I have two versions of this song inside my cyberland of computerdora devices. One was an early Audacity rip I did actually from before I even had a USB turntable when I was using RCA to phone jack cables running into the mic button with a ground wire going from the turntable to a fork laying on a washcloth, so the sound was rough as fuck, but I could boost it and amplify and then clean up the noise and fix the distortion and then it would be barely tolerable. So when I got a USB turntable, this song was one of the first ones I ripped in the cleaner, clearer way. But I also have a version of this song that came from a hard drive full of music I co-opted from somebody for various services rendered, and that was probably straight up Itunes originally. I really hope the version I ended up finding and upping for this stupid list is the one from my own vinyl, complete with scratches and crackles.
The reason for this is the album by the same name is one that my folks had when I was a kid, and would play often. The album design is maybe the most amazing and beautiful country music album cover ever, when you factor in front and back. The front is a straight up illustrated countryside, with rolling hills and farmland and shit, with a giant illustrated Don Williams, in his standard jean jacket and cowboy hat, climbing out the horizon from the torso up like rural Gulliver in America Lilliputia. Then when you flip the album, the back side is his back side, and the looming clusters of crystal cement and false hopes and broken dreams of the city are in the distance. He's just a country boy, and the city is there, but he only looks at it from afar. And the fact we live in a computer age with graphic designers galore but nobody who knows how to work a goddamned colored pencil, there will never be anything like this again, except for computerized ironic homages eventually, by somebody like myself who knows and loves it. Shit, maybe I end up doing a mixtape with that style cover bitten outright. I could see that happening, if my moral code of not tramping on the originality of personal heroes becomes a little more compromised.
Beyond that, this song is the shit. It was the shit to my folks when I was their only child and we lived in a shitty cinderblock house full of rats at the edge of a farm in podunk Rice, Virginia, on a road that now dead ends into a man-made reservoir. Me and the family rode down there last summer (or the one before), and where the house I lived at from like age 2 til age 7 was gone, it being a field now, and we pulled up to the house beside, looking as old as it did 30 years ago when I would play with the neighbor kid, where some old lady sat in a swing on the front porch. I asked her about the house that used to stand there, but she was an old lady in a cotton dress, no shit in 2010 (or 2009 I guess, to be more precise), and she didn't completely understand me, or was full of the Alzheimers, or something. But mostly she answered my questions with my questions, but positively reinforced. Like I would yell-talk, "Do you know the house that used to be in that field?" And she'd go, "Yeah, there was a house in that field?" And I would go, "Do you know how long it's been gone?" And she'd answer, "Yeah, it's gone."
That album is one of many I took from my folks, and it has gotten much play in my current house - an old two-story farmhouse built in 1905, and the cardboard sleeve is as neat as ever, and thinned by time. The album is scuffed yet cared for, like nothing you'd find at a thrift store (always scratched from neglect or being moved around by people who don't care) or at a record store (always too pristine and unblemished to be a part of a real person's real life on a real basis). I've seen my oldest kid staring at the cover, flipping it over and looking at the back, and then going back and forth a time or two before tucking it back into the stack. And no matter how much I struggle for money in life, which of course is a minor struggle compared to reality, but we all build our own little cocoons of creditory self-destruction that we feel is about to bury us to death, “I’ve got silver in the stars... and gold in the morning sun... gold in the morning sun.” Fuck yeah, Don. Fuck yeah.
STEAL “I’m Just a Country Boy”
NEXT UP: Unfinished beat business and my literal soundtrack to life!
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