Beautiful Despair

There wasn't a lot of music in my house growing up. Dad had learned one song on the piano back during WWII, and was hailed by one of his fellow English teachers as the world's most tone-deaf singer. Mom had a few albums; I think the family's whole music collection fit into the top-loading LP drawer on our console Hi-Fi (which I believe is still in my father's house, serving as a table for photographs and vases.

In retrospect, it's probably amazing that I'm the musician I am. As far as I know, I'm the only musician in recent family history. My first instrument was cello, at age 10. After that came guitar, and so on. I ransacked my aunt's old '45 collection at my grandparents' house in Bismark, finding a treasure trove of early-sixties wonder, from the novelly dreary ("Eve of Destruction") to the drearily novel ("Winchester Cathedral"), to the glorious (a bunch of Crystals singles and a stack of Four Tops, Four Seasons, Beatles...)

But while one didn't grow up in the Berg family with a keen sense of what music was good, one certainly got the idea about what was not.

Country/Western.

While my dad was short on the music gene, he certainly did (and still does, and does yet again) write. I remember when I was probably in fifth grade, he wrote a bunch of comically bogus country western lyrics and sent them to an address from some ad in a magazine. Sure enough, he got a letter back from Nashville, saying he was (if I remember) a future star, and they'd be happy to manage him and record his demo - for a price, naturally.

There were two radio stations in town, the "everything local" station (where I started my radio career, much later) and the country station. Given the choice, unless there was local news we usually listened to Canadian Public Radio (we didn't get an NPR affiliate in that part of North Dakota until the mid-eighties).

So the only background I had in country music was ridicule, until I was around 19. Then, I got my first job working at a country station, at KDAK in Carrington, ND.

It didn't completely stop the ridicule; I was into Springsteen and the Clash, then as now, and listened with a very critical ear. I learned that 99% of country music was controlled, then as now, by a tiny coterie of executives on Music Row in Nashville. In 1982, the race was on to clone the next Alabama or Kenny Rogers pop-crossover clone (or the next 250); George Strait and Randy Travis (and their 500 inferior clones) were the closest you could find to traditional country on the Nashville Top 100; the Judds were an unknown, scary breakaway sect, and Emmylou Harris was an apostate bluegrass crusader who didn't seem to tumble the way Nashville blew.

And yet I discovered that the remaining 1% included a lot of wonderful music; Harris, Strait, the old Outlaws (Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and Jessi Coulter), Johnny Cash (yes, 89.3 The Current crowd, I was into him 20 years before the rest of you hYpStRz), Roseanne Cash (whose Seven Year Ache not only included the wondrous title cut, but a honky-tonk cover of Tom Petty's "Hometown Blues"; a good Petty cover is a clear channel to my heart)...

...and, behind a lot of it, Cash's husband, Rodney Crowell. He wrote much of Seven Year Ache as well as some of the best country of the eighties, nineties and now, and remains one of America's best songwriters in any genre, ever.

Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer (not of KSTP-AM) had a fantastic piece last week about Crowell, written to an audience that presumably has no idea who he is or what he's done.

A couple of excerpts from a very long interview you need to read:

Beautiful Despair. The great country-and-western singer-songwriter, Rodney Crowell, was passing through town on a bitter cold February day, and I got a chance to talk to him about "beautiful despair," which is also the title of a song on his forthcoming album, The Outsider.

He’s one of the masters of that singular emotion, that elusive, seductive, mournful and redemptive state of mind that is beautiful despair, and after he got back from a photo shoot out on the frozen North Fork, I met him in his room at the Parker Meridien.

You know Rodney Crowell, right? Author of one of the two or three greatest country-and-western songs ever written, in my opinion—"’Til I Gain Control Again"—along with countless other classics. You know him if you read this column, since I’ve spoken about him in my ceaseless (but probably doomed) attempts to get Northern intellectuals to recognize how good the writing in country-and-western songs actually is, at its best. How, if you detach yourself from conventional hierarchies of genre, some of the best American writing of any kind is being done in that form.

