“And we ain’t gonna be around to spend what we don’t got,” reasons Bell, telling Barksdale they can invest the cash they now have into more real estate: “We in a money game where nary a motherfucker goes to jail. We could be past the run-andgun, Avon. We could finance the packages and never touch nothing but cash.
“No corners, no territory, nothing but making like a goddamn bank. We let the young ’uns worry about how to wholesale, where to retail. I mean, who give a fuck who standing on what corner, when we pulling our cut off the top and putting that money to good use?”
Avon gives a fuck, saying that he “ain’t no shirt-wearin’ suit like you. Just a gangster, I suppose. And I want my corners.”
Told about Hamsterdam by Bodie, Bell drops by to see the experiment in action, though he remains skeptical.
“Put some of our people down here,” he tells Bodie. “Not too many. Just some of the young ’uns. Keep the package real small, in case this is a trap.”
Avon orders his crew to “put a hurt to this Marlo. I want my corners,” and the strategy falls to Cutty. It begins to go awry, however, when a Barksdale soldier named Chipper ignores Cutty’s orders and rushes into action to his death.
Armed, Cutty corners Fruit but as he stares into his rival’s eyes, he finds he is no longer a man who can pull the trigger and Fruit gets away.
Bubbles tips Greggs that Marlo and Barksdale are at war. At first Greggs isn’t too excited – the detail has orders to pursue other targets and bring the crime rate down – and then she learns that two Barksdale boys have been killed.
“Westside gonna be all Baghdad an’ shit,” says Bubbles.
But even bodies falling in West Baltimore aren’t enough to persuade Lieutenant Daniels to set Greggs and McNulty loose on the drug war and he throws them out of his office.
Says Greggs to McNulty: “If your old friend Bunny Colvin’s up to his ass in bodies, I’d bet he’d take all the help he can get. Not that you’d ever go behind anyone’s back or anything like that, right?”
Right.
Avon and Bell respond like a hawk and dove respectively to the beating they took in the offensive against Marlo.
“Ain’t got no more motherfuckin’ time now,” said Barksdale. “When word of this get out that the boy, Marlo, punked me, what am I gonna look like?”
Bell warns Avon that if he’s anywhere close to a violent crime, he’s going back to jail. Avon tells Cutty and Slim Charles to take care of Marlo themselves.
Donette tells Brianna that McNulty stopped by, suggesting that D’Angelo may have been murdered. It’s something Brianna has never considered in regard to her son’s death. But she’s thinking hard on it now.
Omar pays a visit to Bunk, just to clear things up. No one will talk and the eyewitness the detective found has “had a change of heart.”
Enraged, Bunk reminds Omar that they grew up together, that once they lived in a place where people cared.
“Rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a community. Wasn’t nobody, no victim, who didn’t matter. Now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you.”
Carcetti continues his campaign to get Theresa D’Agostino to run his campaign for mayor. “Crime is outta fucking control,” he argues. “Black, white, green – people are pissed off.”
Upset that he let Fruit get away, Cutty has a heart-to-heart with Avon and admits he couldn’t pull the trigger, explaining: “Whatever it is in you that lets you flow like you flow, it ain’t in me no more.”
episode thirty-two
BACK BURNERS
“Conscience do cost.”
– BUTCHIE
Directed by Tim Van Patten
Story by David Simon & Joy Lusco Kecken; teleplay by Joy Lusco Kecken
On a tour of the old neighborhood, Avon is told by Slim Charles that Marlo has closed up shop on the street and is working strictly as a behind-the-scenes wholesaler.
“And I was just beginning to respect the motherfucker for showin’ heart,” says Avon.
Herc, on duty in Hamsterdam, is stunned to see Avon cruise by in a SUV and Cutty is back with the yard work crew.
“You walked through them old doors, didn’t you?” his foreman asks.
“Tried to,” says Cutty, confiding that things have not gone very well lately.
