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April 14, 2021
Rick Bass's Playlist for His Essay Collection "Fortunate Son"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Rick Bass's essay collection Fortunate Son is his love letter to Texas, its people, its past and future.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"Fans of the author's writing and collectors of Texas literature alike will prize his homecoming."
In his words, here is Rick Bass's Book Notes music playlist for his essay collection Fortunate Son:
The Stack of CDs in My Kitchen
For James and Larry McMurtry
Maybe the best way to look at this is, What’s the song or songs you’re most likely to ask Alexa to play when you’re cooking—at home, but even more so, in another’s kitchen—in another’s kitchen, when nobody else is around to judge you or say I don’t care too much for that? At the top of the list, the song I most listen to, especially if there’s a positive feeling to the day, is Guy Clark’s “The Dark.” And when Alexa gets it wrong and plays the entire album instead of just that masterful title cut, all the better. This is the album that birthed the cliche, “Each song on this album is a gem.”
If I’m trafficking near the edges of despair—if I’ve just gotten a speeding ticket in the land of despair—I might spin some Townes Van Zandt. Certainly, “Snowin’ on Raton,” and “Colorado Girl.” Really, the whole Rear View Mirror CD/album. Here’s a dude who’s hurt more than you or me or maybe anyone. Funny, and a little sick, how that can cheer one up. But also this anthem to joy--“To Live is to Fly.” Where to stop—“Flying Shoes? If I Needed You”—if I could bring back any two musicians, it would be John Prine and Townes. But I can’t. We’re so damn lucky to be alive in the same wedge of history in which they played. That fuckin’ fiddle solo in “Pancho and Lefty.” How bright the guitar plucks, between stanzas.
Maybe the best song ever about the artist’s chronic illness of economic angst?
Eliza Gilkyson’s E-Town Live version of “Beauty Way.” (“Redtail diving for a rat on Sunset
Coyote picking through the trash
Oh I wish I was lying like a cat in the sun
'stead of working like a dog for the cash little darling
I'm only working for the cash…”)
Patty Griffin’s “Please Don’t Let Me Die in Florida”—harsh—but how sweet then that “American Kid” is on the same album? “Mad Mission,” “Making Pies,” her cover of Springsteen’s “Stolen Car,” “Chief.”
Martin Sexton—heard him in Seattle, in The Shoebox—tiny—smoke-filled—such joy, such abandon, such wildness/beauty/eagerness/joy in the sound of the voice and the music—the fundamental elements and underpinnings of artistic honesty.
Mark Knopler’s guitar on “Telegraph Road”—(“…then came the churches, then came the schools, then came the lawyers then came the rules…”)
Speaking of existential despair and end-of-life ballads, there’s nothing more sharp-edges, haunting, and compassionate than Steve Earle’s “Ellis Unit One,” again from the fine folks at E-Town. I remember being on their show once in the long-ago with Mary Chapin Carpenter, who was preparing to bust out “Passionate Kisses.” We were backstage and she was making small talk in the final seconds before being launched—before launching herself—to the hungry ears of the live audience, and time immemorial/posterity beyond. And she was asking what I did, and I was yammering on about writing fiction but also nonfiction about the Yaak Valley in my attempts to help protect it. And they were saying to her, Ms. Carpenter, Five, four, three, two…And she looked at me without seeing but with kindness and said something to the effect of Well that’s real good, keep believing in yourself, or some-such pep-talk, and then she went out there into all that light, lost before I could connect with her or attempt to connect with her at some deeper and real level about the Yaak Valley, but she was kind, didn’t know me from boo, but was kind, in the last microsecond before the trauma and stimulation. Manners matter.
