Purple State of John

Check out this 90-minute interview conducted with us by the guys over at Ceasefire Strategies. It’s a lot of time to spend on one topic, but the questions were smart, and the hosts, Eric Bumpus and Timothy Moranville, had done their homework.

In the interview, I reveal ten perfect gifts for winning over the heart of that certain atheist in your life, including dark chocolate-covered marzipan shaped like a question mark, Silver Age Marvel Comics in mint condition featuring elastic-limbed super scientist Reed Richards wooing his wife Sue with talk of negative energy, autographed photographs of Jonathan Frid as the vampire with a heart of gold in Dark Shadows, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken gizzards that prove evolution in domesticated fowl and much, much more.

Actually, it’s a serious and hopefully entertaining discussion about faith, politics and conversation. Enjoy!

Our saga continues. For those just arriving, I’m telling an epic story of American love, hate, death and survival through the medium of my favorite music in an effort to preserve the legacy of the great departed music magazine No Depression. For the latest in its on-line life, check out Peter Blackstock’s recent post on Northampton locals the Drunk Stuntmen. I haven’t seen Young At Heart, the movie in which they feature, but I caught their live act a while back and can attest to their glory. More people should know about them.

As most of its fans know, No Depression will resurrect in December as a bi-annual bookazine, but the transition marks the end of an era and offers a chance for an eccentric like myself to offer up a Mad Max vision of the music’s future. For an in-depth explication and rationalization of this fool’s exercise, you can start here.

And so back to our tale. Thus far, we find ourselves in central Kentucky, somewhere between Louisville and Appalachia, i.e. Kentucky, in a small town split between two factions, the Nash and Henry clans. The Rev. Jeremiah Nash storms from the pulpit of the Holy Gethsemane Church. Ben Henry sits behind bars of a federal pentitentiary. The two men hate each other, thanks to a murder case that swallowed the town whole. In a fight, Henry murdered one of Nash’s church members over a woman. Nash sways the town and therefore the jury against Henry, even though the man Henry killed had beaten his wife almost to death.

Years have passed, and the wounds have festered, but we also see hope of reconciliation. Catalina Nash, teenage daughter of the reverend, and Sugar Henry, equally teenage son of Ben Henry, meet in bar and fall in love. At first, they sneak around; it’s clear that the town won’t accommodate their love. Sugar’s ex-girlfriend Etta Place will stop at nothing to thwart the relationship. Meanwhile, Catalina’s stepbrother from her father’s first marriage, Jake Nash, has just returned from Baltimore and a failed marriage, and his semi-incestuous love for his stepsister will soon turn to rage.

18)“Until You Came Along”, The Golden Smog—Every time I hear this song, it makes me happy. It’s a perfect piece of pop craftsmanship from some No Depression giants, including Jeff Tweedy of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco and Gary Louris of the Jayhawks, and it has one of those hooks that start in the ears and ends up in the deep interior. It hits us like a sugar-coated bullet to the gut.

In our story, it’s the moment when Sugar Henry lets us know how deep his feelings go. He would rather die or leave home than give up Catalina Nash.

19)“The Road to Gila Bend”, Los Lobos—The catalogue of the Hidalgo Brothers is so rich and deep that I could have turned a dozen directions, but I knew I’d have to reach for one of their rock tunes, which have always managed that Springsteen feat of holding hope and despair in the same hot cup.

I can remember the record shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I bought their debut album Will The Wolf Survive?. I played the title track till it warped. I first saw Los Lobos in 1987 at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Dave Alvin along for the ride, and it was a magical evening steeped in personal unhappiness, a night toward the end of a dying relationship. Twenty years later, I saw them again in Northampton, and it felt like a much happier family reunion. The same year I’d first seen them, after the other relationship had gone to its long home, I met my wife, and we’ve been together for two decades. So has the band.

In our story “The Road to Gila Bend” introduces more new characters, cousins of Marisol Nash, illegals who have crossed into the United States for work and are trying to find their lost family member. Back in Coahuila, her mother has died. Marisol gets word that they are in Texas, working lawns and slaughterhouses, and tells Catalina, unaware that her daughter is about to strike out for the territories. The Los Lobos song, off their more recent record The Town and the City is a gorgeous song about flight both to and from our hopes.

20)“Not the Tremblin Kind”, Laura Cantrell—Following a muse that has lured others before her, most recently Shelby Lynne, Laura Cantrell has just released a record in the spirit of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and the only disappointment is that we won’t hear more of her own original work. Cantrell has a rare gift. On two previous records, this New York DJ, host of the once indispensable Radio Thrift Shop, turned her exquisite musical taste into sweet, tough, gorgeous country tunes of her own. Her first record, Not The Tremblin Kind wandered through months of my life, and the title track has never quite faded from my mind.

In our story, Catalina Nash stands up to her father, who has just discovered the love affair. This song marks the great break between doting father and beloved daughter.

21)“Dias Y Noches Perdidas”, Freddy Fender—Wonderful news that the town of San Benito, Texas has given one of my musical heroes, a giant of conjunto, the late and lamented Freddy Fender, his own museum! In that spirit, I have to include one of the greatest of all country songs sung in Spanish by a man whose voice rivals that of Sam Cooke in its silky, sad texture. How many times have I sat in a darkened Broadway music hall and asked myself—why couldn’t someone just start to sing “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights?”

In our saga, Marisol Nash sings about her life, far from family, far from home, in the household of an increasingly angry man, her husband Jeremiah. She knows her daughter will leave, and she is thinking the same thing. Time to light out for Texas, where her cousins are waiting.

22)“The Beast in Me”, Nick Lowe—Did I first hear this song at the end of the Sopranos episode or did it really make an impression as sung by an aging Johnny Cash? One way or another, it is poetry about the divided soul, and it would be almost as beautiful without the music. Lowe’s song here on its own terms, but it seems right to me that an early punk champion of country music, someone who learned a lot from the practicioners of the classic Nashville songwriting, should be part of this cavalcade.