Earlier, Daniels had his ass handed to him by Burrell and Rawls over the body count in the Marlo/Avon struggle for the Westside.
Now, back in the detail office, Daniels tells his crew that Kintel is no longer in focus, the new targets are the well-known Stringer Bell and the newcomer Marlo Stanfield.
Daniels then calls McNulty into his office and asks him point blank if he went to Colvin behind his back. Not one to lie to authority, McNulty admits that he did.
“When the cuffs go on Stringer,” says a furious Daniels, “you need to find a new home. You’re done in this unit.”
Omar, on advice from Butchie, makes plans to buy Officer Dozerman’s missing gun, which appears almost as soon as Omar puts out word that he wants it. Of course it has to be the right one.
“Tell him I’ll pay when it proves itself,” says Omar to Butchie.
“Told him that already,” says the blind man. “He say you can make it $1,500 for his trouble … conscience do cost.”
In this way, Bunk gets his gun and Landsman off his back.
A Barksdale soldier named Bernard brings in a new delivery of “burners,” cell phones to use and throw away once the minutes are used up.
Shamrock tells him to bring 60 more in a few days and as Bernard goes about his business, buying a few at a time here and there, his girlfriend nags him to just buy them as fast as he can so they can go to the movies.
The news out of greater metropolitan Hamsterdam: shootings and aggravated assaults are down five percent in nearly every neighborhood across the Western District.
Info from a Fruit “burner” phone – salvaged by Bubbles and turned over to Greggs – shows calls made to a network of numbers no longer in use.
“It’s all historical,” says Freamon. “We can find the network no problem, but when we do it’s a week old and they’ve dumped their phones. How we get a wire up, that part I haven’t figured out yet.”
Over dinner, Donette infuriates Stringer Bell by telling him not only that the cops are suspicious of D’Angelo’s death but she passed the info along to Brianna.
“It’s her son,” she says. “Ain’t she got a right to know?”
Bubbles, selling classic white T-shirts from a supermarket cart on the street, makes a visit to Hamsterdam, witnessing if not the Netherlands, a netherworld of drug use with abandon: fiends firing, others smoking crack, prostitutes selling their ass, all sorts of fighting and all-around chaos.
More importantly, he sees out-of-work corner boys standing around, no longer needed as runners or look-outs.
Carver will later tell dealers who have put the kids out of work to pay them a sort of unemployment insurance, that if they want to do business in Hamsterdam they will have to pay a tax.
“If I find anyone holding out, he’s … back on the street getting his head busted,” says Carver. To which Herc comments: “What are you, a fucking Communist?”
At home, Cheryl tells Greggs to move out.
“I miss us,” Greggs says, noting that she only agreed to have a baby to keep the relationship.
Finding out that the mayor has lied to him about strengthening the witness protection program, Carcetti goes to City Hall to lean on Royce.
The mayor – mentioning meat and potatoes necessities like snow removal and trash pick-up – says the city is in such weak shape financially that it’s the best he can do.
When Bodie and a crew are pulled over with a large amount of narcotics in their car, they protest that they are “untouchable” because they are headed to “the free zone.”
McNulty and Greggs have no idea what Bodie is talking about and the shit gets weird and tense until Bunny Colvin
shows up.
Colvin asks McNulty to let it ride and not spill the beans on the free zone at HQ: “… before you decide to lose your minds over this, you might take a moment and ride past some of my drug corners. Empty. All of them … district-wide, my crime is down five percent.”
They concede, as McNulty owes Colvin a favor for getting Daniels to put them back on Stringer Bell. And from the car they recover a live cell phone with minutes left on it, a prize for Lester Freamon.
[Indeed, it won’t take long for Freamon to build a case with the phone – he instructs the detail to gather up as many Barksdale “burners” as they can – even though by the time a wiretap goes up, the dealers will have discarded other important phones.]
Cutty makes a return visit to his friend Grace’s church and has a heart-to-heart with the Deacon about beginning a new life.