James McMurtry’s “Levelland” and “Holiday” (“There’s nothing more dangerous than Texans on ice….” How can there be a better lyric?) and of course “We Can't Make It Here.” James wanders up to Montana now and again and when he does I try to meet up with him and cook some elk, to which he is addicted. One time we made a campfire in the parking lot of the Motel 6 where he and his band were staying; there wasn’t time to go to a park (Missoula). It looked totally like Bladerunner lost ruins of civilization’s end, the red meat speared on the tips of willow branches and the blazing fire in the middle of the asphalt parking lot, while the tourists who pulled in in their Winnebangoes had to veer left and right around our temporary encampment…
I mean, Shit, where do you start, and where do you end? Driving through a blizzard in southern Colorado on my way up to northern Utah my sophomore year of college at Utah State, studying Wildlife Science and playing football and skiing on the weekends—how good does it get?—and listening in the orange VW rabbit on the 8-track to Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie” while the world spun sideways and at me in flurry of white…later, after I made it to Utah, my weightlifting partner John Irion (what a name for a lifter!) and I would push that car through the cemetery at night for resistance training—the perfect song for driving through a blizzard or for that matter, using a little German orange car through a Mormon cemetery every night at midnight, thighs bursting aflame…We used to have a mantra, “Never drive a car you can’t lift,” and it was a middling pleasure to us to grab the back bumper and heft, heave, the back wheels and axle of the buoyant car off the ground, good cheap fun…
There’s a 15-year old songstress and songwriter at Idyllwild Arts Academy in the Covid-dodging mountains of southern California. Siri Saeteren, also known as Seed. Watch for her, listen for her. There’s a short (8:46) documentary, “Black Ram,” about a small Montana non-profit that’s trying to stop a 1000-acre clearcut in the ancient forest and home of the Yaak Valley’s last 20 grizzly bears. We’ve gone in and taken out a single round of wind-thrown 300-year old spruce from this magical jungle that’s the headwaters of the Yaak River, the first river coming into Montana from out of Canada, which master luthier Kevin Kopp (www.koppguitars.com) will make into a Yaak old growth spruce top guitar. The film (Black Ram) will debut at the International Wildlife Film Festival—listen for Siri’s vocals at the end. For info on how to help, write to us at info@yaakvalley.org, and visit www.yaakvalley.com Kevin builds guitars for Leo Kottke, (My favorite—1999’s One Guitar, No Vocals). The sound is tight and bright. “I love making guitars,” Kevin says simply. “It’s love.” They’re transcendent. They’re light. They’re beautiful. They’re alive.
Texas. Nanci Griffith’s “Trouble in the Fields” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” and (with John Prine) “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.”
Homesick-for-Texas songs? The late great Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Hill Country Rain” and “Desperadoes Waiting for a Train” (via the late great Guy Clark) and “London Homesick Blues;” Lyle Lovett’s “Road to Ensenada” and “The Girl in the Corner” and so much more.
Charlie Robison’s cover of Flaco Jimenez’s and Ry Cooder’s “The Girls from Texas.”
Beyond Texas:
Cheryl Wheeler—“Driving Home.”
Cowboy Junkies’ “Mining For Gold”—I used to be an oil and gas geologist. It’s what trained me to be a writer—looking for something hidden below—what’s the diff, right?—and it kills me, that beautiful last stanza, “And I feel like I’m dying/from mining/for gold.”
Sera Cahoone—Deer Creek Canyon album. (Fun fact: no matter how many times I correct her, Alexa always struggles with the pronunciation of “Sera”).
The Be Good Tonyas’ “The Littlest Bird.”
John Hiatt’s “Crossing Muddy Waters” and “Take it Down.” Saw him and Lyle Lovett play/converse together at the fancy little intimate little Performing Arts Center in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We drove a long way through 20 below to get there with my sweetheart Carter.. Lyle was sipping some brown liquor and being an imp.
Jesse Colin Young’s “Ridgetop”—the keyboard! The sweet little drums. Horns! Who plays fucking horns any more? Oh wait, yeah, 1973. After 1967’s “Get Together.”
You can’t talk about music in Montana—or music, period—without talking about Red Ants Pants. Saw Jason Isbell play one of his first shows after going clean, or whatever it’s called. Transcendent. McMurtry, incredible. He was staying in a tent. We built another elk-fire and shared a bottle of red. Brandi Carlisle--
More Texas stuff: Z.Z. Top’s “LaGrange” and “Master of Sparks” (Billy Gibbons went to my high school, preceded me by a bit. The song’s about the way they’d push each other in a steel barrel out of the back of a truck out on Highway 6. My best friend Kirby and I got into a lot of similar mischief out that way. Another essay, that.) Michelle Shocked’s “Anchorage” and “Prodigal Daughter.”
Michael Martin Murphy (he used to be Michael Murphy) “Geronimo’s Cadillac” and “Swans Against the Sun” and “Alleys of Austin.”
