A Tale of Two Thompsons

This was the last column I wrote for Stray Pickers.  I don't think it was ever published.

A Tale of Two Thompsons

 

 

            We were tired.  You know how it is, the gig’s over, 3:30 in the morning, your steel guitar player driving, the road blurring into a version of Picasso’s Guernica.  That’s when Billings always gets paranoid.  He starts raving about the government, space aliens, conspiracies and the ways Philip K. Dick resembles Tolstoy.  If it’s a trip you haven’t taken, it’s one not to be taken lightly.

            So you know I had to do it.  I had to lock him out of the bathroom at the rest stop off of I-25, the one with all the info about the Ludlow Massacre and how they’re still digging up bits of skull from the women and children there. 

            Sure he screamed at me, and slammed his fists against the metal door, threatening to leave me there, and sure there was that enormous black spider with nearly twelve inch legs hanging upside down in the corner, but I had to do it.  There was no sense in allowing him in because he’d only say something that would so freak me out as to cause some kind of permanent damage, and I couldn’t have that. 

            Bret doesn’t like to talk about it now.  He says it’s embarrassing, but that’s not how I remember it.  It was actually somewhat pleasant. 

            Maybe that was just part of the effect of three days playing country music in southern Colorado mixed with the inevitable dietary supplements supplied by Bluegrass Festival organizers, about which NO ONE DARE SPEAK.  But as I listened to the rhythmic pounding of Billing’s fists, and the curses he added to my last name…names, really…I couldn’t help wondering “What would Hunter do?”  Meaning, of course, Hunter S. Thompson.

            And it wasn’t just because Bret had gotten off on one of his jags about the virtues of Brittany Spears’ music.  (Seriously, don’t get him started.  He has so much to say about that Grammy appearance and “the politics of sex” that you’ll be in Denver by the time he starts deconstructing “Oops, I Did It Again.”)

            Which was about when I saw the sign for the Ludlow Massacre.

            Oh, I’ll admit that I actually really liked “Oops, I Did It Again” the first time I heard it, and that was reason enough to be suspicious.

            I began to wonder, with that big spider crawling across the ceiling toward where I crouched, back against the door, if anyone else has that same relationship to songs.  It’s strange, but if there’s a song that I immediately like, I will almost always come to pity it.  Never despise it, exactly, but watch helplessly as it flounders and languishes as a lukewarm ex-enthusiasm, like a loaf of marble rye.

            Oddly, I thought, spider pausing, Billings imploring me to let him in because he needed the use of uninterrupted plumbing, oddly, the first time I heard Josh Ritter I had the same response.  I was watching a YouTube video with clips of Hunter S. set to Ritter’s “Monster Ballads,” and it seemed perfectly elegiac.  I rushed out, bought the album, and then watched it turn hard and crumbly, just like the rye bread.  (Though I still like “Monster Ballads.”)

            “Why?” I asked the spider.  “What is it about instantly likeable songs?”

            The spider let itself down to the floor on a long thread. 

            “Richard Thompson albums aren’t like that at all,” I said.  “Most of them I instantly dislike.  They’re more like a bottle of whiskey that tastes acrid at first, but a month later turns into the best drink you’ve ever had.”

            It wasn’t until then that I felt afraid of the spider.  It didn’t move once it hit the ground, but I was aware of how close it had crawled.  Billings started pleading.

            And here, with the dreaded fear of what’s coming, and the pounding insistence from outside, I want to make a roots recommendation.  You may have to go online to order it, but it’s worth the effort. 

            A couple of years ago Richard Thompson put out a DVD/CD of his concert “1000 Years of Popular Music.”  It’s a remarkable work, and one that fits the category of this column like no other:  roots music in the true sense of the word “roots.”  Beginning with the song, “Sumer is Icumen In,” from around 1260 AD, it moves though the Mikado, the Ink Spots, Buck Owens, on into, yes, “Oops, I Did It Again.” 

            I looked at the spider. I thought about the song, about how I’d fallen in love with it again after hearing the Richard Thompson version, and how I knew Billings was always right about everything: Brittany, Philip K. Dick, and the space aliens.  So I did what any music fan would do, I let him in. 

            And I don’t know if he even saw that spider.

            

So, I've been reading about blogs, and it appears that no one bothers to read anything longer than two paragraphs.  

