True to the Roots

by Monte Dutton

  "Whatever the arguments are," Ingram interjects, "I've always had what you're saying. People can say it's sophistication or maturity or whatever. My songs have always been about trying to figure out what I'm going through. If I can figure that out, I've always trusted in the fact that it's going to have an impact on other people. If you feel that way, you can trust that there's a whole bunch of others who feel the way you do and relate to what you feel.

  "A lot of artists think of their lives as so normal that they don't feel compelled to write about it or sing about it. That's really insecure horseshit because the fact is that being normal is really fucking hard. Everybody's got a lot of shit to deal with . . . and that is normal. They think, man, my life is just like everybody else's and nobody cares, and the fact is that everybody's having a real hard time getting through it all every day, and that's what's interesting."

  Then I remark that so much of country music seems soulless today, and I suggest that the stars of past years succeeded in part because they lived the lives they sang about. I mention Brad Paisley—incredibly talented, incredibly nice, but, to me, incredibly boring—and Ingram concedes the point but comes to Paisley's defense.

  "Why I really love Brad Paisley is that he's a fantastic guitarist," he says. "He has a great career. But I want to know one thing. I want to know what they care about. I know it ain't fishing. If he doesn't have anything that doesn't keep him up at night, God bless him."

  I propose that in the modern age virtually all families are dysfunctional, and I offer some personal history to back it up. I tell him we all privately think we come from the craziest family on earth, and the reason we all think this is that we hide it so well. Jack mainly laughs, nodding in agreement.

  Then I cite the example of a country music icon, Tom T. Hall, who wrote songs that stirred my soul. I'd wondered once why the quality of Hall's work had declined, until I realized that Hall's life had changed because of his very celebrity and that once he became well known, he could no longer just hang out over by the Coca-Cola cooler in a backwoods general store and observe actual people like he used to do. People knew him. They wanted his autograph. He lost the invaluable advantage of being an everyman. I told Ingram that what I had finally come to understand is that once the world changed, the best a Tom T. Hall could hope for was to maintain a degree of clarity, enough at least to be able to make wry observations about the ways his world had changed; as I saw it, by maintaining some perspective in the context of enormous fame, Hall proved that he had never really abandoned the Muse.

  "A lot of great people do [keep the faith], but you're right, man, that's tough," Ingram opined. "A man has to keep his perspective when all about him things are changing.

  "The great fear of every songwriter is that [his] life will stop being real, so [he] can't write about it. Because my career has taken such a low trajectory, I've been able to see that, as things get a little bit better, it's still left me with things to write about. There hasn't been this dramatic transformation in my life.

  "It's the way life is. Misery and insecurity, and love and hate, man, that's it. The best you can do is see the humor in it. That's the best way to get around it."

  Since Ingram is such a thinking man, he actually understands the reasons behind his own plight. He understands why ubiquitous commercialism exists even as he decries it with every ounce of his being.

  "There's a lot of money at stake promoting a race car driver, an artist. Not a songwriter. Just an artist," he says. "I don't think I'm really out there on the edge. There are a lot of guys out there who go a lot farther. There could be somebody out there willing to make a big million dollar decision on whether to sign me and give me a million dollars and push my stuff or to sign somebody else who's found another way to be compelling by not being passionate. Somehow not as compelling, not as passionate."

  And, yes, Ingram concedes that a Brad Paisley, judged from a record executive's perspective, is a far less risky investment.

  "Of course," he says. "He doesn't drink. He plays guitar like a bat out of hell. That's just the way life is, man. I just figure . . . you can be stronger than all that."

  He pauses for a moment, collecting his thoughts.

  "If I make it . . . when . . . I haven't given up on that shit. When I make it up there, man, I've got a thousand gigs under my belt. When I play in front of 135,000 people, man, I'm going to know what the fuck to do.

  "Just like those NASCAR drivers you watch, man, when it comes time to win that fuckin' race, they've got to know what the fuck to do."