In our story, the song goes to Jake Nash, who unveils his murderous thoughts towards Sugar Henry and his wayward stepsister Cataline. He has discovered the affair and means to kill them both. “The Beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bonds, restless by day and by night, rants and rages at the stars.”

23)“Light Enough To Travel”, The Be Good Tanyas—Hello, Vancouver! These three women, criminally neglected folkies, gave me a reason to rethink “Oh Susanna”, and I’ve never said a proper thank you. Their first record offers one gem after another, the harmonies, the strings, the mournfulness. I love the moment in this song when one of the gals has to throw down her accordion to get away from the police.”Light Enough to Travel” is a song about the ability to move, as often as necessary, and the price of that movement.

In our story, Catalina sings it, and it’s about being young and getting the hell out of Dodge.

24)”Wedding Day”, Alejandro Escovedo—What’s more to say about one of the great singer songwriters of our time? He transcends any label. I’ve seen him in concert twice, once at the Iron Horse in Northampton, where he delivered one of the best musical performances I’ve ever seen. The man still looked a little fragile after his years of struggling with hepatitis, but my God the power of that show, like some hurricane blowing out of a dark corner of the bar. He’s already written a musical cycle, so it’s redundant of me to bring him into this mus-epic-al. Still, I have to. If I’d known about “Wedding Day” when I got married, I would have asked the band to play it at my wedding. Here’s my penance.

In our story, Sugar Henry and Catalina Nash get hitched, and he sings this song to her. We’re coming to the moment of departure, and once the two of them leave, they know, they will never be back, which brings us to…

25)“Windfall”, Son Volt—For as long anyone cares about this music, there will be arguments about Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, the duo that gave Uncle Tupelo its distintive sound and then went on to found what may seem like separate nations. In fact, I can’t imagine either the pages of No Depression the magazine anymore than I can imagine the last fifteen to twenty years without the music of both of them. Between them, they tackled vast range of roots sounds, reinventing and rethinking to such an extent that it’s hard to go back to the original source material, whether the Carter Family or the Beatles, without hearing their musical descendants. For me, as much as I love Jeff Tweedy, Jay Farrar’s “Windfall” will always be the crowning achievement in song craft. At Tramps, in New York City, God rest its seedy soul, I saw Steve Earle cover the song, and he said beforehand “there’s real lonely in it”, a high compliment. I couldn’t live without this one.

In our story, it’s the accompaniment to the departure of Catalina Nash and Sugar Henry, just married, from their childhood home. Its lyrics talk about the freedom of the sadness of the road, but they also foretell the literal and figurative storms to come. This love will be tested.

26)“The Levee’s Gonna Break”, Bob Dylan—What do you want? There had to be Dylan, and I love this song, and I needed rain, so here it is. “I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload, I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload, Riches and salvation can be waiting behind the next bend in the road.” It’s one more doom-laden ride from the Modern Times record, and I can listen to it again and again. Bet there’s a Dylan musical in the works. I don’t care. The man has to be here.

A thought about the meaning of this enterprise of mine. Does anyone else here remember the moment in the Clinton presidency, before Nixon died, when all the presidents from 1968 forward were still alive? I recall a photo of the men in the New York Times, and I marveled at the living history represented in the image. It was Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Sr., and Clinton, more presidents than had ever been alive at the same time. Maybe the No Depression moment is nothing more than an extraordinary statement of living history. At one and the same moment, a very brief one, in the end, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Ralph Stanley, Iris Dement, Beck, Neil Young, George Jones, Ruth Brown, Wanda Jackson, Solomon Burke, Gillian Welch, Son House, Jay Farrar, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Norah Jones, B.B. King, Tom Waits, Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens were all alive and performing at or near the top of their games. That alone would justify the movement, the magazine, the mus-epic-al.

In our story, as the chorus sings, we realize that a hurricane is coming, and the levees won’t hold. Is it any surprise? Katrina or one of her wild sisters makes an appearance. What epic of American life, particularly in this decade, would be complete without huge weather?

26)“Eastwinds”, The Sadies—Quite simply, one of the most haunting songs ever recorded. We hear spectral lyrics of death and destruction sung by Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin. This isn’t just spooky and pretty. It’s transcendent. The fact that most American music lovers have never heard this song is its own argument for the mus-epic-al.

In our story, “Eastwinds” is sung by a chorus, and it charts the arrival of the storm that will separate families. Sugar and Catalina have headed south and are near the Louisiana-Texas border when it strikes. They join of an army of refugees headed east. Hot on their trail, the Reverend Nash, Jake Nash and Etta Place are scattered to the winds.

27)“Wide River To Cross”, Levon Helm, Written by Buddy Miller and Julie Miller—I first read about this record in the pages of No Depression, and it was one more reason to be grateful for the magazine. Levon Helm’s voice had always been familiar from the Band era, but nothing really prepared me for this record. One of these days, when better times are here, I want to go see The Midnight Rambles in Woodstock, New York, that gathering of musicians around Daddy Helm. You might way my mus-epic-al was inspired in part by the idea of these evenings in celebration of a sound, a community and an era. God bless Levon Helm. Truly. “Wide River To Cross” has given me more comfort in the last year than most songs in a decade. And see? Buddy and Julie Miller are here, their songwriting geniuses rather than their voices.

In our story, the Rev. Jeremiah Nash sings “Wide River To Cross”, and we know that in this one moment, with this song, in the aftermath of the storm, he has become an old man. His rage at his child, and his foolhardy pursuit, have destroyed something in him, and he understands that his life will never be the same. He will never return to Kentucky, but he no longer knows where he will go. He sees himself as outcast.