My dear friend in Nashville, Kathi Whitley, with Vector Management, would always send me CDs, passes any time I wanted to see a show, wherever I was. Elizabeth and I went to Seattle to see Emmylou Harris at some little park outside, Dave Matthews was in town, slid in and played some. She, Kathi, was good to get Lowry tickets for clubs when Lowry was in Madison. I met Kathi through another shared dear friend, the writer Larry Brown. Kathi’s been diligent across the decades with a Quixotic goal I have with the band Stellarondo, to do a Montana evening at the Ryman, on behalf of the Yaak Valley’s last twenty grizzly bears. Life is long, we’ll get there some day, but suddenly we need to hurry: something’s gotta change if those hanging-on last twenty are to survive, and recover. Kathi introduced me to Traci Thomas at Thirty Tigers Management (like Kathi, a force of nature), and author of the incredible article, “How Not to Treat a Female Artist Manager” has been way-cool about helping me with interviews and shows. Check her out here—she and Jason Isbell and others turned in their Country Music Academy membership cards when that failed to note the passing last year of John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Billy Joe Shaver. (https://twitter.com/tennesseetraci) A few Septembers ago Traci introduced Stellarondo and me to Jason Isbell at The Wilma. Some fun. These gifts of friendship—the beauty way—it runs both ways, like music itself, forward and backward…
Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Decoration Day,” and, well, pretty much everything.
Pearl Jam’s “Better Man”—sound, lyrics, acceleration of rising power, joy of chords—and Eddie Vedder’s “Society” (as featured in the film, Into the Wild).
Joni Mitchell’s “Paradise,” “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio,” “River,” “Real Good for Free,” “A Case of You,” and, best of all, live version from long ago of “Woodstock.” And so much more.
On some untitled mix tape left over from a house party some decades ago, an instrumental-only of CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” super slow.
CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle,” The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” Sachal Studios Orchestra playing “Eleanor Rigby.” Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
The Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces.” Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow.” Sheryl Crow’s “Leaving Las Vegas” and “Gold Dust Woman” and “If it Make You Happy.”10,000 Maniacs’ “More Than This.” Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia.” Sarah McLachlan’s “Drawn to the Rhythm.” Dead Fingers’ “Closet Full of Bones.”
Everything by John Prine—the live version of “The Bottomless Lake” (with the immortal and best advice ever, “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”) and of course “Lake Marie,” live version. I remember reading the accolades offered by some other songwriter and musician, who marveled that he got up there and sang that damn song with heart every night he played. Who does that? “Picture Show.” “That’s the Way That the World Goes ‘Round.”
Shovels & Rope “Lay Low.” “Homeward Bound” by Simon and Garfunkel.
Tony Furtado’s Roll My Blues Away album. George Winston’s Autumn and Winter. Dimitri Tiompkin’s soundtrack for The Alamo—the old one (with the John Wayne soliloquy). Carter’s young daughters are crazy about the soundtrack to Hamilton, which amazes more with playing, even out beyond the hundredth time. (They’re crazy also about Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).”
My brother B.J. in Austin is like the world’s best DJ and he loves Modest Mouse and Calexico (!!!) and Silver Jews and stuff and so do I. Old 97’s. Bob Wills. It’s funny, the narrow range of what I like. I’m tone deaf. I love what I love and I love it live best.
Norah Jones—“Lonestar” (duh) and”Come Away With Me”—really, the entire album. Albums.
Keith Urban’s “Days Go By” and much more. When the girls were growing up, they were crazy about him. We went to a concert in Spokane and were way up in the nosebleed balcony, and one of his stagehands saw them up there, came and got them and brought them to the front row—they were like ten and seven—let them play his guitar, that kind of thing—I strove to get a magazine assignment profiling him so they could meet him, pitched two hundred pages of queries to his management company, but with never a bite. Closest I ever came was getting two signed b-&-w glossies. I remember walking back from the mailbox when it arrived—Borman Entertainment—and showed it, with excitement and fanfare to them. “Dad,” they said, “you just got a picture of him and signed it yourself.”
“No!” I protested.
“Dad,” they insisted, “don’t prank us, that’s your lying face…”
Braid Paisley can play the heck out of the guitar. He and Alison Krauss on “Whiskey Lullaby.” Dierks Bentley. Kathi got us tickets to his shows in Missoula, I used to take the girls to all of them. Miranda Lambert, too. Yay, Aunt Kathi.
