#238) "Remember When" by Alan Jackson - It's certainly true that you can get too sentimental in life, too sappy, too morbid, moribund, and morose. It's all too easy to fall into a pattern (often without realizing) in which you're not merely looking back, but dwelling on something long gone that no amount of emotional black magic will ever bring back. Life offers only forward progress, so keep moving, keep moving, keep moving.
It's no secret certain songs aid greatly in the application of sappy, sentimental sorrow, and as a rule I do everything I can to avoid them. But like with nearly everything else in life, there are a few notable exceptions, songs that lean toward sentimental rather than sappy (sentimentality being a less blinding shade of the same emotional impulse), and one of them is Alan Jackson's "Remember When". I must confess, it's on a short list of songs almost guaranteed to get me tearing up if the light is just right.
Sure, it's easy to dismiss as cheesy, a Hallmark card set to music, but that's mostly if you don't like country music and are disposed to dismissing the entire genre out of hand. I haven't been that way since I worked in country radio and - stuck listening to it as part of my job (rather than just hearing it drone from a radio in the background) - realized, hmm, some of this isn't so bad. It was a revelation; I'd spent my entire childhood believing otherwise.
I think for me it's not so much what "Remember When" says, but how it says it. The mewling mandolin, the sturdily constructed orchestration, Jackson's tenderly father-like vocal, all seem to conspire to preserve something, or fix something, put something right...like a musical bed sheet snapped in the air, falling gently and protectively, in a room where time stands still, nobody has to say goodbye, and everyone stays the same forever.
Of course, that's not even close to how life plays out, but through the ordeal of this sometimes heartbreaking mortal coil, in which time flies by, every has to say goodbye at some time or another, and nobody gets (or wants) to stay the same, most of us carry a reasonable expectation: that amidst a certain amount of ceremony, we will grow, live, grow again through our children, grow old and die, hopefully with memories intact and most of those not too painful. "Remember When" taps deeply and powerfully into this universally anticipated (and sought) story arc, giving it the architecture we crave.
Yes, you can dwell too much on the past, but at the end of the day sentimentality, like humor, is among the traits that distinguish us from animals and, at least every once in a while, our ability to allow waypoints in life to blossom into exquisitely sentimental moments is what makes it worth living.
Without some "architecture" applied to the process of living, nothing really matters. We simply live, and die. And that can be a devastating thought...especially if the light is just right.
"Remember when old ones died and new were born / And life was changed, disassembled, rearranged..."
#239 "Choices" by George Jones - Three words: drinking fucking sucks.
Make no mistake, I had my moments in younger days - nights I don't remember, or nights I wish I could forget, hellacious hangovers, the whole bit. Alcohol has led me to plenty of bad choices - passing out in places I shouldn't have, with women I shouldn't have, saying things I normally wouldn't, hearing about them the next day and cringing between dry heaves.
But I was always merely a weekend warrior type...I could go out, hang out, get plastered, have the greatest (or worst) night of my life, and then be good for a week or two, sometimes more, before I felt any urge to drink again.
It never became a lifestyle. I rarely drank alcohol with dinner. I never drank alcohol just to relax. Never drank to escape. In fact, the opposite. Moments of turmoil in my life (financial, romantic, whatever...) have always been met with an urge to get more sober, not less, as sober as I could be. I don't like not to be in control of myself, especially when things are shitty.
And honestly, I never saw much point to drinking at all unless there were women present...meaning, if the night was going to be just four hairy asses sitting around a high top table in a grungy tavern, insipid banter broken only by an occasional glance up at the TV above the bar for the score, I'd have just as soon drank water all night, or Dr. Pepper.
Sometimes I would drink water, or Dr. Pepper, even if there were women around. Talk about exquisite: at bar close, when everyone else was slinking, stumbling, puking and pissing out the back door, watching for cops, praying to get home safely, I would jump into my car, clear eyed and big as you please, light a cigarette, crank the radio, and take a late night drive along a country road. I was kind of a weirdo I guess, to be 21, 22, 23, and get so excited by doing that...and yet, not really. Country roads at three in the morning are gorgeous, and whatever the reason, staying sober guaranteed I would never get an OWI, or kill someone, or kill myself.
I know it's not totally a matter of choice. Alcohol is a drug like any other. Some people can handle it, some people can't. But from what I've seen of some of those "some people" over the years, I'm thankful (sincerely...) that I've always preferred to be sober...or at least been okay being sober.
