J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown – September '10 #1: “Lowlands” by Ozark Mountain Daredevils

It is strange how these things come together because I plan on writing every night of my life, but some nights are controlled by life and some are controlled by passion and some are controlled by obligation or preparations for the next day or whatever. But I had been getting to this number one song from two months ago, thinking in my head how this was off an album my folks used to play all the time – It’ll Shine When It Shines – probably one of my favorite albums to this day. The cover is a play on that famous plate motif that everybody had (or we did at least) that I thought was just some shit my mom got from Winn Dixie but I guess is some famous ass old plate design. And my oldest kid has actually added most of the songs off this album onto her little tiny ass ipod, digging the music as well, probably like I did too with the added benefit of Sunday mornings and bacon cooking and this being in the background.
Then tonight, me and the ol’ lady watched The True Meaning of Pictures, a documentary about the photographs and subjects of Shelby Lee Adams, who takes black and white pics of Appalachian people, that dying breed of holler dwellers that are being faded into oblivion by progress. And it was funny to me hearing the art critics complain about Adams being involved in engineering the pics he takes, like buying the hog that is slaughtered in one of his more famous pics of a smiling ass mountain goat family sitting around the hanging carcass of a huge hog. But then you hear the stories, and the guy knows these people for a long time, and gets involved in their lives. And it seems the biggest complaint critics had was how his pictures made them think of a stereotype that was in their brain already. And I’ll admit there’s probably a couple shades of bullshit to Shelby Lee Adams’ indignant defenses, but I don’t fault the dude. Fuck being a documentarian watching people like zoo animals. You have to interact with the world you are trying to shine a light on.
Mostly though it got me to thinking about the place I came from, both literally and figuratively. My folks were high school dropouts, neither of which was 18 the day I was born, and it was a rural life when there wasn’t a little evil portal monitor into everything on earth in every living room. I mean, it wasn’t Appalachia rural by any means, we didn’t have chickens, but I had to cut wood my whole life and it was an hour ride on the schoolbus to get to school. And I feel like a fucking piece of shit for even pretending it was hard, because it wasn’t, though it probably would’ve looked like it to some. It was what it was, and I’m good by that.
Shit is dying man. The real ways of doing things are going away. I went to Lowes the other weekend looking for metal fence stakes to hold down some raggedy ass wire fencing to keep my new little pigs penned in, but they didn’t have anything. They had tons of Christmas displays, and all sorts of goofy little weekend warrior projects you could knock out that didn’t really accomplish anything except for put something plastic in place that looked like copper or made someone who can follow numbers have a construction worker fantasy for four hours one Saturday afternoon. But that’s what we’ve become. We don’t actually do things anymore; we just pretend we do things. And I’m as guilty of that as anybody, with this blog, with my day-to-day, with how I carry myself, feigning torment by words when my natural mental illnesses are not all that bad at all. I wish I was crazier with uncontrolled spirit.
The whole “dying breed” thing always plays out in my head the same way, thick with questions of mortality and mark upon this world, with me thinking back to about 18 months of my teenage years when my folks split up and my dad moved into a trailer at the end of the road and I would stay there, and my uncle Ricky would always be around. Even though he was my uncle, he was only about 6 or 7 years older than me, and about 10 younger than my dad, but the three of us kicked it, indulging in various personal addictions, small ass trailer fitting three huge personalities, although to be honest mine was just starting to incubate into what it is now. But that’s normal. Those were some great times, and really shaped the fuck out of who I am and how I think, in a lot of ways, a lot more than I care to get into before this turns into a livejournal post circa 2002.
Both my uncle Ricky and my dad Charlie “Tuna” McMillian are dead, been years on both of them. My dad had a massive stroke at like age 47 (about the same age my grandfather died, for reasons unknown to me because I was little, but he was a pretty heavy drunkard from what I understand, and tormented by memories of both the Korean War and World War II), and Ricky killed himself behind the pop-up camper my dad was living in behind my grandmother’s trailer, the Saturday evening/Sunday morning before Father’s Day. My step-grandfather Bob was the one who heard the shot and went out to find him, too.
I was in my second year of college when that happened, living in my first real life grown folks apartment, with a crazy bitch of a girlfriend on a slummy ass block of Richmond, Virginia, well-known for decades for the transvestite prostitutes walking up and down it and congregating on the corner of Broad and Lombardy. My uncle Ricky was one of the few ever in the family who had an actual life insurance policy, so my grandparents got the cash, paid for the funeral, gave money to my other uncle to help finish building the race car Ricky and him were working on, helped pay some restitution to keep another family member in the good graces of the law, and my grandmother bought me a word processor – a shitty old Brother that only showed five lines of text at a time, and not even the whole line when you had it at 15 pica. But I used the fuck out of that word processor, for a solid decade, so much so that when it died, I actually bought a replacement off of Ebay. But it didn’t work out too well compared to a computer, although computers are full of the digital distractions that help me be one of all of us who don’t really do things so much as pretend we do things. I still had a good bit of one project on there that just recently I’ve been trying to move over, which pretty much was such a pain in the ass that I decided to just start over rather than try to retype and correct what came out of the old Brother.
My dad and my uncle Ricky are buried beside each other, a chainsaw image on my dad’s grave marker, and a funny car doing a burnout on my uncle Ricky’s. And I often wonder what the fuck is gonna be splurged on for my grave marker, what will the family I leave behind identify as a solid symbol of Raven?
But I think about my kids growing up in a house where we blast music and are cooking up bacon on a Sunday morning, and it’s bacon from our own hogs, and there’s chickens in the back yard and stupid ass hound dogs and the ol’ lady’s got a herb garden and it still probably looks kind of fucked up from the distance, but it is what it is, and we’re good by it. And my kids are coming up with at least a bit of that in their goddamned brains and souls, to try and make something real out of what this world has become. Bird Tribe – a little flock born from the raven and the owl. And I ain’t gonna be a punk and pretend we’re saving the old ways or got it all figured out. But we’re doing something, and it feels like a goddamned fight sometimes, but I know it feels better than not fighting.
STEAL “Lowlands”
NEXT MONTH: A rebirth in the form of the first J.J. Krupert list from the new computer’s Itunes!