28)“Walt Across Texas Tonight”, Emmylou Harris—When we hear the name Emmylou Harris, we don’t usually think of this song. It’s an obscure gem, and it shows a more joyful, less mournful side of one of the undisputed greats of the music here. Emmylou was a key artist for me, educating my musical sensibility through her assistance to others and through her incredible taste in songs. Among her many albums, my favoriote is the lesser-known Cimarron from the early 1980’s, and “Waltz Across Texas Tonight” strikes me as a song in the spirit of that remarkable record. Also, I needed an uplifting number to end Act One, for that’s where we are.

In our story, the lovers Sugar and Catalina have crossed into Texas, where they will begin a new life. Home lies behind, along with parents, lovers, brothers, an entire past blown apart by the storm. They are young, married and adventurous. Catie Nash sings this song to Sugar, and the curtain comes down.

NEXT: ACT II

So here we are: the moment of truth. A mus-epic-al, like a musical, is only as good as its songs. When I lived in New York, I found myself once or twice at shows inspired by the awful music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, wishing for just one pedal steel guitar or blues howl to expose the fraudulence of the emotion, the complete bankruptcy of the enterprise. So much of Broadway music of the last thirty or forty years has been narcissism in the void, arias composed in the spirit of the second Gulf War, enormous amounts of maudlin shock and awe hiding a total lack of taste or vision.

Did Evita point the way to Falluja? You be the judge.

But I would be lying if I called this effort an attempt fumigate the stage of Sir Andrew. Really, who cares? I’m not interested in a critique of something despised. On the contrary, this is a case of unrequited, idiot love finding expression in a cul-de-sac.

I didn’t search out the Platonic ideal of the No Depression sound. That would be impossible. Every listener has favorites and will find much to criticize in my list. It’s an unavoidable consequence of creating a fake cultural event out of other people’s work. Instead, I stuck to my original plan. I chose my favorite music and then started to conform those songs to a story line. That’s why you’ll find glaring omissions and surprising even offensive choices for inclusion.

How on earth can you do without Buddy and Julie Miller and yet include Joe Pernice? Why in the name of everything sacred would you include Cheri Knight and Rilo Kiley songs and yet leave out Rhonda Vincent and Heather Myles? George Strait without Shaver? The Derailers without the Flatlanders? Emmylou without Gram Parsons? Are you on crack?!

The Old 97’s get just as many songs as Ryan Adams? How does that happen? In terms of influence, there’s no comparison, and it gets worse. You also give Ryan’s old pal Caitlin Cary two songs, as if she somehow deserved as much attention as her far more famous, former partner-in-crime. I do, indeed. I wanted to create a mus-epic-al that I could love,that I could watch again and again. I wanted a soundtrack that would never get stale. Too much Ryan is the very definition of stale.

Here’s the thing. I am giving you my own mini-canon, reconfigured to make a rough story, but if you have better ideas, please insert them. Create your own No Depression mus-epic-al. This is mine, and I have to live with it.

I should make plain a few first principles.

Nothing is here for the sake of pure nostalgia. Everything works at both the story level and as enduring music. For the longest time, I included “Hell of a Chance” by the BoDeans, a song I always loved by a band I still like, but in the end, in the company of better songs by greater bands, that tune had to go. Nothing against the BoDeans, but I gradually understood that “Hell of a Chance” made the cut because it had once meant the world to me. There were other, better accounts of leaving home. Fond memory only goes so far.

The BoDeans raise another question. How do you decide what fits into the No Depression category? Is it a matter of time-line? Were all of these songs recorded within the life of the magazine? If the BoDeans 1980’s work is included, clearly not. So how to fix the selections within a single context without seeming either too narrow or too broad? Once again, I used my own compass.

The oldest song here dates back decades and is probably “The Wayfaring Stranger” as recorded live by Neko Case. With one notable exception, a Freddy Fender tune in Spanish, the earliest recording comes from about 1980, around the time that I began to listen to country music with different ears. I have used a few covers of old chestnuts, “The Streets of Baltimore” and “That’s How I Got to Memphis”, my way of including songs from long ago and faraway that became touchstones for a new generation of singer songwriters.

If you’re already bored or pissed off, you should probably go, but at least listen to my mea culpa. This experiment is nothing more than a conversation starter. What if there were such a thing as a No Depression mus-epic-al? What would it look and sound like? Would it be Sam Shepard meets Loretta Lynn? Or would it be more Tennessee Williams meets Bob Dylan? Who would write the script? How would you arrange the music? How would you integrate sound and word? Would there be girls in bikinis dancing next to the band? My songs, your songs—it’s all the same. Deep in my subconcious, I needed to get the idea off my chest. If it has any further appeal, great. If not, I’ve put it out there, one more inelegant phantasm of the web.

ACT ONE: LOVE/DEPARTURE

SETTING: A SMALL TOWN SOMEWHERE BETWEEN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY AND THE HOLLERS OF APPALACHIA

1)“The Mountain”, Steve Earle & the Del McCoury Band—This song chose me. As soon as I had the idea of a mus-epic-al, I knew that it would start with “The Mountain”. The show needed one of those big scene-setting tunes that could define a way of life, a geography, a cast of characters, a community, and this one fit the bill. I love the mournfulness and defiance of the song, which has the sweep necessary to convey a vast canvas. Also, it establishes Kentucky. Needless to say, Steve Earle is one of the muses of the project. We’ll encounter his work again.

2)“Way Down in the Hole”, The Blind Boys of Alabama, written by Tom Waits. This may seem like an odd choice, but it belongs for all kinds of reasons. One, it is simply a haunting song about the devil, and the devil plays a role in my story. Two, it’s a fusion of folk, blues and Gospel, just the thing that No Depression always championed. Finally, it was the theme song for one of television’s greatest moments, HBO’s The Wire, and the show’s creator, David Simon, made arguably the best screen use ever of the sound of the mus-eoic-al, closing Season Two with Steve Earle’s “I Feel Alright” and Season Three with Solomon Burke’s “Fast Train”.