  Music City

  Nashville, Tennessee I April 2004

  It's kind of fitting when I walk into the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on lower Broadway. A Gram Parsons tune is playing. Naturally, I wind up buying a boxed set of Parsons's considerable, and all too brief, body of work.

  I find plenty to like at the downtown store. A few minutes later Hank Snow's "Hello Love" wafts through the shop. The bins feature more Johnny Duncan than Garth Brooks and more Louvin Brothers, by far, than Dixie Chicks.

  Later that day, while I'm waiting to interview Jesse Lee Jones, I sit on a stool at the bar of Robert's Western World, next to one of those old-beyond-his-years natives who mingle with the tourists. He may or may not be a musician, but he loves the music. The place is practically empty late on a Monday afternoon. A singer, Dave Foley, and his bass player, Rich Holbrook, are basically just practicing since there really isn't anybody here for whom to perform. Foley is singing "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died," a Tom T. Hall signature. It's kind of an unconventional version since Foley has a gravelly voice. Down low, he begins, "I remember the year that Clayton Delaney died," and without much of a second thought I chip in my own high harmony from the bar. "They said for the last two weeks that he suffered and cried."

  The guy sitting next to me said, "Hey, man, you a singer?"

  I say, no, I just like to sing.

  He pretty much bellows at Foley, bringing sort of a halt to the song. "Hey, man, let this guy sing!"

  Foley says, "Sure, c'mon up, man. I'm good with that."

  I give my new friend a little shake of the head and a drop of the shoulders. "Nah, that's ok. I'll just embarrass myself."

  "No such thing, man, not if you're having fun."

  So . . . I end up walking up to the front, going up the little steps to the stage, in front of the plate glass windows where my back is facing the street. Because I just walked across the street from the record shop a few moments earlier, I have a guitar pick in my pocket. I remember it cost fifty cents because I picked it up after I had already charged some CDs to my credit card. The guy behind the counter didn't charge me any sales tax, which was damn nice of him since I'd just spent over a hundred and fifty bucks on music. Funny how I don't remember exactly how much the music cost, but I remember the pick cost four bits.

  Since I have that pick in my pocket, I ask Foley if I can borrow his guitar. First, he's letting some yokel sing, then he's giving up his precious starburst guitar.

  "Sure, man, go ahead."

  So, completely unexpectedly, I sing the old Charley Pride song "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone?" because it's the first song I think of and because I know I can play it without screwing up.

  When I get through—Holbrook stays up there with me and plunks away at the standup bass—Foley actually says, "That's a damn good song, man. I gotta learn that one."

  It's called just knowing enough to be dangerous, and it's kind of odd that a guy who can barely strum along, sitting on a block where the best musicians you never heard of play night after night for only tips and a few cheap, homemade CD sales, can walk up on a stage and play a song as if it was the birthday party of his niece or something. Pretty good deal for Dave Foley, though. I wind up tipping him ten bucks and paying another ten for his CD Breaking Old Ground. Foley tells me the old barn on the cover is where he lives and that he's hoping to get electricity in it eventually.

  Music is kind of a buyer's market in Nashv
ille, where a few get fabulously rich but most are just getting by.

  Oh, how I hate the Nashville that keeps cranking out the same crude vanilla shit and ignoring all disreputable types who really keep the dream alive. I reckon nothing has really changed. Where once there was some fat guy smoking a big cigar who took an old poor boy from Georgia's song and made a million bucks off it, now that guy's a Lipscomb or Belmont graduate who's a born again Christian, but if Jesus came back tomorrow, he'd toss that blow dried, immaculately dressed, articulate marketing type right out of the temple and, preferably, right on his ass in the middle of Broadway.

  When I came to town, I got offered two seats at the Opry. I would have liked to have had a backstage pass, just so I could observe the mingling of the young hellraisers with Little Jimmy Dickens and Jimmy C. Newman and Jim Ed Brown and all those other Jimmies. The tickets came in a packet to my hotel, but they were for "quality seating," and sometime during the show, I'd been informed by letter, someone would come to take me on a guided tour backstage. That way, I guess, they could keep me under surveillance, lest I actually try to chitchat with someone like Randy Travis or Brad Paisley.