When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, the radio was a big thing. Steve Winwood’s “Arc of a Diver,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”—Shit, you could hear anything on the radio. Texas Sun radio, Fredericksburg/Hill Country—I can tune in on the app on my phone, via my satellite in the Yaak, and listen to what they’re listening to in Gillespie County, or wherever. It’s a little strange. I don’t do it too much. They had a cool special on Selena this winter. I sat in the car after gassing up in F’burg listening to the most amazing live a capella long version of Tracy Chapman’s "Fast Car" but have never been able to find it on the internet. Went on like what felt like 20 minutes. Mesmerizing.
Rod Stewart, “Maggie May.” There’s always been something about a mandolin. Shawn Colvin “Round of Blues.”
Best pedal step player ever? Gibson Hartwell of Stellarondo. Best spoken word and music? “Watertrance” by Tuatara and Coleman Barks. Best mandolin—Nate Biehl of Stellarondo. Most delicate banjo, best lyrics? Caroline Keys of Stellarondo. Inimitable, beautiful voice, impossibly raw and honest. Luminous. Jeff Turman and Travis Yost bass. Blind Pilot. Amy Martin. I like Missoula. I like the Top Hat. I like the Wilma. I like Missoula. Bethany Joyce’s cell. Bethany Joyce playing the fuckin’ saw on the short story, “The Bear.” Richmond Fontaine’s “Two Broken Hearts” and the incomparable Willy Vlautin’s Track No. 9, “Charley Tells Pete about the Good Times”—the companion CD for his novel Lean on Pete. Lua’s “Dark and Stormy Night.” I’ll listen to a little Radiohead. I’ll listen to a little Beastie Boys. I know it’s inaccurate to feel this way but it feels like everyone else tries to imitate them. No can do.
The beautiful trainwreck sound of Neko Case in “South Tacoma Way.” Also “Hold On, Hold On” (Live). Ruth Moody, “The Garden,” The Wailin' Jennys (they played in Whitefish!), “One Voice,” “Something to Hold Onto,” and their covers of Neil Young’s “Old Man” and of John Hiatt’s” Take It Down.”
Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” David Byrne’s “Burning Down the House.”
Edie Brickell and Steve Martin, “When You Get to Asheville” and “Love Has Come For You.”
Heartless Bastards’ “The Arrow Killed the Beast.” It’s interesting to me how much music got me through rough spells. Like it’s an arrow, or a rocket, or whatever, and you just grab on and let it carry you through all the shit and scrum and blood and tatter, believing, knowing, there is clear cool good air on the other side, that you just have to hold on long enough. What does Rand say near the end of James Salter’s Solo Faces—Something to the effect of “You just have to hold on.”
Greg Brown’s “China” and his long live version of “Happy,” (and so much else).
Eva Cassady’s “Fields of Gold.” How can a voice be so strong without being stylized or fancy? Like a railroad track, gleaming—late day winter sun in Marfa flowing its shine in the straightest line ever. Bright enough to keep the parallel track beside it from ever converging, despite physicists telling us they must.
Homesick for Montana songs? Martha Scanlan’s entire album, The Shape of Things Gone Missing, The Shape of Things to Come. And the whole album, The West Was Burning—"Isabella," "Walkin," "The Meadow," "Honey Blue," "Seeds of the Pine." The title song! John Neufeld on a lot of ‘em. ("Black Prairie," “Rock of Ages.”) Gibson H. on pedal steel sometimes—live from the Top Hat. Holy. Shit. Also Martha Scanlan’s“Hallelujah” with The Reeltime Travelers. (They played some for the soundtrack of Cold Mountain). I remember hearing her and them play it in some horrible pool hall dive in Missoula. Can still smell the stale beer now, so at odds with the transcendence. Or part of it.
Bonnie Raitt’s “Angel from Montgomery;” Emmylou Harris’ “Boulder to Birmingham.”
Jay Farrar’s “Live Free” got me if not all the way through a rough patch far enough in so that the only way out was further/farther forward. Alejandro Escovedo’s “Castanets.” Like, sometimes when you’re stoved up, you can just lie down on the rolling carpet of the sound wave, and it’ll take you forward, whether you want to go any further or not. Will take you to wherever you’re going. Like being on a raft in a big wild river, or a slow river, no matter. Did I mention Patty Griffith’s cover of “Moon River?” Dwight Yoakum’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere.” And who doesn’t like them some Merle Haggard?