In my story, “Way Down in the Hole” serves a twofold purpose. It introduces to two characters, the Rev. Jeremiah Nash, pastor of the Holy Gethsemane Church, a preacher with serious conflicts and a rebellious teenage daughter named Catalina, or Caty; and Ben Henry, Jr., in federal prison for murder, whose son Sugar Henry wants to be a rock star but works in a coal mine. The two men hate each other. Nash helped to put Henry away by swaying the town against him for killing a member of Holy Gethsemane who ahd been beating his own wife. Nash considers Henry a savage. Henry considers Nash a fraud. They are the Montagues and Capulets of the town.

3)“Concrete and Barbed Wire”, Lucinda Williams. This one should be clear enough, though some may ask in dread if this is my only choice for a Lucinda song. It is. Couldn’t I do better? Believe me, I worked long and hard to find the right one. You can base an entire musical around her music, but I bowed to necessity. I love the song, I needed a prison number. In the show, Sugar Henry might sing it about his father, but his wife is dead, so it could be more of a Greek chorus tune.

4)“Kern River”, Merle Haggard—Back in 1982 or so, driving around in Dallas in the heat, I started to listen to country radio willingly for the first time in my life. Right about that time, I caught Merle Haggard singing “Big City”, and it was as if I’d never heard country before. There was a directness and swing and charm. A year or so later, “Kern River” came on the radio, and it was the moment when I understood the extraordinary depths of power in the music.

In the show, Ben Henry, Jr., will sing this song about his late wife, mother of Sugar Henry. This is a case of a song creating its moment. I tried to find ways to shoehorn “Kern River” into the last act, set in California, but it never wanted to fit.

5)“The Wayfaring Stranger”, Neko Case—Now we’re at Holy Gethsemane for a Sunday service, and the mournful preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Nash, his long-suffering wife Marisol and his rebellious daughter Catalina, or Caty, are conducting the service together for a dozen or so haggard people.

6)“Singer of Songs”, Johnny Cash—This song, so humble in spirit, but also kind of megalo-maniacal, establishes the self-mythology of the Rev. Nash, a tyrant in his small world, full of pride and about to take a fall, but seeing himself as merely a humble and righteous servant who has no opinions only stories and prayers and sermons and songs. He’s a monster, but redeemable, as we will see.

7)“Van Lear Rose”, Loretta Lynn—The title track off Loretta’s collaboration with Jack White has a lot of anger for a song about true love, shards of class rage embedded in the account of how “a poor boy” won a “beauty’s heart”. Marisol Nash is singing about her husband to their daughter Caty, but she’s also explaining her man’s bottomless pit of resentment.

“Dancing With The Women At The Bar”, Whiskeytown—Everyone has their favorite cut off the great Strangers Almanac, though I have two. I also considered “Losering”, but “Dancing” works better as the theme for Sugar Henry as he hangs out in the bars of town, looking for a woman, getting into trouble, the whole routine. The way the character in the song sings about his father suggests the relationship with father and son in the story. It’s got a tragic feel to it. It’s also one of the first certified alt-country tunes that I ever loved, and so gets a sentimental nod.

9)“The Long Way Around”, Dixie Chicks—No he didn’t! This is Catalina’s song and establishes her adventurous streak. The Chicks are such huge commercial successes that they may seem unlikely candidates for a song in a mus-epic-al, and yet they qualify for all the obvious reasons. It ain’t about hiipster cool. It’s about great songs in a grand narrative. I listened to it again, and I knew. In the same way that Natalie Mayes stood up to the conservative Nashville establishment in her stance on the war, long since vindicated, Caty Nash stands up to her preacher father, but we’ll get there.

10)“Time Bomb”, The Old 97’s—Very simply, one of the best songs ever written about what happens to people when they fall in love. It’s a different flavor from what came before, the first real rock tune in the mus-epic-al, and kind of kicks the action up a notch. Murry Hammond told me that he had written the basic tune and a single line for this song years before Rhett Miller added the bulk of the lyrics and Ken Bethea figured out the guitar, so it’s a real collaboration.

In the story, this is the moment where Sugar Henry meets Caty Nash, and the song’s timebomb goes off in his brain. He falls in love with the daughter of his father’s hated enemy, and our story kicks off for real.

11)“Fell In Love With a Boy”, Joss Stone, written by Jack White—Here’s where I expect to lose a few more people. First, Joss Stone is hardly a ranking member of the alt-country nobility. In fact, she’s sort of a soul diva, more akin to Mariah Carey than Bettye Lavette. Two, she’s taken a beloved Jack White song and massacred it with fake-o Welsh R&B. Three, she’s young and beautiful in all the wrong ways. Needless to say, I disagree with all of the above. She’s got real roots lust, she sang the living hell out of Jack’s rock tune, and looks ain’t the point, but hers sure don’t hurt.

In the story, this is the moment where Caty Nash sings about falling in love with Sugar Henry, the son of her father’s scourge, Ben Henry, Jr.

12)“Thick Walls Down”, Caitlin Cary—It’s a sort of duet with a verse sung by Thad Cockerell, and the two singers meld in a way that reminds me a lot of late 70’s pop but with more twang, energy and passion. It’s a great song about someone coming out of a dark hole and discovering the possibility of happiness, and it works for the Greek Chorus who are following the action.

13)“Down Home Girl”, Old Crow Medicine Show—This is a just fantastic song about sex and lust and water rolling down the velvet skin of a woman whose kisses “taste like pork n’ beans”. Had to be in the show. In the story, it’s the moment after Sugar and Caty have had sex when he is singing to her about all her fleshly virtues.