  I didn't go. After hanging out on lower Broadway, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

  Years ago, when I was younger and had less sense, a friend and I took what we called a Jerry Lee Lewis cruise around town. We rode around in the Olds 98 that my friend's mother, in some brief episode of insanity, had loaned us for a road trip from South Carolina to Nashville. We drank an awful lot of beer—I'm sure it was the cheapest in the supermarket—and listened to one Jerry Lee song after another, cruising endlessly through rich neighborhoods with "Drinkin' Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee" playing wide-ass open. Back then I couldn't relate to some of the tunes, like "Middle Age Crazy" and "Thirty Nine and Holdin' (Holdin' Anything He Can)." Now I get the picture.

  So, the two of us rolled right off Briley Parkway, back to which we had somehow found our way, and attended the Grand Ole Opry. Back then it was in the middle of an amusement park, but, since there's a God in heaven, they tore down the park in 1997.

  As fate would have it, Bill Anderson was walking on the stage soon after we took our seats in the balcony.

  "This part of the Opry is brought to you by Goo-Goo Candy Clusters. Please make welcome the host of this segment, Whisperin' Bill Anderson!"

  My friend was not Whisperin' Bill's biggest fan, and it didn't help that he began singing a song that was really insipid. As I recall, it began with something like "Happiness, happiness, everybody's lookin' for happiness!"

  To which my friend began jeering. "Boooooo! Boooooo! Get that stupid sumbitch off the goddamn stage!"

  It wasn't a capacity crowd, but a lot of heads turned. I think maybe even Whisperin' Bill himself shielded his eyes to the spotlights and peered up into the balcony.

  "Man, you just don't boo at the Grand Ole Opry, man!" Somehow I got him quieted down, and, by a miracle even greater than the one that didn't have us already in some jail cell, we managed to watch the rest of the show without being spirited out. In fact, I would have respected the Opry more if they had spirited us out and put us on public display in stocks out front of Roy Acuff's cabin or something.

  Tom T. Hall had a song called "Come On Back to Nashville," in which he noted the danger of basing the music on the tastes of businessmen, record company executives, and the socalled entertainment experts. Those people aren't connected to the working men and women of the country, yet they insist upon dictating exactly what people in the heartland get to hear. The tail was wagging the dog even then, and now the dog doesn't seem to matter anymore.

  It's as true now as it was when he wrote it, only now the fix is instituted by lawyers and computer technology and marketing surveys and Belmont grads with the fear of God and the might of corporations on their side. It's worse than payola ever was, and there's no chance that anybody's going to jail for it. The fixers and blackmailers are considered too respectable.

  Meanwhile, the record industry in Nashville is going broke, and they insist on blaming it on the kids who are downloading stuff off the Internet. The reason those kids are doing it is because they can't get the stuff they want to hear on the radio.

  Goddamn it.

  But I don't hate Nashville. Not all of it. I only hate the part that matters to the people who don't have any innate creativity at anything other than making money. I love the part that really matters, that is, in the eyes of the God whose name I just used in vain.

  I love the kids who play rockabilly in front of a dozen people in a little converted warehouse that looks like it would make an excellent set for one of the weirder episodes of the 1990s TV show Twin Peaks.

  I love a cowboy singer named Mike Siler, who's obviously cut some cattle in his time and very probably been bucked off a Brahma, or that would be my guess from the way he carries himself. I love Foley and Holbrook—both of whom are from Massachusetts, for chrissakes—playing for tips at Robert's and living in a barn without any electricity. The day they were playing at Robert's, by the way, there were snow flurries outside, so you know Foley was looking forward to getting offstage and back to the barn that doubles as his home.

  I love to listen to a rode-hard-and-put-up-wet guy with his white hair—a touch of gray in the temples—combed straight over and herded into a ponytail down his back. Jimmy Snyder spends too much time name dropping for my taste, but what's a guy supposed to do when he's probably been in and out of this city for at least three decades and he's still playing for tips at Tootsie's?