Released in 1999, "Choices" was George Jones' twilight catharsis. The singer of "White Lightning" was in his late sixties by then, and "Choices" was a somber acknowledgment of what too much white lightning, over time, can lead to. (Fucking sucks...) Around the time of its release, Jones was involved in a serious drunk driving accident, which underscored the song's relevance and message. I think it says everything that needs to be said about alcohol as a lifestyle, without (and this is important) overstatement or preaching.
"I was tempted, by an early age I found I liked drinking, and I never turned it down / There were loved ones, but I turned them all away / Now I'm living and dying with the choices I've made..."
Showing posts with label Alan Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Jackson. Show all posts
Friday, March 31, 2017
Friday, October 24, 2014
The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)
#121) "The Pretender" by Jackson Browne - Like many, I'm interested in the 1960s as a time of precipitous social change, some of it good, some of it bad. But I also consider the period to be, lamentably, the apex of our American society, and this defeatism is harder to admit openly because I am fairly patriotic; I don't want to think it. It was a critical decade when, relinquished from the repression of the past, and with so much changing all at once (but not yet changed irreparably), dreams and expectations could afford to - for short period of time - become idealized.
It's no secret that what was idealized was never actually realized. Something happened along the way. We took a wrong turn or forgot where we wanted to go, and now the society we live in - a violent, impulsive, image-obsessed world where ad execs are our philosophers and our artists and innovators are the ones programming our computers much more often than they are anyone using them - doesn't quite live up to even the most bare bone dream of the Baby Boom generation. It may have been inevitable, may have from the beginning been more of a delusion than a dream, but the let down, the extent of it, surely wasn't anticipated, and the fact that it happened almost entirely within the span of my life, haunts me a little.
The Pretender is very 70s - its mellow piano, vaguely disco rhythms and thick-shouldered orchestral accompaniment are unique musical artifacts of that time period. I really like the sound, but the song's genius, I think (that which supports my earlier assertion that Jackson Browne is to the 70s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s) is found in the sublimely illustrative lyrics, which paint an anguished portrait of an exhausted America, right at the critical crossroads of the post-Watergate era.
If Browne had written this song in 1986, or 1996, after the fact, when his generation had already reached middle age, when their music was already being called 'classic rock', John Lennon was already gone and it was obvious there remained no hope whatsoever that even a faint blip of 60s idealism had not been swallowed up by the cynicism, consumerism and commercialism that had once been thought (naively) to be conquerable, it wouldn't have meant nearly as much. But in 1976, this was pretty damn prescient. Browne predicted, and lamented, the replacement of 'hippie' ideals with yuppie ideals - and all that it would mean for us, as individuals and a society - years before it really got underway.
I'm gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender / where the ads take aim, and lay their claim, to the heart and the soul of the spender / and believe in whatever may lie, in the things that money can buy...
Are you there, Browne sings, as the bass gently wrings an exquisite despair worthy of the 1970s right out of the air (listen for it), say a prayer, for the pretender.
And I love the cover of the album. In myriad ways intentional or otherwise, it too is an accurate portrayal of the 1970s.
"And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor..."
#122) "Little Man" by Alan Jackson - A kind of thematic cousin to The Pretender, Alan Jackson's Little Man concerns itself with the vanishing American downtown, how 'Mom and Pop' has been snuffed out by big business in every form, from the grocery store to gas station, bookstore to the candy shop. How specialization has given way to one stop shopping, stadium-sized department stores where you can buy motor oil in one aisle and bed spreads in the next, and a six foot TV on the end cap. And don't forget candy for the kids, and grandma's pills, and her Echinacea, and the latest copy of People, and milk, cereal and ground beef, bleach, window cleaner and trash bags, diapers, fishing lures and a betta for little Jimmy, he really wants one...
It's a nice thought, a stellar rumination for Sunday afternoon, surely, to lament how impersonally (and overwhelmingly) global and corporate the world's become even in its most remote, far-flung corners...and it's completely true. I witnessed the demise of the little man first-hand, growing up. My parents owned a bookstore throughout the 1970s, a 'Mom and Pop' concern that even then was on borrowed time. My parents did some things to keep it afloat, tried to diversify. They sold art supplies, had candy and video games in one corner for the local school kids, even made homemade fudge for a while.,.but it didn't last too long into the 1980s, and the reason was simple. Even before huge bookstores came along selling more coffee than books, before anyone could imagine ordering something on a computer (or knew anything about computers), and long before the veritable witchcraft of Kindle, my dad explained it: The day the big department store at the edge of town started selling the Top 10 best sellers was the beginning of the end.
