One summer when I had a job painting the dorms at VCU in Richmond's sweltering thickness, I was walking home and passed a familiar porch with dudes I often times kicked it with, and some dude I had met like once was like, "Raven, I'm going to Maine on Friday to pick blueberries... you wanna go?" Of course, I went. Why wouldn't you drive a thousand miles (maybe not that far, fuck math and maps together, that's complicated) with a dude you hardly know in his shitty Mazda Escort (or whatever the fuck) to work a shitty migrant labor job for hardly enough money to cover the gas home? We ended up living in tents for a month, with a bunch of yankee ass people, and Micmac Indians. There were also plenty of Mexicans, of course, it being a migrant job, but all the Mexicans lived in the cabins and vans and I never went there and it was kind of assumed that was their area so you didn't go there, but in retrospect I bet they played norteno music and danced on the dirt out front and played wacky Mexican games that were like dominoes but had three sides and they would've told me about Chalino Sanchez and we'd play his music and laugh and fuck and stab each other lovingly in the throes of frustrating poverty.
While living in my shity blue tent that did little to keep me warm during the suprisingly cold ass late August coastal Maine night times, all I had for music was a shitty cassette walkman - seriously - which I later destroyed by trying to make a tattoo gun out of it. The one tape I played the most was a 90 minute Maxell where the one side was all Charlie Daniels Band tracks I put on together, and the other side was all Lynyrd Skynyrd. I think being stuck in an extended road trip with a semi-delusional hippie-ish new age stoner dude caused me to swing back the other way and get in touch with my roots, which is shit like that. "Feeling Free" is a straight road dog song anyways, about riding a bike (motorcycle kind, not gay assed Lance Armstrong kind), and was the first song on the Charlie Daniels Band side of that mixtape, which means I listened to it thirty million times that month and a half. It comes from the completely great Fire on the Mountain LP that also has "Long Haired Country Boy". Look, I'm not gonna be some music blog asshole and pretend "Feeling Free" is a superior song, because "Long Haired Country Boy" is a southern redneck hippie anthem and has been played on warbled hungover Sunday mornings and sad Thursday night funerals for decades, not to mention all those Friday and Saturday nights that go til sun-up. But that record is more than just the one good song (also has that "South's Gonna Do It" song as well), and "Feeling Free" is most definitely the unknown classic off that album. Man, The Charlie Daniels Band, through a streak of like five or six albums in the mid-to-late '70s, had a great discography of good rural stoner awesomeness. Yet all he's known for is the stupid fiddle and that "Devil Went Down to Georgia" song. Pop goes the weasel, even in the country.
STEAL "Feeling Free"
NEXT UP: World savvy indie bullshit!
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