Southern California has a vibrant music scene that dates back at
least as far as the Beach Boys, and if you drive inland enough to
recognize what Bakersfield did for country music, or add the
Grateful Dead half of the Golden State to your reckoning, the Left
Coast looms large in any fair-minded tally of American musical
influences. After a month in North Carolina, however, this
Californian is beginning to feel like he returned to the mother
ship.
Festival season does not officially start until Spring rains
have washed the heavy yellow dusting of pine pollen off
windshields, but music around here is even bigger than March
Madness.
What I mean is this: Seemingly every Fifties-themed diner in
America has a checkerboard floor and red vinyl seats under
chrome-rimmed Formica tables. But where the Pacific Ocean holds
sway and Highway Patrol cruisers wear the black-and-white markings
of killer whales, such restaurants use memorabilia from Route 66 or
vintage soft drink marketing campaigns to decorate their walls. Not
so in North Carolina. The state apparently has a law saying that
you can’t open a Fifties-themed diner unless you or someone you
know has a longstanding subscription to the local paper: How else
to explain why so many restaurants are decorated with original
concert reviews and announcements under glass, looking just a
little older than they did before Neil Armstrong set foot on the
moon or Norman Greenbaum sang about the Spirit in the Sky? Last
week, I met a woman whose father had gone to school with Elvis.
Things like that do not often happen around San Diego.
The sheer volume of music in these parts adds an almost
Tolkienesque sense of drama to the rolling landscape. Trees enough
for what John Ronald Reul called an Ent Moot dance cheek-to-cheek
with the mirrored glass of business parks, the spidery alien metal
of municipal water towers, and the bronze or granite of monuments
to Confederate dead. For the moment, at least, dawn is awash with
bird songs. Northern cardinals flit through the woods in flashes of
scarlet, and robins really do rock in the treetops all day long.
One wonders if the chorus of avian dialects is constantly praising
God, as Francis of Assisi would have said, or sometimes occupied by
lesser questions, like whether the difference between “might could”
and “might should” is worth a few verses.
As can be inferred from the number of column inches devoted to
NASCAR stories in the Sunday sports pages, regional differences
between the east and west coasts are functions of culture rather
than time. Certainly some of the people who claim ancestors among
the first European settlers on the land awarded to Sir Walter
Raleigh sniff at the relative youth of the American West. Less
jingoistic historians realize that the California Missions were
thriving a generation before the cornerstones of the red brick
Baptist churches that anchor so many Carolina towns were laid. If
relative proximity to centers of power is anything to go by, the
Methodists tramped south hot on the heels of the Baptists, and the
other Christians who followed those two groups built worship space
in the suburbs.
Are there two Americas? Not as long as some of us still pledge
allegiance to one flag, gripe about the complexities of one tax
code, and salute the genius of one Bill of Rights. Musicians have
celebrated such unity in song lyrics for years, and not simply in
standards like “America the Beautiful,” which I like to think of as
“mom,” forever trying to settle the rivalry between “Dixie” and
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by threatening those fractious
siblings with threats of “wait till your father comes home” (“Dad”
in this scenario is The Marines’ Hymn).
Beyond my fevered imaginings, the bluegrass band called Front
Range had a festival hit in the Nineties with a song saying that
“from the coast of California to the hills of Caroline, I keep your
love here with me in this heart of mine.” There’s a hint of the
same unity in the ballad of the Sloop John B, which holds a
prominent place in the Beach Boys catalog while paying backhanded
tribute to a ship’s cook who got the fits and tossed the grits. If
that’s not a blend of east and west, then Patty Griffin doesn’t
sing like an angel, and Duane Allman wouldn’t know a slide guitar
from a bowl of banana pudding.
But as Lars Walker did a fine job of reminding readers in these
pages recently,
our common humanity does not make us all the same. At the arid end
of America, you can get chile relleno with your hamburger. At the
humid end, it’s easier to get a side of hush puppies. I like both
ends.