14)“Wait Until Dark”, Kelly Willis, written by Kelly Willis and John Leventhal—Now that Kelly Willis has officially announced on her website that she will no longer tour, due to the demands of rearing four kids, it’s time to reflect on what we’ll be missing, one of the most beguiling, entrancing, entertaining singers in modern country. I’ve loved her since I first heard her take on Marshall Crenshaw’s “Whichever Way the Wind Blows”, and it wasn’t easy to pick out a song. I know that Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden over at No Depression have had their differences about Kelly, but here in western Mass, we’re pretty devoted.

“Wait Until Dark” is one of her best, and it works perfectly as the first clear Romeo and Juliet song. Sugar and Caty have to sneak around. If they get caught consorting across family lines, people will not be happy The Rev. Nash will hurl thunderbolts of dark Gospel. Sugar’s father might send one of his cronies on the outside to talk some sense into his son—a trip to Fist City.

15)“Summer Long”, Kathleen Edwards—This isn’t my favorite Kathleen Edwards song by a longshot. If I could have found a place for “Asking For Flowers” without making Iris Dement redundant, I would have done it, but there was no way. Or there’s “Westby” or “National Steel” or “In State”, but none of them worked quite as well as this one.

Caty Nash wants to know whether she’s just a one-night stand for Sugar Henry; and he wants to know whether he’s just some sugar, or the main course, more or less.

16)“If Wishes Were Horses”, Cheri Knight—Wow. Who is she? She’s one of the great lost opportunities of the No Depression years, a career derailed or exchanged for greener pastures. This song is her finest hour, and it’s about a rare subject, envy of one woman for another. I’m putting it here not only because it’s good, and it works, but also because I want to send Cheri Knight a message: she’s missed.

In the story, we now discover that Sugar Henry has a girlfriend, an on-again, off-again sex kitten who isn’t exactly in love with him, but hates to see another woman fill her shoes. Her name is Etta Place, to borrow a great woman’s name from the mythology of the American Western. She’s going to resurface in Act Two.

17)“Streets of Baltimore”, The Little Willies, popularized by Gram Parsons, words and music by Tompall Glaser and Harlan Howard—It’s one of the great country music songs of all time, and it’s been recorded by better artists than the Willies; I personally prefer the Bobby Bare version to the Gram Parsons. It’s one of those songs that captures poetically and succinctly a huge economic reality, the migration of people from rural America into the cities of the northeast, and what that migration meant. It reeks of hope and sorrow, promise and death. Can’t get enough, so it had to be in. Has there been a Broadway song in the last fifty years as good as ‘The Streets of Baltimore’? Doubtful.

In the story, we meet another new character, Jake Nash, stepbrother of Caty Nash from their father’s first marriage. He’s just come back to his father’s after the collapse of his marriage in, yes, Baltimore, so the whole Tennessee thing in the song will have to be explained in the script. He was probably living there with his mom. Like Etta, he will be unhappy about the love affair between Sugar and Caty and will try to stop it. He’s the Tybalt of our Romeo and Juliet saga, except he doesn’t get felled in a swordfight, and Sugar doesn’t kill him.

NEXT: NO DEPRESSION: THE MUS-EPIC-AL (PART IV)!! OR MORE SONGS FROM THE SHOW

So what is the difference between a musical and a mus-epic-al?

A musical is a story set to music. The mus-epic-al is an epic told by music. Think Wagner with more words and no swords. Also, everyone knows about musicals. No one has ever seen or heard a mus-epic-al.

Let’s take one step back. In literary terms, an epic poem is neither fiction nor history. It occupies a place between those forms, though it’s not entirely divorced from them. What epic shares in common is narrative, and the most familiar examples are The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer. It’s no accident that the Coen Brothers chose the latter as the model for their mock epic Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? The themes of epic poetry center on lands and peoples, heroes and monsters, gods and mortals, kings and queens, parents and children, all of which make their appearance in the movie.

Oh Brother winked at the form. Their movie had to be a mock epic, otherwise the material would be unbearably dated. Modern audiences can tolerate the epic in the context of fantasy or the deep past, in Lord of the Rings, for instance, or 300. When set in more recent times, the form courts cliche. It seems wooden and overwrought, taking itself and its subject matter too seriously. Even a classic like John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, for all its merits, often comes off as preachy and stilted, Ma Joad, as played by Marie Dressler, bloviating once too often as the voice of the People.

Music, on the other hand, particularly the dozen or so varieties that flow into the No Depression sound, can hit the epic note effortlessly, without agitprop, without being stentorian or avuncular, hitting its intimate heart while never losing a gigantic sense of scope. I’m thinking, for instance, of Steve Earle’s “I Feel All Right”, which features a Homeric poet—“I’ll bring you precious contraband and ancient tales from distant lands”—bearing an acoustic guitar. David Simon used the song to cover the montage at the end of Season Two of his HBO series The Wire, and you could feel the narrative enlarging and deepening in the presence of the music.

I don’t pretend here to anything as superbly accomplished as The Wire. The mus-epic-al is meant to be the opposite of a tightly structured, noveslistic narrative, and it’s meant to belong almost completely to the people who perform it, musicians, actors, dancers and narrators. As it exists now, it’s nothing more than a sketch of an idea to be taken and improved by people in a position to make it happen. I have little or no hope that it will ever see the light of day, but I offer it up as an option, a means of channeling the ineffable on a summer night in some lost corner of the country when everyone has a little time on their hands and no money.

*

No Depression: The Mus-epic-al should be staged in an open space, preferrably outside, but it could also happen indoors in a place that has enough room for musicians to occupy several different spots, and the audience to sit in their midst. We should have a narrator who establishes time and setting. character and even elements of plot, and orchestrates those moments when words give way to music and vice-versa. Actors should be seated most of the time, then summoned forth like spirits to deliver bits of dialogue that I haven’t scripted, that should ideally come from the actors or musicians themselves.