He confesses he “… had this feelin’ for a long time now like I’m outside of myself, watching me do things I don’t wanna do, you know?”
Herc stuns McNulty and Greggs by telling them that Avon Barksdale is running free, that he just saw him cruising the ’hood.
“Jesus, Herc. He’s at Jessup, down for four or five at least,” says Greggs. “What, we all look alike to you?”
Avon Barksdale has walked and sure enough will be running.
WAY DOWN IN THE HOLE
The Music of The Wire
Steve Earle is not the kind of man who asks for much. But when the last shot to perform The Wire theme song rolled around, “I begged,” he said.
“Way Down in the Hole” had passed through many capable hands since the show’s 2002 debut: The Blind Boys of Alabama recorded it first; the original version – majestically croaked by the song’s composer, Tom Waits, launched Season Two; the Neville Brothers were up next.
In the fourth year, a heartbreaking story about middle-school kids, the song was handled by a group of Baltimore teenagers calling themselves DoMaJe.
Earle played the recovering drug addict Walon, the clean and sober hillbilly who worked as Bubbles’s on-again, off-again Narcotics Anonymous sponsor, and knew The Wire would bow out after Season Five.
“He said he had an idea for it and described a kind of broke-down street sound,” recalled Simon. “It sounded right for the homeless/false serial killer motif.”
Earle’s notion for the song came together with Los Angeles producer John King, half of the Dust Brothers duo who produced Beck’s 1996 album Odelay.
“I did my vocal with a resonator guitar, posted a [computer] file and sent it to John,” said Earle in June of 2009, speaking before a concert with John Prine in Vienna, Virginia.
“[King] sent it back to me, flute and bass went in last and later I rerecorded the voice and guitar.”
Simon, who’d considered Earle for one of the longshoremen in Season Two until schedules conflicted, liked the result, using the rendition for the concluding season.
The experience of recording “Way Down in the Hole” together convinced King and Earle to work on songs that became 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, winner of a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk/ Americana album and one for King as producer.
“The Wire,” said Earle of the collaboration, “was the deciding factor on both sides.”
•
John Lennon described the blues as “a chair … not a design for a chair, but the first chair.”
So sturdy is that chair that countless musicians – from its first builders in the Mississippi Delta to the White Stripes – have been able to sit in it comfortably.
In some ways, said Earle, “Way Down in the Hole” – though constructed from weathered planks of gospel – served that purpose for the various performers who settled into it over the The Wire’s five-season arc.
“The show,” said Earle, is “… a story following people on both sides of the drug war with as many good guys as bad guys on both sides. That makes the choice of ‘Way Down in the Hole’ very interesting” as a theme.
He noted, however, “you’re treading on thin ice if you try to figure out if it’s a gospel song” in message. “In form it is, but in terms of how much it has to do with Christianity, that’s dangerous and probably more dangerous to talk about with Waits.”
The 60-year-old Waits – whose unauthorized biography, Low Side of the Road, was published by British author Barney Hoskyns in 2009 – is a hero to any songwriter of “my generation,” said Earle. Not just for his staggering repertoire of American music, but “the way he carries himself as an artist.”
“The Blind Boys obviously approached it as a gospel song,” said Earle. “It’s hard to say with the Nevilles, they have a long history of approaching gospel music secularly.”
Earle said that DoMaJe – with vocals by Ivan Ashford, Markel Steele, Cameron Brown, Tariq Al-Sabir, and Avery Bargasse – took the most unique approach.
“They fucked with it more than anybody to make it work with the beat,” he said. “They proved the universality of the song.”
•
On the soundtrack to David Simon’s life, the money song never shows up on time.
“My song never plays on the radio at my moment,” he said. “It’s always somebody else’s song.”
The music found in The Wire echoes that.
“What you don’t want is to script a song that speaks to the moment, which is something a lot of people in TV don’t get,” he said. “If the lyrics are dead-on with [the story] … it’s redundant.
