Pandora the music website is a great idea, but a problem with it is it's all musically scientific and lacks a respect for the spirit. In my personal life, I feel there is no form of music that needs to be multiplied that Hank Williams III's Straight To Hell LP, especially the strange cokehead country whiteboy meets codeine-drinking screwed and chopped styles of the second CD. It is, to borrow a played out phrase, the shit. I have often looked for other music like this, but it all falls short or goes in a different direction. Wayne Hancock, while cool I guess, is too far on the “like Hank Williams Sr.” tip for my tastes; it makes me think of college city girls with tattoos who are on the roller derby team and have a vintage kitchen table with sparkly top. Those Poor Bastards, who originally wrote “Pills I Took”, are like a happy dirge you play for your own one-man suicide party. Stuff that calls itself “outlaw country” is usually outlaw filtered through the profitability factor of the Nashville sound system, so that a guy like Jamey Johnson or Chris Knight, as pure of heart as they may be, still sound like they might rip off their honest eyes like that old mini-series V and are really just fucking lizards making money for record companies in subversive ways. And stuff that calls itself “alternative country” is usually, from my experience, the idea of honest country music filtered through a series of cul-de-sacs. It’s not necessarily a dishonest form of music; it just don’t know.
I am from a shithole place where hopelessness reigns supreme. I am a chronic fuck-up with bad tattoos, stupid scars, and lifeline on my palm that’s got a few bridges out that I’m gonna have to pull some General Lee jumps to make it to 60, much less 70. Shit man, let me just give you a straight real example... I took my riding mower to get fixed last year at the shop that my dad worked at for nearly 30 years, because I figured I could trust them. My drive belt kept slipping from where I hit a loose piece of tether cable in the field where I used to stake my goats up, and I just bent the pulleys and all back into close enough shape, which worked for a year or two, but it needed fixing. So I took it to that shop, hoping for the hook-up, and the crooked-walking guy who worked with my drunken dad for a decade said he’d hook it up. I had money in the bank to get it done. Except that guy, Lee, was the one who had to do it to make it happen right, and he had a tendency to not show up to work for weeks on end. So it took them a few months to fix my goddamned riding mower, and by that time my own chronic under-employment had left me broke, so I couldn’t pay the $175 to get it back. So I fixed my push mower on my own and power walked my way through 2.5 acres four times last year, in random patches that made my yard look like it was way into De La Soul’s first album. One day, the small engine shop lady called me and I told her I didn’t have no money, could they hold it for me, and she said yeah, which I knew meant they’d charge me for holding it. Fast forward to nowadays. Now understand this was a family business that I’m part of the family of, and it’s a family related name (my grandmother’s maiden name actually) that’s on the business sign outside, yet nobody there is connected to that. Except one cousin, who is back home cleaning up from heroin and opiate painkillers and too much realness at too quick a pace. But he’s solid earth. I call him up to get my mower back and he says he’ll make it happen, but come tomorrow. So I do. And my great uncle is there, who used to own the store, and was the nemesis to my dad’s drunken employment for those decades in the back room of the store, where the repair work was done, where I used to scoot around on this weird sliding seat thing all the time when I was as young as I can remember. I talk to great uncle for a while, who’s over 80 now, and still complains about every goddamned thing on earth like he always did. (This guy actually used to give me old copies of Popular Mechanics, because he wanted me to be an engineer because I was smart. Not laughing, just saying, that’s the history.) Nine months sober from heroin cousin hooked me up on the bill, gave me a couple files to sharpen my chainsaw chain, and we loaded it up on the back of my bruised and battered truck, and then leaned along the bed rails to bullshit away an hour. Another dude I grew up with who works there was chilling, and we should’ve went to get a beer or four, but my truck had an expired inspection sticker, so passing cops were sci-fi flick floating eyeballs waiting to report back to the overlords and ruin my life. And he has offspring and offspring partners to answer at as well. So we just got in our assorted vehicles that aren’t like the ones we wrecked or the ones we used to have last summer, that we got given to us or pieced together to keep running or were allowed to borrow for the time being, and we took our turns down the road in different directions. But we all came from that same place.
That’s why that Hank the Third shit, most especially the Straight To Hell, speaks so goddamned loudly at me. There hasn’t been music from that same place in forever. And there’s a lot of motherfuckers like us out here.