I have come up with a list of 82 songs to drive the narrative, so one possible version of the event would be a two or even three-night affair, with people bringing picnic baskets and tents, spending a weekend, in effect, as they would for one of the big rock festivals, though the mus-epic-al wouldn’t require big stars or name actors or anything like that. It should be the product of talented local musicians, performers and writers, pulling off a kind of medieval extravaganza, like a mystery play without the orthodox religiosity but with some of the showmanship of a megachurch Sunday service.

Having said that, I could also see a vastly truncated version of No Depression, using snippets of songs, cutting the play list way down, dispensing with entire bits of the plot and some characters. In my head, I see a fleet and flexible vehicle that can be staged with twenty five songs in a small parking lot behind a burger stand in Texas or in a bar in a snowstorm in Maine.

The story is told in three acts, the first set in Kentucky, the second in Texas, the last in California, each act separated in time by a decade. I don’t mean for the acts to sample the music of a particular decade, though someone might want to try it. I arranged the song sequence to move the plot forward. My guiding principle was the narrative force inherent in the music. How many different songs from how many different genres could be pulled together in the service of a primal tale about America?

In an attempt to characterize the mood of each act, I have put headings over each one, though these are meant to be helpful and not definitve. Each company can decide for itself the mood to strike. Act One is subtitled Love and Departure, Act Two Disillusion and Betrayal, Act Three  Redemption and Death.

The plot is Romeo and Juliet without the suicide. What if the lovers had come from mutually hostile families in Kentucky, met in a bar, fallen in love, escaped their families and moved to Texas, with fathers, brothers and ex-girlfriends in hot pursuit, divorced in Texas, then moved separately to California, where, older and wiser, they had found each other again?  What if their families came from a slew of different races, white, black, Hispanic, and race heightened the conflict and attraction and connected them to other families and experiences as they traveled across the country to their destinies?

All of my characters are musical. They either play instruments or sing. Some do it in a church setting. Some do it for fun. Some want to do it for a living. There should never be any question that these people burst into song when attemnpting to vocalize their most profound feelings. I envision a sort of Greek chorus, too, that would perform songs that aren’t quite appropriate for individual characters.

I thought a long time about race and how to apportion it to various characters, but in the end, I leave that to the companies. My people can be of any race, because the music itself comes out of different racial, cultural and ethnic traditions, and the music should be the means by which to make any final judgments about a character’s background. The key thing is that Romeo and Juliet, or Joe and Soledad, should come from families with differing ethnicities. One of my characters, a patriarch, is a preacher named Jeremiah Nash. He can be black or white. Right now, I’ve given him the Johnny Cash version of ‘Singer of Songs” as an introductory number, a very white sound for a Gospel tune that could also take on a bluesier flavor or might be sung in a conjunto spirit.

Geography did not often determine my choice of songs, though certain opening and closing numbers at the beginning and end of each act are intended to convey sense of place and strike a particular chord of optimism or despair. Steve Earle’s “The Mountain” kicks off the first act, his interpolation of the bluegrass sound telling us right away that we’re in the mythological sphere of Kentucky. It also sets the mood and imbues character with color and history. Emmylou Harris’ “Waltz Across Texas Tonight” closes the act and lets us know the distance we’ve crossed and gives us a sense of closure at the same time.

By this time, you must be wondering about the play list. Which songs did I choose to flesh out my drama? Are they all as obvious as Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris?

Glad you asked. I was just about to get to that.

NEXT: THE SONGS

Why on earth would I come up with an idea for a musical?

I don’t like musicals, or rather, I barely like them. When I was a kid, I saw Camelot, South Pacific and The Sound of Music and knew the words and music. My parents had the original cast LP’s, and these were aural staples of our home. Later on, I serenaded a high school girlfriend with the song “The Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. Years after that, I saw and enjoyed the Broadway show Chicago. At the movies, I considered the moment in Singin’ in the Rain when Gene Kelly dances with the umbrella one of the transcendent moments in American cinema.

That’s about it. Mostly, onstage and in the movies, I avoid the genre. Yet something musical-ish began to happen to me about three months ago. I can’t quite explain it. As soon as I heard that the magazine No Depression would close its doors, a thought began to germinate in my mind. How to preserve what I most loved about the magazine and the music it championed? How to frame a legacy?

On one level, the answer is easy enough. Keep buying the music. Keep going to the shows. Keep telling other people about the stuff you like. That always seemed to be the mantra of the folks over at the magazine, and why not continue in that unimpeachable spirit?

I don’t have a good answer to that question. All I can say is this: it didn’t feel adequate to the task. My brain kept gnawing at a ridiculous thought.

For those who don’t know the story, the term “No Depression” started its life as a fragment of the title of a 1936 song popularized by the Carter Family: “No Depression in Heaven”. The chorus has always come to me like a ghost from Oklahoma, wailing of traumas never quite faded:

I’m going where there’s no depression,
To the lovely land that’s free from care
I’ll leave this world of toil and trouble,
My home’s in Heaven, I’m going there

More than half a century later, that same song became the title track to one of the most influential albums of the last two decades, Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression, a post-punk nod to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, a roots dirge in the age of Nirvana. That record served as a rallying call to musicians in Austin, Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle, not to mention all points in between, eventually giving its name to a crystallizing moment, a gathering of forces that came to be known as the alt-country scene. More lyrically, literally, the scene also went by the name of No Depression.

The words began their life as a song, morphed into an album and became a movement before they ever graced a magazine. I ask you. How many publications can claim such a rich etymology for their title? No Depression may have been beloved because it was one of the last magazines to survive in the anarchic and idealistic spirit of earlier decades; the sound may have mattered in the same way rock had mattered back in 1975. Yet I’ve always felt a magnitude of a different kind in the music, something more timeless and less ghettoized than the baby boomer identification with its rock heroes. “This means something,” as Richard Dreyfuss says in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “This is important.”