I saw the Marshall Tucker Band in Houston in high school. Nobody hears much of them anymore. “Fire on the mountain/lightnin’ in the air.” If I’m not mistaken that’s what Shakespeare called iambic pentameter.
Oh, I thought of another good song about being poor: The Band’s “Atlantic City,” also covered so wonderfully by Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen’s “Youngstown” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad”—the former classic Springsteen feist and chippiness, the latter so wistful and earnest and sweet.
Patty Larkin’s Regrooving the Dream. That fuckin’ Stratocaster sends shivers into your marrow. Heard her at Cactus Club in Austin, espresso machines awhir, glasses clinking, the whole shitaree. Didn’t bother her a bit, she just kept on killing it, a pro, while the yuppie freshmen conversed and dishes clattered—she was in a bubble, in her dream--
I like when women singers drop their voice way down deep—Patty Griffith in the aforementioned ”Please Don’t Let me Die in Florida” (listen for how she drops there on Flor-i-dah) and he way Reese Witherspoon (playing June Carter Cash) drops into that same growl-land in “Jackson.” You can hear it—the husk—in Emmylou Harris’ “Red Dirt Girl.” I don’t know where it comes from. I guess a singer would. I sure like hearing it. Aimee Mann has it in “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” The inimitable Lucinda Williams hangs out there most of the time. “Drunken Angel.” In “Joy,” when she sings “You took my joy/an’ I want it back,” our youngest daughter, Lowry, thought she was singing “You took my jaw, and I want it back.” And would sing along with cherubic sweetness. Lowry also thought Tom Waits’ “You’re innocent when you dream” was “You’re venison when you dream.” Of course now we’re off on a whole other subject—our friend Stephanie Woodruff, addicted to Madonna at the age of nine, thought “Crazy For You” was “Creamy For You,” a fact which mortified ern other. (Elizabeth, around the same age, thought Springsteen’s "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’s" refrain was—a mystery to me, still, and somewhat concerning—“Tent Devil, You Can Freeze Ass.” Yeah that’s right, you heard me, you can just go freeze ass.
Emmylou Harris’ instrumental of “Buckaroo.” Joe Goldmark’s cover of the same on the All Hat and No Cattle album. Deke Dickerson and the Straitjackets.
Springsteen’s “John Henry,” “No Surrender,” the live version of “The River,” “Thunder Road,” the lyrics to “Tunnel of Love”--
I don’t watch many movies—I have trouble looking at, looking into, a screen—but a great soundtrack helps me be able to watch a movie. The Royal Tennebaums, The Darjheeling Limited—anything put together by T. Bone Burnett—Crazy Heart, O Brother Where Art Thou, Walk the Line, etc., etc.—The soundtrack from Elizabethtown, including Kathleen Edwards’ “Summerlong.” (“Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly,” Ryan Adams’ “English Girls Approximately”—hell, all of it.)
That guitar that’s coming out of the 800-year old forest in the most northwestern, wildest corner of the Yaak Valley? I wanna hear John Prine’s “Paradise” played on it. As if that 300-year old spruce—a seedling almost a millennium ago—was waiting, growing, yearning, toward a song not yet written. Filtering century after century of pure cold water—guarding the headwaters of the Yaak River, birthing the headwaters of the Yaak River—and spreading its branches, and holding in its resonant heart the music of owls and the river itself and bats and elk bugling and cougars squawling and of course the wolfsong chorus of winter—all of it resonating in the wood as sound is said to vibrate forever within wood, the wood, once its created the music, never able to shed or quit entirely the quiver, the variations of sound—but in this instance waiting for that song by John; or maybe John, in walking the world, could feel that ancient forest so far away, and write a song for that tree that forest, and all old forests—moving toward tat guitar, though living not quite long enough to lay hands on it, though just as surely, writing a sing for it, while it, like he, was still in the living—“Paradise.”