“In real life you don’t get to punch the button on the song that you want to be playing when you get into the bar fight, when you’re in a car chase.”
After waiting years for a soundtrack to The Wire, fans can hit the button on two separate discs of songs from the show.
Released by Nonesuch Records, The Wire: … and all the pieces matter, intersperses dialogue from the show with 23 songs – from “What You Know About Baltimore” by Ogun featuring Phathead to “The Body of An American” by the Pogues.
It also includes the first four versions of “Way Down in the Hole,” but not Earle’s, which appears on Washington Square Serenade.
The companion disc is Beyond Hamsterdam: Baltimore Tracks From The Wire.
The final track on … and all the pieces matter, is the oddly soothing, atmospheric instrumental that meanders toward silence as the final credits roll. Titled “The Fall,” it was composed by Wire music director, Blake Leyh, who has followed Simon to the New Orleans Treme project.
Decidedly not on either soundtrack are these gems: “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” the 1972 hit by Looking Glass, played on a beat-up radio in the stevedores’ pier-side shack as Frank Sobotka worries about a can of contraband languishing on the docks. The Tokens singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (the “whimaway” song) as Jimmy McNulty and his two boys follow Stringer Bell through a city market.
Nor sadly, is Gram Parsons’ “Streets of Baltimore,” which Bunk Moreland suffered through on a night of drinking with McNulty. Or the plaintive work of Lucinda Williams, which plays quietly as city prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman is stuck at home with paperwork.
But there is “Sixteen Tons,” the Merle Travis song sent to No. 1 in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford and barrel-housed in Season Two by the Nighthawks of Washington, D.C.
Said former ’hawks guitarist Pete Kanaras of the day the band was filmed live at the Clement Street Bar: “My favorite moments occurred during a break … George Pelecanos came over and said, ‘You must be the Greek!’
“And a crew member came over to take pictures of my shoes – cordovan red Fluevog Buicks. She said they were badass!”
•
While making The Wire pilot, David Simon and Bob Colesberry deliberated for weeks about which song – and, just as importantly, by whom – would best serve the show as its theme.
“Songs can be on point, but only up to a point,” said Simon. “A lot of different things I listen to are like that, but all of Tom Waits is like that … never on point but they lend
themselves cinematically.
“He’s painting pictures in those songs and they’re never linear. At least they haven’t been for a long time.”
With Tom as the early favorite, Simon began playing the Waits catalog for Colesberry in search of “the mood of a broken world.”
“Way Down in the Hole,” off the 1987 album Frank’s Wild Years, emerged as an early contender.
“We kept listening to it over and over again, and at some point somebody handed me a copy of a CD by the Blind Boys of Alabama doing a lot of gospel stuff with rock-and-roll origins,” said Simon. “At this point I was arguing for John Hammond’s version of ‘Get Behind the Mule.’”
The lyrics to “Mule” – from the 2001 Wicked Grin album of Waits covers by Hammond – speak to getting up every morning, getting behind the mule, and going out to plow, a primitive take on the rat race.
But the Blind Boys ultimately carried the day with “Way Down in the Hole,” Simon swayed by “the African-American voices” charting Waits’s sensibility.
In seeking permission to use the song, Simon did not have the honor of speaking with one of his heroes.
“He wanted to see some episodes first to know how it was going to be used,” said Simon. “We sent him a bunch of tapes and didn’t hear anything for weeks.”
Finally, post-production chief Karen Thorson got in touch and Waits explained that he hadn’t gotten around to watching the show because he didn’t know how to operate the family VCR.
He assured Thorson that “my wife will be home soon and she knows how to work it.”
“The next day,” said Simon. “He approved it.”
episode thirty-three
“MORAL MIDGETRY”
“Pretty don’t even come close to the problem.”
- THE DEACON
Directed by Agnieszka Holland
Story by David Simon & Richard Price; teleplay by Richard Price
This episode, said screenwriter Price, “was about how quickly utopian visions can create dystopic hells.”
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