be a car song.
“Trans-Am” is an upbeat song, but there’s also some darkness
here. The speaker longs for a Trans-Am, but does not actually have one. The
second verse is about the shoddiness of American cars, and the third is about
registering for the draft, which adds a note of urgency to what is ultimately a
carpe diem song.“Ride around while you
still can,” we are told by a band called The Skeletons. And how do you say
carpe diem in the Queen City of the Ozarks' English? By emphasizing“car,” of course.
Everybody now: T-R-A-N-S-A-M!!!
[1] It
was disc #20510 in the CD Warehouse file cabinet, per the “Disc at Counter” sticker
I still have on my copy.
[2]
Speaking of things your friends made, thanks for reading this blog!
[3] Skeletons
frontman Lou Whitney has an engineering credit on the album. Of course, he
probably has an engineering credit on like 70 percent of the rock albums made
in Springfield from 1980 to 2010.
[4] I
should note that I have no proof of what substances the Daredevils were
actually into. On the other hand, they were a popular rock band in the 70’s. I
just opened to a random page in Supe Granda’s autobiography (which actually
exists) where he talks about touring with The Steve Miller Band and The Flying
Burrito Brothers. On the next page I turned to he talks about transporting “fresh
green buds” direct from a farm in the Ozarks to the A&R Department of his
record label. I’m done researching.