Thus, this post.  Things don't change much, except possibly our attention spans.  Or maybe that's not true.  Maybe there are now more things in heaven and earth to which one might pay attention.  And we're all bound to pay!

The world turns.  Economies collapse.  A blight upon the face of the green earth we loose with our divided attentions.

Sex With Gregory Alan Isakov

So, this was actually the second column I wrote for Stray Pickers. The first one was about one of my favorite Colorado country bands, The Dalhart Imperials, but I'm expanding that one a bit, rewriting it for a future blog posting. In the meantime, this one, about Gregory Alan Isakov, generated more responses than any of the others.  Er, the other two that were published, anyway.


Sex With Gregory Alan Isakov


So DJ Loki, the gun-toting, ukulele-strumming morning genius who along with the encyclopedic mind of Uncle Jeff Holland hosts Radio 1190’s Route 78 West, calls me and asks if the Hi Beams wanna play a show at the Trilogy Lounge in Boulder. He says he and Jeff are going to record it and play it on the show.

Cool. We love the show. Love Loki and love Jeff. Love it all.

We show up, unload, get situated and jabber about Eldon Shamblin’s coolest western shirt, when the lights go down. I’m standing with Loki when Gregory Alan Isakov takes the stage, sits down and sings.

“Look at that,” Loki says. He points to a group of beautiful college girls three deep seated on the floor directly in front of the stage, at Gregory’s feet. “The estrogen in this room is so thick you could spread it with a paper knife,” or something like that.  

Gregory Alan Isakov sings and the room swoons. He steals the show, the dirty bearded bastard.

And that was right before I had sex with him in the men’s room. But I’ll get back to that in a second.

First I want to tell you that his album, “That Sea, the Gambler,” if you haven’t heard it, is so beautiful that it’s stunning. If you have a soul, it will massage it. If you are the poetic sort, you’ll be depressed when you go to your book shelves inspired to read Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” and John Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” and find them missing. So then you’ll put “That Sea, the Gambler,” back into the cd player.

If lines like “out of this blue Sunday dream/ come to me with your smoky mouth, raindrops fall on this old town,” evokes Bob Dylan’s “With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,” and the minor chords and ringing tones rhyme with a heart full of Nick Drake, I tend to give Isakov the benefit of the doubt, to trust him as he looks for an American voice. While songs like “all there is” and “that sea, the gambler,” or my favorite, “salt and the sea,” might take a while to sink into your consciousness, once they do they’ll help you get by, like the bible or percoset.

Normally, of course, I’d wanna talk to you about some honky-tonk crooner like Les Cooper or the perfect pitch and twang of Jessica Smith (Spring Creek Bluegrass Band), but once you’re seduced by the moody folk vibe of Gregory Alan Isakov you gotta go tell somebody.
So, back to sex with him in the bathroom.

I frequently feel like artists, especially those isolated by mountains and miles of farmland and prairie, are easily overlooked by a public that loves reading about Brittany’s shaved head, or her sister’s teen pregnancy, or Amy Winehouse’s smack trouble. These scandals are worth millions in advertising and don’t seem particularly hard to come by.

So, if I start nasty rumors about Gregory Alan Isakov, maybe some people will take notice. Even if it’s NOT TRUE that his kids have been seized by the state, that he shaved his head after consuming three bottles of Apex Fat Burn 3, or that he ever had sex with weirdo country singers in nightclub bathrooms. Why would you ever think any of that’s true?

Go see him play. Or buy his record. You’ll at least want to have sex with him. He makes love to his audience so you might as well admit it. Maybe everyone could wear t-shirts that say “I had sex with Gregory Alan Isakov,” and it’ll be a huge scandal and he will be a star.

Hi.

Welcome to my nightmare...I mean my fantasy...I mean my blog.  I'm gonna start, and try not to falter hereafter, with a few articles and cartoons I wrote/drew for a now defunct bluegrass magazine out of Lyons, Colorado, "Stray Pickers."  Lots of typos, lots of whiskey, lots of missed deadlines, but I thought it'd be good to post them again somewhere.  The column was supposed to focus on Colorado Roots music, though I was just beginning to get off topic when the rag defunked.  What's a boy to do?

Bookmark me, write me, call me up, come see a show, and/or visit the Hi*Beams myspace page.  All comments are welcome.