And—I guess it’s impossible not to mention—you probably know him as well as the ex-husband of Rosanne Cash, another genius of beautiful despair. He was the producer on some of her most beautifully intense works. (Listen to Seven Year Ache and weep.)

And you know beautiful despair, don’t you? Is there anyone who doesn’t? You’ve felt it, even if you haven’t named it that. It’s not depression; it’s not mere melancholy, lovely as melancholy can be. It’s something both sentimental and spiritual. You know it, for instance, if the sentimentally spiritual novels of Graham Greene are as much a guilty pleasure for you as they are for me. (They’re about "guilty pleasure," come to think of it. Or guilt and pleasure. As are most country-and-western songs.)

Rosenbaum compares Crowell with Graham Greene (calling Greene the "country songwriter of Northeastern Catholic intellectuals", or some such), and elaborates:

I thought of a Graham Greene character that Christopher Hitchens mentions as a bit over-obvious: Dr. Czinner. "There are some turns where I will spin": There are some turns, Graham Greene might say, despite (or because of) our best intentions, where we will sin. We will become Dr. Czinner. Now I understand why I’m drawn to both writers: despair over unworthiness.

And then he tells me something remarkable: the explicitly spiritual origin of his sensibility. He told me about the way he grew up in a family of Pentecostalists. "Two cuts away from snake handlers," is the way he put it. And that his mother would fall down in church and start speaking in tongues. And how "the pastor would go over to her, lean down, put his hand on her forehead and translate" the unintelligible words pouring out of her into what he said was a message from God.

I thought of this when Rodney Crowell was talking about songwriting, how some songs came to him whole from another realm and he just wrote them down. Translated something from the realm of the unintelligible to something beautifully, sometimes spiritually intelligible. One song, he told me, came to him complete in a dream, and "I only changed one word."

And this bit here, which illustrates so beautifully the art of writing a song - how tightly you have to compress meaning to fit the strictures of the meter and the music:

The high point of our discussion of songwriting had to do with a single word in one of his best-known hits, "Shame on the Moon."

If you know the song at all, you probably know it—as I did for a long time—from the Bob Seger cover. You remember: "Blame it on midnight / Shame on the moon." But I hadn’t heard it as a Rodney Crowell song until I listened to a version from one of his early albums and finally paid attention to more than "Blame it on midnight / Shame on the moon." In fact, it’s one of his best, believe me.

It’s one of his best, but he can’t stand to hear it—in fact, he refuses to sing it. It’s not about Bob Seger; he liked Bob Seger’s version, he said. He likes the song, he said. Except for one word—one word he feels, as a songwriter, that he failed to get right, and this has ruined the song for him forever.

Or has it? I asked what word, and he said it was in the last stanza.

But first he told me the origin of the song—an origin which perhaps has put a curse on it for him. "I started writing that when I was watching coverage of the Jim Jones thing," he told me. "The Jim Jones thing": the now almost forgotten mass suicide in Guyana of some 900 disciples of the charismatic psychotic preacher, Jim Jones. The sad victims whose main legacy now is a somehow wildly inappropriate catch phrase: "They took the Kool-Aid."

The song doesn’t seem to reflect the tragedy explicitly. But it does seem to have something to do with the inability to know, to really know another human being.

One verse, for instance, about what it’s like being "inside a woman’s heart" concludes:

Some men go crazy,

Some men go slow,

Some men know just what they want,

Some men never go.

But it’s the final verse, a word in the last line, that drives him crazy:

’Cause until you’ve been beside a man

You don’t know who he knows.

Who he knows. That’s what bothers him: "who he knows." He feels it was dashed off and doesn’t mean anything and that it fails, that it undercuts the entire song with its mediocrity. Unusual for an artist to feel that strongly about one of his most successful songs. The beautiful despair of a writer who can’t call his flawed creation back. But he’s told singer-songwriter friends that if they can come up with a better line than that, they can use it.

"But nobody has," he says.

Read it. And if you don't know Crowell's work - your mission is clear.

Posted by Mitch at March 7, 2005 07:07 AM | TrackBack