My favorite Republican drives around town listening to country
music and crying. Wendy Wakeman, the former chair of our board of
selectmen and an experienced, tough political cookie, doesn’t mind
admitting it. She also pounds on the steering wheel and sings along
with her favorite raucous tunes, like Alan Jackson’s “It’s Five
o’Clock Somewhere.”
Pour me something tall and strong,
Make it a hurricane before I go insane.
It’s only half past twelve but I don’t care…
It’s five o’clock somewhere.
When I’m fed up with news and talk and politics, and it does
happen, I switch over to one of our two New England country
stations in this area and catch up on what’s happening in the real
world. Wendy and I swap favorites. With “It’s Five o’Clock
Somewhere,” as with so many other good songs, it’s not so much the
catchy chorus that grabs our attention as the razor-clean look at
life in the verses:
The sun is hot and that old clock is moving slow,
and so am I.
The workday passes like molasses in winter time,
but it’s July
I’m getting paid by the hour and older by the minute,
My boss just pushed me over the limit.
I’d like to call him something, but I think I’ll just call it a
day.
WHEN COUNTRY MUSIC WORKS, it works beyond compare. You turn on the
radio and get three knockouts in a row, Faith Hill’s orgasmic “This
Kiss,” Alan Jackson’s exquisitely sentimental “Remember When,” and
Toby Keith’s delicious half-stoned singalong, “I Love This Bar,”
and all’s right with the world.
And then comes Montgomery Gentry’s kick-ass bar rocker, “Hell,
Yeah,” with its oddball infusion of octave singing (used be the
exclusive province of Euro-rock), heavy metal guitar riffs, and
almost chattily Beat lyrics, which deserve an extensive quote:
She’s got an MBA and a plush corner office
She’s got a don’t mess with me attitude
She’ll close a deal she don’t reveal that she can feel
The loneliness the emptiness
Except when she comes in here
She’s the product of the Me generation
She’s got a rock and roll side when you get her agitated
She got the tattoo there on her derriere from a spring break
dare
In Panama where love was all she thought she’d ever need
She yells out to the band,
“Know any Bruce Springsteen?”
Then she jumps up on the bar
And she, and she starts to scream
She says
Hell yeah!
Turn it up!
Right on!
Hell yeah!
Sounds good!
Sing that song!
Guitar man playin’ all night long
Take me back to where the music hit me
When life was good and love was easy
And if the disc jockey finishes off that quartet with Toby Keith
and Willie Nelson singing what must have become an anthem for our
boys in Iraq, “Beer for My Horses,” why, you’ll be setting off
skyrockets in your car, bouncing up and down on the driver’s seat,
and wiping your face just like Wendy and me.
Justice is the one thing you must always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line.
When the gunsmoke settles we’ll sing our victory tune,
Then we’ll all go back to the local saloon.
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces, singing,
“Whiskey for my men and beer for my horses.”
COUNTRY MUSIC CAN DISAPPOINT, TOO. Twinkletoes marketing boys
try to turn the music’s legendary common touch into a marketing
technique, resulting in a distressing number of cold, calculating
tunes (“Let’s see, it has to mention drinking, a farm, a car,
religion…”) like Brooks and Dunn’s “Red Dirt Road.”
It’s where I drank my first beer,
It’s where I find Jesus.
It’s where I wrecked my first car.
I tore it all to pieces.
Sometimes you turn on the radio for another “Ten In A Row!” and get
one damned focus grouped song after another. They sound as if
they’re written by committee, and they probably are. My friend Ed
spent years in Nashville as a songwriter, much of it “writing with”
this or that other writer or writers. That can be a creative
technique, of course, but it can equally often amount to little
more than show biz social climbing or crank-it-out commercialism.
Note, however, you will never hear incompetent country music.
Those Nashville cats still play clean as country water, and
everybody can sing.
PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW COUNTRY MUSIC, like people who are bad at
imitating accents, will often launch into what they think of as a
howling parody of a what they think of as a typical song: “My dog
died the day I got outa prison,” and so forth. Grief and heartache
appear aplenty. The willingness of country writers and singers to
confront that sadness gives the music its strength. No other genre
can offer the savagely clear-eyed contemplation of loss of Joe
Diffie’s “A Night to Remember.”
Sad ain’t my style but once in awhile
I just have to give in,
Cause a woman like you is so hard to lose
You just don’t want it to end
I know this can’t go on forever
So tonight I’ll have a night to remember
Dim the lights, lock the door, spread your pictures on the
floor,
Throw the dust off of our past, let it all come hurtin’ back.
Cause it ain’t easy being strong, and when I can’t forget you’re
gone,
I just surrender
and have myself night to remember.
That’s a
man, folks, telling us how he sits alone in a
room and sinks himself in grief over a lost love — and does it on
purpose, because he has to.
The whole world of country music takes credibility from honesty
like that, so when it tells us something important, we have to
listen. For example, to John Michael Montgomery’s “Letters from
Home.”
I saw your momma and I showed her the ring.
Man the television said something so I couldn’t sleep.
But I’ll be all right, I’m just missin’ you.
And this is me kissin’ you X’s and O’s
in a letter from home.
I hold it up and show my buddies
Like we ain’t scared and our boots ain’t muddy
But no one laughs cause there ain’t nothin’ funny when a soldier
cries.
And I just wipe my eyes.
I fold it up and put it in my shirt,
pick up my gun and get back to work.
And it keeps me drivin’ on
Waitin’ on letters from home.
THAT’S THE LATEST FAVORITE of Wendy’s and mine. It gets us every
time.
A week before the last Presidential election, a liberal friend
of mine e-mailed me that he thought Kerry would win by about two
percentage points. I should have told him to turn on the country
music station where he lived. That week found John Kerry
criss-crossing the Midwest with aging rock and rollers. President
Bush hung out with NASCAR drivers and with country stars who never
age. It was obvious who was going to win.
Forget those things the television says that rob you of sleep.
Listen to country. America is going to win, too.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