But there's another side to this saga. Yes, something has been lost in the last forty years as small towns have been slowly absorbed into the global economy - a sense of community, a sense of purpose and place, a certain identity. But the truth is that Wal-Mart is as much the great equalizer as it is the killer of downtown, structured to benefit everyone who once called downtown home. Wal-Mart stores typically have a regional (rather than local) reach, and can therefore provide more jobs and more hours...better pay, holiday pay, benefits, et cetera. Mom and Pop simply could not do this. Moreover, Wal-Mart's business model enables it to (truly) offer the lowest prices, and as there are other big box chains to contend with, an element of competition arises that didn't exist in days past. Before 'big box', the sad truth was that if you lived in an isolated small town, you paid whatever the 'little man' wanted to charge you, and endured significantly less selection.
And as for customer service? Well, I think the notion of the unconcerned Wal-Mart worker roaming the aisles like a zombie and providing no help or answers of any kind is a myth. If anything, the opposite is true. Wal-Mart generally goes out of its way to train its employees well, not only so that they're knowledgeable (sorry, but I've never received an inadequate response to a question in the electronics or garden department of Wal-Mart...), but also so they properly engage the customer. Some are better than others at this song and dance, of course, but it's at the Mom and Pop places that I have gotten hit with indifference - sometimes hostility - from the help. The various Wal-Mart department workers have answers. The Wal-Mart exit greeters flash me a smile and a 'hello' when I come in and when I leave, because they're trained to do so.
The worker at the dusty little store downtown looks up from his magazine and scowls at me for disturbing him. And think about it: it's the same "local" person working at both locations.
I think on balance the consumer and worker alike have benefited from the Wal Mart-ization of America,
"New store came where you do it yourself, you buy a lotto ticket and food off the shelf / forget the little man...forget about that little man..."
#123) "Summertime Blues" by Blue Cheer - When my brother and I were kids, we thought this was the funniest song, and Blue Cheer the funniest band, with the drummer's hair hanging in his eyes, completely obscuring his face as he ruthlessly punished his drums. I remember, we jokingly called him Cousin It, from the Addams Family, and I remember being as excited as I was amused by the band's look and sound. They were the embodiment of youth and rebellion to me from about 7th grade on, even though they came a full generation before. In the winter of '87, I actually got a little crap from classmates for digging Blue Cheer.
I don't know why. They are crazy good. I still think their version of Summertime Blues is a great - as in fucking awesome - interpretation of the Eddie Cochran original. Check out the drumming! Turns out 'Cousin It' really is a monster. :-)
Everything about this band was monster, really. Their whole album Vincebus Eruptum is fantastic. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
"I done told my congressman and he said, quote, 'dig this, boy...'
It's no secret that what was idealized was never actually realized. Something happened along the way. We took a wrong turn or forgot where we wanted to go, and now the society we live in - a violent, impulsive, image-obsessed world where ad execs are our philosophers and our artists and innovators are the ones programming our computers much more often than they are anyone using them - doesn't quite live up to even the most bare bone dream of the Baby Boom generation. It may have been inevitable, may have from the beginning been more of a delusion than a dream, but the let down, the extent of it, surely wasn't anticipated, and the fact that it happened almost entirely within the span of my life, haunts me a little.
The Pretender is very 70s - its mellow piano, vaguely disco rhythms and thick-shouldered orchestral accompaniment are unique musical artifacts of that time period. I really like the sound, but the song's genius, I think (that which supports my earlier assertion that Jackson Browne is to the 70s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s) is found in the sublimely illustrative lyrics, which paint an anguished portrait of an exhausted America, right at the critical crossroads of the post-Watergate era.
If Browne had written this song in 1986, or 1996, after the fact, when his generation had already reached middle age, when their music was already being called 'classic rock', John Lennon was already gone and it was obvious there remained no hope whatsoever that even a faint blip of 60s idealism had not been swallowed up by the cynicism, consumerism and commercialism that had once been thought (naively) to be conquerable, it wouldn't have meant nearly as much. But in 1976, this was pretty damn prescient. Browne predicted, and lamented, the replacement of 'hippie' ideals with yuppie ideals - and all that it would mean for us, as individuals and a society - years before it really got underway.
I'm gonna be a happy idiot, and struggle for the legal tender / where the ads take aim, and lay their claim, to the heart and the soul of the spender / and believe in whatever may lie, in the things that money can buy...
