#162) "Allentown" by Billy Joel - If this playlist really is more about the road I've traveled than the road trip I plan to take, then there may be no more seminal song to put on it than Allentown.
I was ten when this song was released, halfway through the task of growing up in my very own rust belt. And while my family was not directly affected by the broken promises and eventual vanishing act of the Great Lakes shipping industry, which in the late 1960s left my hometown with an economic hangover it's only recently started to get over, I grew up in it nevertheless, grew up amidst the same post-industrial grimness described in Joel's song. In fact, it was the very same industry that dipped out on Allentown, Pennsylvania...just the other end of it. My hometown shipped out the iron ore that wound up in places like Allentown to be turned into steel. But as the latter half of the 20th century unfolded, the ore was depleted, demand diminished, overseas competition hardy, and the industry collapsed, leaving a generation of men with no reason to get out of bed in the morning, and a generation of women with no reason to try rousting them. Make no mistake; I think Allentown, Pennsylvania fared much worse. My region managed at least to preserve a glimmer of hope by letting the natural beauty of Lake Superior become a tourist destination. But still, a lot of what made my hometown what it was when I was growing up was not all that pretty.
The strange thing is I was aware of it when I was ten. Yes, it would seem likely that I'd come to such a realization as an adult, but I saw my hometown in Allentown when I was a kid, walking along railroad tracks (the words Soo Line became an epitaph in my young eyes, printed in huge letters along the side of every abandoned train car, every rotting or rusted trestle spanning downtown streets), climbing over chunks of street concrete booby-trapped with gnarled tentacles of rebar that had been dumped along the lake shore, dodging handfuls of taconite pellets whipped at me either by a friend, a neighborhood bully, or worse, a hard-scrabble pack of neighborhood bullies. Perhaps I could not yet wrap my head around what it all meant, but I was making a connection, figuring something out, when I heard the song Allentown blaring from my older brother's dual-cassette boom box speakers.
Ashland, Wisconsin is no longer an ugly, abandoned train town. It's gone to great lengths in the last decade to clean up its act and look forward, capitalizing on the stellar beauty of Lake Superior, and letting a burgeoning environmental and organic movement (which I made fun of as a kid, but now understand and fully embrace) lead the way. But the way it was as I grew up certainly informed my personality, my worldview, and it still haunts me a little when I visit now.
"Every child had a pretty good shot, to get at least as far as their old man got / When something happened on the way to that place, they flew an American flag in our face..."
#163) "Sunday Morning Coming Down" by Kris Kristofferson - This song, I'm happy to say, I can't relate to all that much. I've never been down and out like this, nor let chemical dependency rule my life. I've never had "beer for breakfast and then one more for dessert."
Actually, come to think of it, I may have once or twice when I was in my early twenties. But thankfully, it never turned into something that transcended a young man's contrived flirtations with rebellion, his stylized desire to find romance in greeting each sunrise through bleary eyes. Sunday Morning Coming Down speaks to what was merely a dalliance for me becoming a lifestyle, in which there is no glamour or romance to be found; fading dreams by night, cold reality by daylight, and that daylight sullied as much by the mere fact of the Sunday as by alcoholism.
Johnny Cash did a stupendous version of the song in 1969, and this, understandably, became the more well-known. Kristofferson's strength lies in his songwriting and storytelling more than his performing. But for its poetry (a reminder of what country music once was, should be, and still could be if it stopped trying to be a caricature of itself), and for the solemnity of its arrangement better fitting the subject matter (in my opinion), I list Kristofferson's version here. Either one would do.
I can relate to this song in one way: there really is something about a Sunday that makes a body feel alone.
"And then I headed down the street, and somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing / And it took me back to something that I lost somewhere, somehow, along the way..."