He was talking about a bowl of mashed potatoes. I’m talking about music often played in the company of mashed potatoes. Have I lost my mind?

Launched in September 1995, No Depression arrived as the shock of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the death of grunge receded as musical events, two years before a pop explosion that began, roughly, with the release of Hanson’s 1997 “Mmmbop” record and culminated in American Idol. The magazine identified a peculiar mix of musical conservatism and rebellion, a backward glance at tradition undergirded by a resistance to a vacuous and insufficient present; the rise of a revolutionary new technology, the explosion of wealth, the deepening of poverty, the growing antagonism between left and right in politics and culture, the death of a stable center, the launch of ill-advised wars, all could be heard at the heart of this sound.

Even as I write, I can feel the difficulty. How to define something so huge without sacrificing definition? No Depression the sound was the noise of lament and revolt, but it didn’t amount to a rant or screed. It embodied a larger vision of this country, its people and its aspirations, than was elsewhere available, and yet it eschewed a rigid political stance and resisted the ideology of academic departments. It was an unconcious collective drive of some kind, deeply mysterious and completely accessible, fostered in bars, churches, punk clubs and honky tonks. I would argue that the best of the music in the pages of No Depression amounted to a national epic, a story of home, love, departure, disillusion, betrayal, redemption and death, told by dozens of voices separated by time and space but by little else.

Until the magazine announced its decision to shut down, I hadn’t given the notion of a legacy much thought. After I heard the news, I thought of little else. How do we preserve this unproclaimed epic without sounding either grandiose or trivial? That’s one question. Another would be logistical. How do you give shape to a story that only exists in the form of songs scattered across a vast catalogue of amazing, underfunded talent?

I can hear half a dozen objections in my mind. You idiot, someone says, there is a musical! I saw it at the movies. Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oh Brother, Where Art Thou is the epic, isn’t it? It has the unmistakable roots music and subject matter. It’s hugely entertaining and moving and larger in scope than first meets the eye. It has race, class, sex, violence and politics, so many of the themes inherent in the music, right? So what are you doing? Have you lost your mind? Or have you merely become one more Internet trainspotter, building yet another castle in the virtual sky?

Reader, I am. I can’t stop spotting the freight cars that Johnny Cash sings about in “Down There By The Train”. I do know that Oh Brother, Where Art Thou isn’t what I had in mind. That movie and its music aren’t an apotheosis of the No Depression sound; they are a preservationist statement about tradition made by No Depression artists, submerged in a movie that uses the music beautifully as a device, but doesn’t really care that much about its deeper resonance. And yet it works, it entertains, it draws attention to the sound as no other work of contemporary  pop culture. It is a kind of No Depression musical.

Nevertheless, I began to put together a list of songs. I started to wrestle with characters, plot, chronology and location. I wrote down a list of songs that I loved. I wrote them down and listened again and again, and as soon as I did that, I began to see people, places, events, families, love affairs, lives and deaths. In short, I began to hear a story forming in the spaces between the songs, and I grasped that I had discovered something that felt like a real answer to that first question: How to preserve the No Depression moment in a form commensurate with its greatness?

The answer was not a musical. It was a mus-epic-al.

What’s the difference? I’ll get to that in a minute.

NEXT: STAGING THE NO DEPRESSION MUS-EPIC-AL

For anyone following the back and forth in the wake of writer Ted Kluck’s vehement post about Detweiler’s performance in Purple State of Mind, check out Craig Detweiler’s impassioned response here.

I’m talking, of course, about New York Post allegations of a love triangle involving the new CBS News foreign affairs chief Lara Logan, who is reputed to have had affairs with a State Department contractor named Joe Burkett, now divorcing his wife, and CNN Baghdad expert Michael Ware. “Sexy CBS siren Lara Logan spent her days covering the heat of the Iraq war - but that was nothing compared to the heat of her nights,” self-pleasures the Post.

Adultery is nothing new in the Green Zone, where at least one affair and marital break-up at the New York Times made small headlines a few years ago. It’s what happens to over-taxed, adventurous, attractive and maybe not-so-attractive people in war zones. It happened in Sarajevo, too, and has probably happened in Kabul. War correspondents don’t lead normal lives, and so they don’t have normal sex lives.

It’s rich territory for fiction, certainly, the heady combination of war and love, laptops and lap-dancing, all set to the music of the muezzin’s call, and we can probably expect a novel or two out of that territory. If that happens, The New York Times peccadillos will probably remain in print. Who really cares about the mating habits of the ink tribe in this day and age? The CBS news situation, on the other hand, smacks of screen treatments. I wouldn’t be surprised if calls hadn’t already been made from Los Angeles to Baghdad.

Katie Couric is reported to be furious at Logan for the way her behavior undermines the hard-earned stature of women in the CBS news room. I wonder if that’s the whole story. It strikes me that Logan probably garnered more respect from the men who work on the broadcast for her hard news work in Afghanistan and Iraq, doing stuff that Katie, as a single mother, simply couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Couric would have to resent Logan’s stature, given her own highly publicized struggles to boost CBS News ratings, but she could never admit to it. The scandal gives her both ammunition and license.

The politics here are depthless and resonant. They are well worth exploring further. In this case, they also have a certain amount of sex appeal, which isn’t the worst thing, particularly if it diverts American attention back to the near forgotten war in Iraq. The movie has an obvious title: Red Zone Diaries.