Are you there, Browne sings, as the bass gently wrings an exquisite despair worthy of the 1970s right out of the air (listen for it), say a prayer, for the pretender.
And I love the cover of the album. In myriad ways intentional or otherwise, it too is an accurate portrayal of the 1970s.
"And the children solemnly wait for the ice cream vendor..."
#122) "Little Man" by Alan Jackson - A kind of thematic cousin to The Pretender, Alan Jackson's Little Man concerns itself with the vanishing American downtown, how 'Mom and Pop' has been snuffed out by big business in every form, from the grocery store to gas station, bookstore to the candy shop. How specialization has given way to one stop shopping, stadium-sized department stores where you can buy motor oil in one aisle and bed spreads in the next, and a six foot TV on the end cap. And don't forget candy for the kids, and grandma's pills, and her Echinacea, and the latest copy of People, and milk, cereal and ground beef, bleach, window cleaner and trash bags, diapers, fishing lures and a betta for little Jimmy, he really wants one...
It's a nice thought, a stellar rumination for Sunday afternoon, surely, to lament how impersonally (and overwhelmingly) global and corporate the world's become even in its most remote, far-flung corners...and it's completely true. I witnessed the demise of the little man first-hand, growing up. My parents owned a bookstore throughout the 1970s, a 'Mom and Pop' concern that even then was on borrowed time. My parents did some things to keep it afloat, tried to diversify. They sold art supplies, had candy and video games in one corner for the local school kids, even made homemade fudge for a while.,.but it didn't last too long into the 1980s, and the reason was simple. Even before huge bookstores came along selling more coffee than books, before anyone could imagine ordering something on a computer (or knew anything about computers), and long before the veritable witchcraft of Kindle, my dad explained it: The day the big department store at the edge of town started selling the Top 10 best sellers was the beginning of the end.
But there's another side to this saga. Yes, something has been lost in the last forty years as small towns have been slowly absorbed into the global economy - a sense of community, a sense of purpose and place, a certain identity. But the truth is that Wal-Mart is as much the great equalizer as it is the killer of downtown, structured to benefit everyone who once called downtown home. Wal-Mart stores typically have a regional (rather than local) reach, and can therefore provide more jobs and more hours...better pay, holiday pay, benefits, et cetera. Mom and Pop simply could not do this. Moreover, Wal-Mart's business model enables it to (truly) offer the lowest prices, and as there are other big box chains to contend with, an element of competition arises that didn't exist in days past. Before 'big box', the sad truth was that if you lived in an isolated small town, you paid whatever the 'little man' wanted to charge you, and endured significantly less selection.
And as for customer service? Well, I think the notion of the unconcerned Wal-Mart worker roaming the aisles like a zombie and providing no help or answers of any kind is a myth. If anything, the opposite is true. Wal-Mart generally goes out of its way to train its employees well, not only so that they're knowledgeable (sorry, but I've never received an inadequate response to a question in the electronics or garden department of Wal-Mart...), but also so they properly engage the customer. Some are better than others at this song and dance, of course, but it's at the Mom and Pop places that I have gotten hit with indifference - sometimes hostility - from the help. The various Wal-Mart department workers have answers. The Wal-Mart exit greeters flash me a smile and a 'hello' when I come in and when I leave, because they're trained to do so.
The worker at the dusty little store downtown looks up from his magazine and scowls at me for disturbing him. And think about it: it's the same "local" person working at both locations.
I think on balance the consumer and worker alike have benefited from the Wal Mart-ization of America,
"New store came where you do it yourself, you buy a lotto ticket and food off the shelf / forget the little man...forget about that little man..."
#123) "Summertime Blues" by Blue Cheer - When my brother and I were kids, we thought this was the funniest song, and Blue Cheer the funniest band, with the drummer's hair hanging in his eyes, completely obscuring his face as he ruthlessly punished his drums. I remember, we jokingly called him Cousin It, from the Addams Family, and I remember being as excited as I was amused by the band's look and sound. They were the embodiment of youth and rebellion to me from about 7th grade on, even though they came a full generation before. In the winter of '87, I actually got a little crap from classmates for digging Blue Cheer.
I don't know why. They are crazy good. I still think their version of Summertime Blues is a great - as in fucking awesome - interpretation of the Eddie Cochran original. Check out the drumming! Turns out 'Cousin It' really is a monster. :-)
Everything about this band was monster, really. Their whole album Vincebus Eruptum is fantastic. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
"I done told my congressman and he said, quote, 'dig this, boy...'
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