And this:
“Christmas in Prison”—
“…Wait awhile eternity
Old mother nature's got nothing on me
Come to me
Run to me
Come to me, now
We're rolling
My sweetheart
We're flowing
By God…”
and “Hello in There”—(“Ya' know that old trees just grow stronger. And old rivers grow wilder every day”)
There’s a rainforest up here, what the U.S. Forest Service calls, with typical lack of imagination, “Unit 72.” Ancient spruce and subalpine fir; giant larch trees, 600-800 years old. It’s a forest on the Canadian border that, amazingly, has never burned. I can hear the rich chords in “Christmas in Prison” and can hear the three-chord stroke on the rich plate of tight-grained spruce that was a seedling long before Burr shot Hamilton, before Ben Franklin flew his kite, and way way before the Civil War—back when every indigenous person in America was free. Back baby, back—I wanna go back, sings Gillian Welch, back in time. I can hear that song being played on this guitar, too, this guitar-yet-to come—this guitar 300-plus years in the making. Hell, maybe David Rawlings would play it. I want everyone to play it. I want albums, or whatever they’re called these days—albums, I guess—to be compiled, one album per year, with each artist choosing the one song they most want to play on the Yaak guitar, with the sales going to the preservation of ancient forests along the northern tier of Montana, a stronghold climate refuge against the dragon-breath of global warming….a screen, a curtain, to absorb our nation’s carbon exhalations—(“Carbon Exhalations” sounds like the sequel to Denis Johnson’s sweet novella, “Train Dreams”—maybe the prequel to the incredible “Tree of Smoke”)
As Emmylou Harris and John Prine and others reminded us at an Earthjustice benefit at the Ryman, Music Saves Mountains….
Lowry and I went to Farm Aid in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. Fuckin’ Dave Matthews, my God. Lukas Nelson. Yeah, we heard Willie and Neil. Yeah, Bonnie Raitt killed it.
The Roseanne Cash interview with Terry Gross. Oh my God, the Johnny Cash interview with her where—clearly, he doesn’t know her from boo—at the end of the most gutwrenchingly intense and cathartic conversation, he slows it way, way down in closing—the traditional part where hostess and guest are saying goodbye and thank you to one another—he stops that outro, slows it even further down—prolonging the moment the leavetaking, and tells her, in essence, “You know, young lady, you’re really good at what you do…” A few months later—weeks—he was gone.
Johnny Cash’s “Unchained” and “Girl From the North Country.”
My Rhino Records’ Millennium Funk Party CD scratched beyond belief. Good times from the long-ago.
More music: the soundtrack for To Kill A Mockingbird. Horton Foote, in a long-ago interview in The Southwest Review, spoke in favor of understated sound in movies that didn’t try to press the emotion upon the viewer/listener like spreading jam with a butter knife. (My words, not his: damn, that was an elegant old man).
How good is To Kill A Mockingbird? So good they haven’t ever tried a sequel.
Magazine clipping on my refrigerator: Ariana Grande, speaking admiringly of Barbara Streisand: “You know, nobody ever saw Babs gettin’ turnt up.”
I like Taylor Swift’s “Mean”—the song a really nice match in cadence and voice, the bright mandolin to her lyrics and enunciation—sure, it stays within its lane, but that’s the point, hard and clean and strong and true, pinging the hammer, the mandolin’s point, again and again—“You’re mean—and mean—and mean, and mean…” (And a liar, and conceited, and pathetic, and mean…)
Mazzy Star. A little goes a long way, but still—and The Cranes, same. We’ve come through some tight patches, all of us, in America, and music captures the pulse, the systole and diastole, in every second, every moment, every year, every decade—growth rings in the tree’s center, unmistakable as a fingerprint…
Shit, raise your hand if you snuck into the Democratic governor’s conference in Big Sky Montana some years ago and heard Jeff Bridges singing “The Man in Me.”
Remember Neil Young singing a capella "Home on the Range” at the beginning of the film about Hunter S. Thompson? Can’t find that anywhere. Somebody help. Talk about rawness and vulnerability. But hell, who’s raw, these days—who’s vulnerable, nowadays? Nobody! We got this whipped, right?
It would be so cool for this guitar that Kevin’s building to be ceremonially played at every Farm Aid—artist’s choice, one song, one guitar. A farm song, or a sing of resistance, or whatever spirit moved them, holding that new guitar from that most ancient of forests. A forest saved, it is hoped, by music. Year after year. Would be cool to have Farm Aid in Montana some year. Would be cool to have it in Texas, cool their red jets down. Where it all started. Willie. The Red-Headed Stranger. It’s only right.
Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the writer in residence at Montana State University
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