  God love him. I wish it were me.

  Praise the Lord and Pass the Weed

  Charlotte, North Carolina I May 2003

  Cody Canada is a twenty something kid with shoulder length hair and, at least offstage, a soft spoken manner. He is obviously more interested in doing his own thing than in becoming a monster commercial success.

  "Are we getting any play on the radio here?" he asks from the stage of Amos' Southend late one Saturday night.

  Not much emanates from the audience in the way of the affirmative.

  "When you sign that recording contract," he says, "you think they're going to play your stuff from here to Bangkok."

  It's not necessarily so. In fact, it's necessarily not so. Where fm radio is concerned, the corporate conglomerates dictate what it is that audiences will allegedly like. There isn't much love left out there. The actual consumers' tastes don't have a whole lot to do with it anymore. When's the last time you heard a radio station solicit honest-to-gosh requests? What requests there are these days are strictly limited to songs already on the computerized playlists. There are individual exceptions, but popular music in this country has become about as manipulated as, well, politics. Canada's—that's Cody, not the country—revolutionary band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, is stuck in the musical no-man's-land between rock, pop, country, and folk. It's where a lot of good stuff resides.

  While cloaked in the respectability of legal paperwork, today's radio scene is worse than payola ever was. The payoffs are still there. They've just got lawyers' fingerprints on them.

  In the cruelest of ironies the term for it is Americana. Some refer to "roots rock." Some say "alternative country." A lot of alternative country is related to what country used to be, which makes the use of the adjective alternative about as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp, a Civil War, or soothing aftershave.

  Perhaps you don't believe me. Perhaps you think you like what your favorite station is playing. ok. Do me this favor. Listen to what isn't being played on the radio. From the small sample of people to whom I've exposed the music of Cross Canadian Ragweed and dozens of other entertainers like them, you'll like the stuff off the radio better than the stuff on it.

  Trouble is, unless you stumble across a Cross Canadian Ragweed or a Bleu Edmondson Band or a Stoney LaRue and the Organic Boogie Band or a Cooder Graw or a Jason Boland and the Stragglers, you're never going to know what you're missing.

  Never heard of these peopl
e, huh? Baby, that's the plan. All you're hearing is what New York and LA and Nashville want you to hear. The fix is in. Nothing's coming out of Austin, Texas; Stillwater, Oklahoma; and, well, Merlefest up near Wilkesboro, North Carolina, for that matter, that you're ever going to hear unless you're passionate enough to look real hard. An occasional respite can be found on the left side of your fm dial, where public radio occasionally plays the music people ought to hear as opposed to what rich business executives want them to.

  You think Cody and his band of hard rocking revolutionaries are worried about protecting their royalties? He stands on the stage, well into Sunday morning, to exhort people to download CCRW's music for free.

  "Ain't nobody but the people already rich worried about those royalties," he proclaims. The underground downloading of music is the road to the Promised Land for Cross Canadian Ragweed.

  I've never seen a band that seemed happier onstage. They're all in their twenties. They're all busy having fun, with all the knowing smiles, backward ball caps, and jaunty dances that having fun onstage entails. There's Canada, the lead vocalist, occasional harpist, and dazzling lead guitarist. There's Grady Cross, listed as rhythm guitarist but capable on occasion of righteous lead riffs. There are Jeremy Plato on bass and Randy Ragsdale on drums.

  The names Cross, Canada, and Ragsdale, of course, bear responsibility for the band's name. Then there's the weed.

  I tell Canada that my first impression from listening to the band's CDs is that the band seems really passionate about two subjects: Jesus Christ and smoking marijuana.

  His reply? "Pretty much."

  "As you get older, though, I think it's fair to say that Jesus gets more and more important . . . in relation to the weed," he concludes, wearing a thoughtful and serious expression. I have a bit of trouble keeping a straight face.