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.