It’s a truism of religious history that the viciousness of attempts by believers to convert the heathen are matched only by the nastiness of internal wars over doctrine. Strife over dogma assumes the very personal shape of civil war, and nothing is quite so ugly, especially when it breaks out among self-proclaimed peacemakers. Case in point. I am hoping that Craig will respond on his blog, but I wanted to rise to his defense here against Ted Kluck–the name is real—and say that I think my friend has been horribly misjudged by someone of a differing theological stripe.

Will those believers who occasionally visit this site please have a look at Kluck’s pluck and please weigh in?

The news from eastern Iowa continues to be grim: homes lost, cultural institutions destroyed, businesses wiped out. It’s worse than 1993, which is astonishing. That was a century flood, and yet few lessons seem to have been learned. The New York Times writes today that the federal government didn’t follow through on a post-flood study a decade ago on the insufficiency of the Mississippi levee system. In the upper reaches of the river, there isn’t one, just a congeries of small and large barriers, some locally supported, others with federal backing and local maintenance, still others the work of individuals.

The upshot is an inundation out of Exodus.

In the midst of the catastrophe, I keep thinking about the pin oak sapling that I brought back from Iowa for my wife on Mothers Day. Twenty years ago, we met in Iowa City, and I spent much of my recent visit going back to our old apartments and haunts. In the moment, Iowa City seemed untouched by time or the elements, but I realize now that was an illusion. Nothing escapes. Originally, the oak wasn’t on my itinerary. I didn’t plan to bring vegetation back from Iowa City. I don’t have a green thumb. I love trees but have never planted one. To be honest, I never had the desire. When I think of gardening, I see weeds. I think heat and mosquitos. Weeds need to be pulled, but I never got the romance.

My trip coincided with Earth Day 2008, and one of our hosts, Nina Cilek, had a brainstorm that sounded implausible, even repellent, at first. The New Pioneer Coop celebrated the “holiday” by giving away pin oak saplings for planting. Nina received one, but she already has an ancient, enormous example in her front yard. She thought I might like hers, though I still had a thousand miles left on the book and documentary tour, a junk food and Jesus journey through Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco by car and plane.

Nothing about the idea made sense. The foot and a half tall sapling, its roots enveloped in Iowa dirt, would be a pain to carry on board the plane, and who knew if security would allow the growth to pass? Did soil count as a liquid or a solid? I would have to water the tree on the road, so there would be liquid traces. The sapling didn’t look its best at that point; it generated none of the charm that it now possesses, planted in a corner of my yard in faraway Massachusetts.

It was such a ludicrously romantic idea. I had to do it. I wouldn’t just bring Debra a hat or a t-shirt or coffee mug from Iowa City. I would bring a living thing that also happened to be the state tree of Iowa, where she had lived as a girl, surrounded by the shade of this tree’s elders. I would bring an organic part of her past, our past, quite literally, into the present.

So the pin oak joined the Purple State roadshow. With Craig, it went to Sutliff for miniature corn dogs, though it didn’t actually sit on the now departed bridge. It crossed the Mississippi River and stayed in my hotel room in Wheaton while I went to the Billy Graham Center. That afternoon, I watered it in the hotel bathtub. Within a day or two, the first leaf began to unfurl from its bud. In San Francisco, that leaf fell off, and we were back to square one.

At Midway Airport in Chicago, I sweated the security line as I seldom do. It’s one thing to lose a bottle of mouthwash or shaving cream, another to see a personally watered tree get tossed. You can’t Fed Ex a pin oak. From being dismissive of the idea of bringing a plant home, from a near eagerness to see it confiscated so that I wouldn’t have to care for it during the rest of the trip, in a mere twenty-four hours, I had become possessive, even defensive. The sapling passed the Homeland Security test without a word. As it turns out, soils don’t count as liquids.

To make a long and fairly uneventful story short—imagine a buddy movie starring the late, great Warren Oates and a potted stick, and you get the idea—I managed to get the pin oak back to Massachusetts. Debra seemed pleased, though not really impressed or excited. The tree still didn’t look like much. Moreover, pin oaks grow in our part of the country, too, so I had brought coals to Newcastle in a very real sense.

I was elated. I’d never given a damn about a plant before. Untold cacti had died in my care. I’d neglected the plants of others. I rooted this one in the ground myself. I watered it morning and evening. I counted its leaves as they grew, from the first two to four to nine to fourteen, at present. I inspect it every day, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve even caressed its leaves. The pin oak matters to me.

In light of the Midwestern liquidation, it has taken on an even greater significance. How can I help the association in my mind? How can I not think of it as the Flood Oak? The plant has nothing to do with what happened out there, and yet it’s linked in my mind to a single place in a given year, a location that exists simultaneously in my memory and on the map, a site of calamity, and the origin of love and life.

It’s a kind of magical tree, capable of turning one man’s dead thumb green. The transplanted sapling changed me a little. Does it hold other amazing properties? The Connecticut River rolls nearby. If I were superstitious, I might be inclined to see it as a talisman against the rising of the tide, but I know how those things go. They work until they don’t.

Instead, I’ll be more practical. I will try to help the tree survive the first long winters here, which isn’t a given, and if the pin oak makes it, I’ll make a point to remember that in the year 2008, when I went back to Iowa City for the first time in more than a decade, in that same year, within a few weeks, a five-hundred-year flood passed across the land, changing it forever. Out of that intersection between my inconsequential past and the dire present came a tree that, with any luck, will give shade and pleasure to someone else in an unforeseeable future.

Never thought I’d post a link to Womens Wear Daily, or as it more sexily called on-line, WWD, but there you go. It’s a new day.

My father turned me on to Peggy Noonan, and I’ve always been grateful. She’s an iconoclast conservative, a witness to the Reagan White House, an appalled observer of the Bush years and rumored to be a future columnist for the New York Times. She’d be a great addition to the roster in the age of Obama, someone who will be willing and able to call out the problems while appreciating the virtues.

For a beguiling article, put on your camisoles and go here.